Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven am AI.
Speaker 1: Chatbots have crept into our everyday lives, and now some
Speaker 1: abusers are turning them into weapons by feeding intimate details
Speaker 1: about their partners and relationships into tools like chat GPT.
Speaker 1: They're churning out things like performance reviews to shame, degrade,
Speaker 1: and control their partners. Today, writer Madison Griffiths on this
Speaker 1: new form of tech enabled coercive control and why chat
Speaker 1: GPT is biased towards the abuser. It's Thursday, July three,
Speaker 1: so Madison, welcome back to seven AM.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me Ruby.
Speaker 1: You have recently been looking into the intersection of artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence and domestic abuse. Why did you start thinking about
Speaker 1: that as an issue?
Speaker 2: I noticed unique behaviors emerging in a few of my
Speaker 2: friends when it came to how they personally engaged with
Speaker 2: chat GPT. Namely, I noticed it being utilized as if
Speaker 2: it were a therapist, and this made me particularly nervous,
Speaker 2: as given I do report regularly on domestic violence, I'm
Speaker 2: aware of the intricacies of course of control. I didn't
Speaker 2: imagine chat GPT then too far out of the ballpark
Speaker 2: of an abuse's methodology. So I then started asking around,
Speaker 2: and I was incredibly unsurprised to find that its use
Speaker 2: by those perpetrating abuse, particularly psychological abuse, appeared to me
Speaker 2: an obvious phenomenon.
Speaker 1: So tell me then, about the people who you spoke
Speaker 1: to and the stories that they told you about disappearing
Speaker 1: in their relationships.
Speaker 2: Yes, so Molly was one such woman who reached out
Speaker 2: to me, and she detailed to me instances of receiving
Speaker 2: really large, onerous words documents where her ex partner had
Speaker 2: essentially created what appeared to be a performance review of
Speaker 2: Molly that was formulated on CHATGBT. The generative AI model
Speaker 2: was fed incredibly intimate details about Molly's relationship and medical history.
Speaker 2: This document critiqued Molly tirelessly. It pathologized her to the
Speaker 2: ant debrie. It offered her reflective questions and exercises that
Speaker 2: were put forward to Molly to suggest that this was
Speaker 2: her only way to salvage the relationship. So essentially, the
Speaker 2: documents appeared as if they were these formal diagnoses of
Speaker 2: all of the victim survivor's shortcomings, and they were very
Speaker 2: much inspired or fed by the user's own sentiments around
Speaker 2: the victim survivor. It made the relationship appear contractual, so
Speaker 2: Molly herself was postured as an employee or a subservient
Speaker 2: of her ex partner. And once I received the documents,
Speaker 2: what struck me about them was how deeply repressive they
Speaker 2: were and essentially offered Molly's ex partner the tools to
Speaker 2: further humiliate and degrade her. To nobody surprise, this usage
Speaker 2: of chat GPT Peggy backed the cause of control that
Speaker 2: Molly was subjected to at the time.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me then a bit more about the
Speaker 1: impact this had on Molly, what it was like for
Speaker 1: her to have her personal information used in this way,
Speaker 1: and how she experienced getting this kind of AI feedback
Speaker 1: via her partner.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean each woman I spoke to, but particularly Molly,
Speaker 2: felt uniquely degraded. You know, CHATGBT in a lot of
Speaker 2: ways became their abus's ally. For an abuser to be
Speaker 2: embedded by anything, at least of all a form of
Speaker 2: technology that is generally regarded as all knowing or ethically neutral,
Speaker 2: is inevitably going to place the victim survivor in a
Speaker 2: state of indignity. I know in my correspondence with Molly
Speaker 2: that after Molly did send me this document, She herself
Speaker 2: felt particularly vindicated when I insisted to her that I
Speaker 2: found it quite disturbing, because there was a brief moment
Speaker 2: where she thought, perhaps this is reasonable, and I think
Speaker 2: read a really interesting place in our social relationship to
Speaker 2: generative AI, where we aren't necessarily sure of the pleasantries
Speaker 2: surrounding how we use it that I imagine it can
Speaker 2: be very easy for victim survivors to feel quite confused
Speaker 2: about how to process that information. I noticed a complete
Speaker 2: corrosion in Molly's sense of self, and there were other
Speaker 2: women that reached out that did not feel comfortable having
Speaker 2: me report on their stories, as they still felt in
Speaker 2: a state of shock at how best to process receiving
Speaker 2: these large, almost managerial documents. But that certainly did appear
Speaker 2: to be a trend. Molly was not the only one
Speaker 2: that reached out to me admitting that those were documents
Speaker 2: that she received, and a psychologist I spoke to, Carli Dober,
Speaker 2: actually identified this phenomenon as a really new and deeply
Speaker 2: concerning issue that she has noticed among her clients.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: She argued that the toxic usage of such could really
Speaker 2: reinforce the victims survivor's own maledactive thoughts about themselves and
Speaker 2: their experiences. So she outlined that CHATGBT was regularly used
Speaker 2: as a means of minimizing perpetrated abuse and as a
Speaker 2: tool that essentially reinforced antisocial behavior, posturing it is normal, reasonable,
Speaker 2: and in some instances, a defining element of love.
