Jeff Bezos Met Gala; Sarah Paulson Protest Look; OpenAI Stalking Lawsuit; My Handbook App’s Fake AI Black Woman Scam – NEWS ROUNDUP

There Are No Girls on the Internet is a weekly podcast hosted by Bridget Todd covering tech, power, and the people who get left out of both. Every week we find the stories about technology and the internet that deserve more attention — especially when they’re about gender, race, and who actually gets harmed when things go wrong online.

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Here’s everything we covered this week with links to the original reporting:

🔗 Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez spent at least $10 million to sponsor the Met Gala — and on the same night, Amazon workers staged their own fashion show outside. Labor unions dubbed it the “Ball Without Billionaires,” with SEIU President April Verrett declaring: “Labor is art.” Democracy Now coverage here.

🔗 Sarah Paulson wore a dollar bill mask to the Met Gala and called her look “The One Percent.” Some called it out of touch.

🔗 A book app called My Handbook used AI-generated images of a Black woman to falsely claim legitimacy — including a fake story about working at Random House. When people pushed back, they posted another AI video doubling down. More on how it unraveled here. And the original post that started it all.

🔗 A Stanford study found AI writing feedback tools treat students differently based on race, gender, and disability status. Black students got more praise. White students got more substantive feedback. And we’re pushing this into classrooms faster than we can verify it works. Nature just retracted a major paper claiming ChatGPT improved student learning — turns out it was built on junk science.

🔗 When Cambridge academic Dr. Ally Louks went viral for her PhD in 2024, right-wing accounts on X dogpiled her with rape threats and death threats serious enough that she went to the police — and Vox documented exactly how X became the platform where this kind of coordinated harassment against women thrives. Since Musk took over, it’s only gotten worse. Now someone is paying large accounts to use her face and story to advertise a fetish marketplace — and the platforms won’t do anything about it.

🔗 A new UN Women report found that this kind of online violence against women in public life is coordinated, systemic, worsened by the rise of AI, and it’s working. The platforms’ algorithms make misogynistic hostility frictionless and rewarding — and 45% of female journalists now self-censor because of it.

🔗 A woman is suing OpenAI after ChatGPT allegedly validated a man’s delusions, helped him stalk her, and OpenAI restored his account even after she filed a formal abuse report. OpenAI’s own safety systems flagged his account. A human reviewer gave it back.

🔗 Kids are bypassing age verification checks online with fake drawn-on mustaches — and it’s working. Half of kids surveyed said age checks were easy to get around. Full Internet Matters report here.

Bridget’s forthcoming audiobook with Simon & Schuster, Love At First Prompt, explores AI, sex, and intimate relationships. Pre-order it at LoveAtFirstPrompt.ai

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