Society is sleepwalking into a nightmare. The rate of global investment in AI is rocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been described as a new arms race. The Californian company Nvidia, which dominates the market in the chips needed for AI, has become the most valuable in the world. The trend has been dubbed an “AI frenzy”, with the components described by analysts as the “new gold or oil”.

Everyone is getting in on the act, and politicians are desperate to stake their countries’ claim as global leaders in AI development. Safeguards, equitable access and sustainability are falling by the wayside: when countries gathered for the Paris AI summit in February 2025 and produced an international agreement pledging an “open”, “inclusive” and “ethical” approach to AI, the US and the UK refused to sign it.

It is worth asking who is benefiting from this headlong rush, and at whose expense. One developer, who only goes by the name Lore in their communications with the media, described the open-source release of the large language model (LLM) Llama as creating a “gold rush-type of scenario”. He used Llama to build Chub AI, a website where users can chat with AI bots and roleplay violent and illegal acts. For as little as $5 a month, users can access a “brothel” staffed by girls below the age of 15, described on the site as a “world without feminism”. Or they can “chat” with a range of characters, including Olivia, a 13-year-old girl with pigtails wearing a hospital gown, or Reiko, “your clumsy older sister” who is described as “constantly having sexual accidents with her younger brother”.

This million-dollar money generator is just one of thousands of applications of this new technology that are re-embedding misogyny deep into the foundations of our future. On other sites men can create, share and weaponise fake intimate images to terrorise women and girls. Sex robots are being developed at breakneck speed. Already, you can buy a self-warming, self-lubricating or “sucking” model: some manufacturers have dreamed up a “frigid” setting that would allow their users to simulate rape. Millions of men are already using

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