Speaker 1: After the break. Why chat GPT will never tell you
Speaker 1: that you are the asshole? Madison. Generative AI the way
Speaker 1: that it works, it has this tendency to try and
Speaker 1: agree with the person who is using it. So how
Speaker 1: does that make it an effective tool for a potential abuser?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I had spoken to Gene Burgess, who is
Speaker 2: a schollar and AI ethicist, and she made a point
Speaker 2: that generative AI models are primed for social secer fancy.
Speaker 2: So the perspective that the users bringing to the chat
Speaker 2: themselves is inevitably reinforced and fed back to them. It
Speaker 2: is very difficult to get a chatbot to tell you
Speaker 2: that you are wrong or a bad or not a
Speaker 2: nice person. Essentially, the models are actually trained on Reddit
Speaker 2: and other things like Wikipedia. You know, a vast array
Speaker 2: of sites on the Internet, but for moral questions or
Speaker 2: social questions or relationship issues. Everyone will be familiar with
Speaker 2: the famous reddit am I the asshole, where users can
Speaker 2: essentially upload social or emotional dilemmas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've spent many hours on that at four am
Speaker 1: when I can't sleep. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And I think what's interesting about that, sumbredded is
Speaker 2: that you will notice that when you're crowdsourcing information, particularly
Speaker 2: about ethical dilemmas, there is a lot of discourse and
Speaker 2: not everyone will agree with you. You know, the moral
Speaker 2: judgment from the subreddit community will weigh in and will
Speaker 2: give you a verdict, and these models are actually trained
Speaker 2: on that data. But as gene Burgess made clear to me,
Speaker 2: researchers found that if you take a pretty clear moral
Speaker 2: dilemma and you compare what the reddit community says versus
Speaker 2: a chatbot, the reddit community actually unanimously disagreed with the
Speaker 2: chatbot because the chatpot always would arrive at a place
Speaker 2: where the user was a really nice person. So, in short,
Speaker 2: it will agree with its user in a way that
Speaker 2: appears intelligent, considered, and I imagine for the average user
Speaker 2: of chat GBT quite omnipotent.
Speaker 1: So do you get the sense then that something like
Speaker 1: chat GPT is pushing people into more abusive behaviors who
Speaker 1: otherwise might not have gone down that path, Or do
Speaker 1: you think that what's happening is a reinforcing of what
Speaker 1: might already be there.
Speaker 2: I think, as a general rule, it is a reinforcing tool. However,
Speaker 2: I did speak to one woman who had explained to
Speaker 2: me how her husband had become very invested in using
Speaker 2: chat GPT, particularly every time, you know, when they had arguments,
Speaker 2: he would feed his diagnosis of the events into chat
Speaker 2: GPT and essentially bombard her with his newfound perspective. One
Speaker 2: thing that she stated was that in the early stages
Speaker 2: of their relationship he did have abusive tendencies that he
Speaker 2: had worked really tirelessly with the work of a therapist
Speaker 2: and his social community to unpack, and she was quite
Speaker 2: happy about where they were at in terms of those
Speaker 2: tendencies that she'd witnessed early on. But now with the
Speaker 2: birth of chat GPT, she has experienced a regression in
Speaker 2: him because essentially he's relying on a tool that makes
Speaker 2: him probably feel a lot better than any therapist would,
Speaker 2: So she has been able to track a decline in
Speaker 2: their relationship based entirely on his usage of chat GPT.
