AI knows how to humiliate women

To be a woman and live online in 2025 means carrying a low-grade fear that your image -- your literal face -- might be used against you. Not just taken, but altered, violated, remixed by a machine and redistributed across a platform with millions of views before you can even respond.

How did we get here? And what can we do?!

This week on The Intersect, I talk to journalist Kat Tenbarge, whose reporting has been ahead of the curve on what happens when AI becomes a tool of sexual violence -- and what that means for women, power and agency in the digital age. Kat has been reporting on the emergence of deepfakes since back in 2018.

A couple of weeks ago, Kat broke the story that Grok -- the AI chatbot baked into Elon Musk’s X -- was being used to generate synthetic images of women covered in … well, something that comes out of a man’s body, not a woman’s. And all it took was a word. One prompt. ‘Glue.’
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This isn’t fringe behavior. It’s not trolling in the old-school sense. It’s scalable, automated sexual harassment. And women are exhausted.

But what Kat reminded me in this conversation is that we are not fully powerless.

Culture moves policy. This takes time, of course, but it’s our best tool at fighting back right now. For instance, Taylor Swift fans famously took on Ticketmaster for price gouging, but they’ve also fought to protect her image, her likeness, her very self from the early days of deepfakes to now.

Women have been here before. Each new tool of harm followed by a wave of resistance and reckoning. But AI changes the speed and the scale.

So what now? If our likeness is no longer ours and it’s moving at a speed and scale we cannot control, how do we protect ourselves and each other?

What does safety even mean in a world where your face can be made to do things you never consented to, and where legal frameworks are still years behind?

Kat’s reporting cuts through the noise with clarity, urgency and care. She’s at the frontlines of this work and advocates for women building the internet we want to live in. Because until then, the internet we’ve got is doing what it was designed to do -- serve power, profit and platforms.

But we still get to decide what we accept. And we still get to stand with one another when the world tries to make us small.

Here is this week’s episode with Kat Tenbarge: AI and the new frontline of sexual harassment​

Cory

Some of what I am reading this week:

​AI as your newest … audience?!​

Designers and media makers are starting to reckon with AI not just as a tool -- but as an end consumer

By Shuwei Fang (Splice Media)

​AI productivity gains fuel to push for a four-day workweek​
​As AI reshapes workflows, some companies are rethinking the 40-hour grind -- and seeing better results

By Emily Peck (Axios)

​Newest CEO flex: ‘AI does my email’​
​Executives are bragging about how little they work, thanks to AI tools doing their admin labor

By Sharon Goldman (Yahoo Finance)

​AI job predictions become corporate America’s newest competitive sport​
​Firms are racing to predict -- and profit from -- the future of work in the age of automation

By Sharon Goldman (Tech Crunch)

​States block Trump-backed plan to strip their AI powers​

Lawmakers across party lines killed a proposed federal moratorium that would have prevented states from regulating AI -- a major defeat for the tech industry and a sign that bipartisan resistance to centralized AI control is gaining traction

By Chase DiFeliciantonio (Politico)

​Millions of sites to get ‘game-changing’ AI bot-blocker​
​Cloudflare launched a system that lets sites block AI crawlers from scraping their content

By Chris Vallance (BBC)