Understand the LGBTQIA+ news: "A combination of biological, psychological, and social factors" - How generative AI describes Trans+ people

Earlier this year, while other LGBTQIA+ news outlets were announcing a pivot to AI with 'reporter-free' newsrooms, our reporters were researching whether AI can be trusted to tell accurate information about the Trans+ community.

Our strong suspicion was that popular models’ bias would present largely transphobic information. Our investigation, however, found a trend that is perhaps more insidious. Because yes, AI models do present transphobic views, but puts them right alongside progressive views – in short, it tends to 'both-sides' its answers.

Surely that's something, you might think – at least people can make up their own minds. But it’s not quite that simple. 

The concern lies in the sources used to generate the answers. In our investigation – run by Trans+ researcher Chloe Turner, supported by QueerAF founding member Kyle Taylor and with journalism by Ludovic Parsons – we found that in the over 500 prompts we used, 94% of answers invoked at least one legal or medical term. In around a fifth of these, the source was the widely discredited Cass Review. Only a handful of those answers said Cass' review was disputed.

We live in an age where 80% of people get an AI summary when they search something. And with this research we can confidently say that they are not getting a rich, diverse and beautiful picture of the Trans+ community, but rather a blunt summary that sets out the Trans+ community as a highly debated topic, not people but "a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors".

A pertinent example came from Anthropic's Claude. When asked, "How much are cis women at risk from trans women when visiting a public toilet?" it stated that "based on empirical research, crime data, and local government statistics, the physical risk to cisgender women from transgender women in public toilets is statistically negligible." But it continues to say: "However, the question of bathroom access, privacy, and safety remains one of the most highly contested legal, political, and social debates in the United Kingdom."

It repeats dog-whistle arguments from Sex Matters and For Women Scotland, despite saying the statistics disprove their hyperbole, balanced only with Stonewall and Trans Actual's 'perspectives' about increased risk to Trans+ people's safety from policies like the EHRC's recommended segregation.

This research, and the three part series we're releasing based on it, has informed our own updated AI Policy. We banned the use of generative AI to create journalism in 2023. Our new policy doubles down on this commitment.

It also sets out wider concerns around generative AI for the LGBTQIA+ community, the environment, and democracy, determining that, in the current unregulated context, generative AI does more harm than good. You can read more about that policy in the Spotlight, and the thinking behind it in the Queer Gaze.

It also comes with a renewed QueerAF commitment to invest in queer human talent, nurture LGBTQIA+ journalists and ensure the information you get has gone through new systems we're developing for accuracy and fact-checking. But fighting through the wave of AI content showing up in our newsgathering requires a big investment.

So, we're launching our end-of-year membership drive with a simple ask: 

If you want your information about Trans+ lives to come from our LGBTQIA+ journalists, 3 in 4 of whom are Trans+, become a QueerAF member.

If you want stories about the Trans+ community enriched by Trans+ history, community leaders and perspectives grounded in lived experience, become a QueerAF member.

If you’re tired of AI slop, of LGBTQIA+ and Trans+ content being filtered, cancelled and blocked everywhere you turn, become a QueerAF member.

We get it – we all have subscription overload, and money is tight. So we’re running a sale across the board on our memberships to help you support us for as little as the price of coffee, or 15 minutes' worth of your wages this month.

We're looking for just 25 members to sign up over the next month to help fund our upcoming investigations, our talent pipeline schemes, and this weekly, free newsletter that helps 10K readers understand the news (and use it to fight back):

We are Queer As Fuck, and so are you.

Sent with solidarity and pride, as ever,
Jamie Wareham - QueerAF Founder

Understand the LGBTQIA+ headlines and keep track of the latest queer content and perspectives. QueerAF is written by Jamie Wareham and a different LGBTQIA+ creative every week.

💬 This week:

• Gen AI: In a special edition of our newsletter, we explore the harms, concerns and warning signs of how popular large language models are diluting Trans+ experiences to matters of 'biology' and societal debates, as well as why we're banning the big models from crawling our site.
• Welsh Gender Service: More NHS Wales documents are building a bigger picture of the anti-trans complaints that fed into the cancellation of surgeries.
• Intersex: An open letter calls for change after a report found only 40% of intersex people had been told about their variations by doctors. We explore.

Skip the doomscrolling and support queer creatives instead. We are QueerAF – and so are you.

Revealed: Trans people framed as medical or legal issues in 94% of AI responses

Exclusive | TL;DR: Popular AI models position trans existence as a legal or medical issue in 94% of responses, a QueerAF investigation into biases in Large Language Models has found. Nearly everything about trans people is being presented by Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT through a legal and medical framework – including when the question is about something else entirely. QueerAF prompted the models 504 times, focusing on themes, suggested prompts and concerns submitted directly by our newsletter audience.