Speaker 1: And one other key point of difference between a therapist
Speaker 1: and chat GPT is that your therapist has to abide
Speaker 1: by rules of confidentiality and data privacy, whereas your outlining
Speaker 1: examples were very personal and very Internet information is being
Speaker 1: fed essentially to a private company without consent, So how
Speaker 1: should we be thinking about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's been a lot of discussion lately about the
Speaker 2: implications of deep fates, which consists of digitally altered visual
Speaker 2: media which is often designed to compromise the subject, for example,
Speaker 2: a woman's face imposed on a pornographic scene. There has
Speaker 2: been much less discussion about the implications of privacy breaches
Speaker 2: when it comes to open AI, So we aren't yet
Speaker 2: sure what ramifications await as we venture into this new
Speaker 2: arena of tech. We don't know necessarily who owns the
Speaker 2: information that is being fed, how it's able to be
Speaker 2: accessed by third parties, or anything else for that matter.
Speaker 2: More broadly, Tanya Faha, who's the CEO of Safe and Equal,
Speaker 2: did state that amongst sector workers, they have heard stories
Speaker 2: of perpetrators utilizing AI technology to stalk, monitor, or track
Speaker 2: victim survivors, particularly through the use of remotely accessible smart
Speaker 2: home and home automation systems, But when it comes to
Speaker 2: generative AI, the implications are at this stage as endless
Speaker 2: as the tech itself, so it is quite difficult to
Speaker 2: see exactly what those implications are.
Speaker 1: And I actually asked chat GPT how its AI is
Speaker 1: being used as a tool for abuse, and very quickly
Speaker 1: it pointed out that its program can also help survivors.
Speaker 1: So is that the case with any of the women
Speaker 1: that you spoke to?
Speaker 2: None of the women I spoke to, No, But I
Speaker 2: have heard of instances of chat GBT being used in
Speaker 2: such a way, and there are certain chatbots, such as
Speaker 2: most notably a chatbot referred to as Amy Says, which
Speaker 2: is designed to help survivors usually combat legal and bureaucratic
Speaker 2: messes when it comes to family court trials or proceedings,
Speaker 2: or other byproducts of leaving an abusive relationship or dealing
Speaker 2: with the fallout. There are certainly feminist researchers in this
Speaker 2: space that are eager to utilize AI for good, but
Speaker 2: in the wrong hands. Again, I'm very skeptical about its usage.
Speaker 2: I am aware that women only make up twenty one
Speaker 2: percent of the global AI workforce, so this does feel
Speaker 2: like an unsurprising byproduct of a biased and gendered design.
Speaker 2: There is no appropriate way to handle something like this.
Speaker 2: It is so incredibly new and inevitably very very confusing.
Speaker 1: I suppose in the meantime it's about being able to
Speaker 1: recognize AI facilitated abuse when it's happening.
Speaker 2: Which even the term artificial intelligence does suggest that this
Speaker 2: model is all knowing. So I do think we have
Speaker 2: a lot to unpack in terms of just what AI
Speaker 2: is and certainly what it isn't, which is a therapist.
Speaker 2: It's definitely not.
Speaker 1: That well, Madison, thank you so much for your time today.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Ruby.
Speaker 1: And if this story has raised any concerns for you
Speaker 1: or someone you know, you can call the one eight
Speaker 1: hundred Respecttional Helpline on one eight hundred seven three seven
Speaker 1: seven three to two. Also in the news today, Foreign
Speaker 1: Minister Penny Wong has met her US counterpart on the
Speaker 1: sidelines of a meeting of the Quad Alliance in Washington.
Speaker 1: Senator Wong says she made the case for a tariff
Speaker 1: exemption for Australia and discussed defense arrangements amid pressure from
Speaker 1: the US for allies to raise their defense spending. She
Speaker 1: says US Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not raise
Speaker 1: Australia's defense budget, and the discussions were on regional stability
Speaker 1: more broadly, and the Victorian government says it will consider
Speaker 1: all of the recommendations of the final report from Australia's
Speaker 1: first formal truth telling inquiry. The four year inquiry, which
Speaker 1: found crimes against humanity and genocide were committed against Aboriginal
Speaker 1: people in Victoria, has delivered one hundred recommendations, including using
Speaker 1: a treaty framework to provide dress for what occurred during
Speaker 1: and as a result of colonization. For more on that story,
Speaker 1: you can listen back to yesterday's episode of seven AM
Speaker 1: on the York Justice Commission. I'm Ruby Jones. Thanks for listening.