The rights women enjoy today were neither inevitable nor easily won.

Across the twentieth century, women in Britain fought to open doors that had long been closed to them, and technology has played an important role in many of these advances. The expansion of telecommunications created new professions. The personal computer allowed women to work, study and organise in ways that were previously unimaginable. The internet has helped female entrepreneurs launch businesses, dissident writers reach global audiences and feminist activists mobilise support for social causes.

Digital spaces have also amplified conversations about inequality and abuse. Movements such as #MeToo demonstrated how powerful technology can be when it enables women to share their experiences and hold powerful institutions to account.

But technological progress has never been purely liberating. The same tools which are capable of empowering women can also be used to harass, intimidate and silence them.

For many years I have had a significant platform on X (Twitter). Speaking publicly online inevitably attracts criticism, and unfortunately women in particular often face a disproportionate level of hostility. I have received violent sexual threats. I have reported incidents to the police. Like many women in public life, over time I gradually learned to ignore the worst of it and carry on.

But earlier this year I experienced a form of abuse that felt like an entirely new frontier.

I became the victim of AI-enabled harassment generated using Grok, the AI embedded into X. Images and videos of me were manipulated and circulated online without my consent, including a particularly grotesque alteration that placed me outside the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau in a stripped bikini. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, seeing my image manipulated in that context was deeply distressing.

What made the experience particularly unsettling was the speed and ease with which AI could be used to create such content. In the past, harassment online, besides that limited to crude insults or threats, required at least some level of effort from those responsible. Today, AI allows individuals to create manipulated images within seconds. It enables humiliating harassment to be automated, scaled and distributed rapidly.

In other words, it allows misogyny and abuse to be industrialised.

That is why I welcome recent Government online safety announcements. The Online Safety Act 2023 was drafted before the explosive rise of AI. As a result, some of the challenges created by it were not fully anticipated when the legislation was first introduced. This means the legislation must evolve to keep pace with the change.

Encouragingly, ministers are already moving in that direction. The Government is considering new powers to bring AI — including chatbots, such as Grok — more clearly within the scope of the Online Safety Act 2023, ensuring that AI platforms are subject to the same duties that apply to social media platforms.

There are also proposals to criminalise the creation of non-consensual intimate images and to outlaw so-called ‘nudification’ apps designed to generate sexualised deepfakes of real people, normally without their consent. In parallel, the Government is also examining new rules requiring companies to remove abusive or intimate images quickly after they are reported, with significant penalties for platforms that fail to act. As someone who has been fighting an exhaustive battle to get content removed, this cannot come soon enough.

With all that said, there is more to do.

First, victims of AI-enabled abuse need faster and simpler routes to justice. Reporting processes across platforms remain painfully fragmented and slow. A unified reporting mechanism — potentially coordinated through Ofcom — could allow victims to trigger rapid takedowns across multiple platforms at once. I can personally attest that the process of getting abusive content removed can be almost as distressing as the content appearing in the first place. Hours spent trawling the internet, forced to repeatedly view degrading manipulated images and videos of oneself in various sexual positions just in order to report them is a gruelling ordeal.

Second, there is a strong case for greater transparency around how generative AI systems are trained and moderated. Independent audits could help ensure that safeguards designed to prevent the creation of abusive or illegal content are actually effective in practice.

Finally, the UK should invest in technical solutions that make abuse harder to generate and easier to detect, such as systems for marking and detecting AI-generated images and improved detection tools for deepfakes.

More than a century ago, the suffragettes insisted that women had the right to be heard in the public sphere. Today we face a different but equally important question: whether women can participate safely and equally in the digital public sphere.

Original photo from the Dutch National Archive.

A happy women’s day to all women from the whole Bright Blue editorial team.