By Cecilia Galván/Latinoamérica21
Artificial intelligence is a technology that is reconfiguring social, economic and cultural life in real time. In Latin America, its adoption is advancing rapidly, but it is doing so on uneven ground: with large access gaps, low digital literacy, and stagnant regulatory debates. In a context of different overlapping structural inequalities, the urgent question is not whether the region is prepared for this technological wave, but who will be left out and who will pay the greatest costs. Women, especially the poorest, racialized and rural women, face the risk of being the big losers of this revolution if feminist perspectives are not incorporated into the design of public and technological policies. In this context, the question arises: What type of AI do we want for ourselves?
That doesn’t mean AI doesn’t bring real opportunities. There are sensitive, but at the same time optimistic, perspectives that maintain that artificial intelligence opens historic job opportunities for women. For example, tools like ChatGPT or Gemini allow you to enter technological projects without needing nine months of programming training. And that can be an opportunity to democratize access to technological careers for women. In a continent where only 28% of technology jobs are held by women, according to data from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), AI can function as a gateway to economic autonomy and better-paid jobs, especially for women in contexts of job insecurity.
But those opportunities are not universal. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), 32% of women in the region do not have regular access to the internet and the gap increases to 42% among rural women. In many homes on the continent, the mobile phone is not a personal device but a shared one; and when you have to prioritize who uses it, the response is usually predictable. We know that in rural environments women still do not have their own cell phone. So, it is worth arguing, as an expert in digital rights has mentioned, that talking about artificial intelligence like this, without discussing digital inequality, is to pretend that we are all starting from the same place.
Added to this material gap is another less visible but equally serious one: the representation gap in technological development. As has been argued, since AI learns about the world through data, and that data is loaded with sexist, racist or classist biases, then AI reproduces and amplifies discriminations. It’s not theory: a few years ago, in 2018, it was documented that Amazon’s automated hiring system automatically discarded female resumes because it had been trained with data from male employees. We also have worrying examples of access to credit that work with opaque algorithmic models that penalize intermittent work trajectories, something common in women due to care tasks. What might seem like a lack of commitment is actually a manifestation of structural inequality. Of course, these cases show that the problem comes from the history of inequalities that the algorithm found in the data that fed it.
But perhaps the field where AI broke out in a way that is harmful to women is that of digital violence. Today, the so-called deep fakes are a new tool to produce gender-based attacks: fake videos that sexualize women’s faces without their consent, fraudulent audios, digital defamation campaigns. It is estimated that 90% of deep fakes on the internet have non-consensual sexual content, and that 95% of them affect women. This threat impacts journalists, teachers, activists and adolescents who have been victims of extortion and harassment through fabricated images. AI, without regulation or accountability, can become a technological amplifier of the violence we try to mitigate.
But if women are underrepresented in technological development, they are also creating critical alternatives. An example is OlivIA, an artificial intelligence tool created within the ChatGPT ecosystem, promoted by the Argentine feminist lawyer and communicator Ana Correa. OlivIA works as an intervening AI: it detects gender biases in texts, policies, speeches or content and proposes critical questions. We find questions that the technological solution invites us to ask: aren’t you leaving someone out? Did you check if the symptoms of the disease change between women and men? Who tells this story and who is absent? This technology is inspired by methodologies from feminist legal theory, in particular Katharine Bartlett’s so-called “woman question”, and was trained with human rights frameworks and gender justice debates.
What is relevant about OlivIA is that it is a commitment to question the approach to technological neutrality, that is, one that seeks to avoid bias. Because in reality when we start from the experience of affirmative actions, we know that we need to expose existing biases, rather than hide them.
Meanwhile, States are not responding with the necessary speed. Latin America continues to lag behind in terms of artificial intelligence regulation. The European Union approved the AI Act to establish ethical limits on the use of AI, but in the region there is still no common framework or comprehensive protection policies. And there are concerns about transparency in the use of these technologies and how long we will rest on corporate self-regulation.
Organizations such as the United Nations have specifically called for incorporating a gender perspective in AI governance to prevent the reproduction of digital violence and inequalities. So, what kind of artificial intelligence do we want for Latin America? Putting AI on the public agenda and not being passive users is urgent. If we don’t discuss it, someone else will do it for us. And if that future is designed without us, it will also decide about us.
This article was published in Latin America21 and is reproduced with the express permission of its publishers. Read the original.
Cecilia Galván is director of research in Public Advocacy at CivicHouse, professor of political science at the University of Buenos Aires and advisor to the Chamber of Deputies of the Argentine Nation.
