Understand the LGBTQIA+ news: Was AI always set up to fail LGBTQIA+ people, and can we improve it by engaging with it?

It's the start of Trans Awareness Week, a global week where organisations look to the Trans+ community to talk about the boundless, bustling and beautiful nature of gender diverse communities whose rich history can be traced to some of the earliest written words in existence.

The week is also a humbling one, in the modern context of Trans+ lives. Vigils will be held for the hundreds of Trans+ people murdered this year, all over the world. In the UK, it takes place against a backdrop of increasing attacks from politics, the media, and the judiciary.

This email also arrives in your inbox as Microsoft's computer outage has left many unable to contact their doctors, take part in school, and has halted governments from communicating with each other. The reliance we all have on big tech is something we can't get away from, no matter what we do to choose our own systems. Indeed, our hosting provider informed us that Microsoft is the most likely to filter out and ban our emails from inboxes compared to the other major players. If you're reading in Outlook or Hotmail today, you're one of few.

As we explore in the final piece of our AI series today, Microsoft's products have been profiting from QueerAF journalism without paying us or our creatives, so we've blocked their AI bots from accessing our website to train their models. It echoes a bigger warning from a leading expert in the field, who warned me five years ago that the technology was set up to fail our community. Five years later, her condemnation and concern have only become stronger.

It's also a week with lots of hopeful wins. From a London-based court saying "The ability to form a deep connection with another person through an intimate and loving relationship is a vital interest for all human beings", to anti-trans lawfare falling at the first hurdle as a school finds a way to be trans inclusive despite restrictive guidelines.

We also hit the first goal in our end-of-year membership campaign, which warms our hearts. We've extended the goal to our stretch target of 40, and are already on our way.

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:

• Set up to fail us: In the final piece in our AI investigation into transphobic biases built into the three most popular AI models, we examine the real-world harm this creates for LGBTQIA+ people. 
• Queer rights wins: We look at two significant legal wins this week, including one which could reinforce the rights of millions of LGBTQIA+ people across the world. 
• Midterms: The dust has begun to settle on the US Midterms’ ‘Blue Wave’. With significant queer representation wins, Alex Comben examines what hope we can take away, and the limits of making change within systems stacked against us, in the Queer Gaze.

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

AI was set up to fail LGBTQIA+ people. Here's how it's already harming us

TL;DR: The major environmental, economic, and community harms of data centres, the misinformation and hallucinations, and the plagiarism and content theft that AI models require all make up the backdrop to AI technology. Whatever benefits its proponents say it will also have, without guardrails, there is growing evidence of the dangers the technology poses to both democracy and LGBTQIA+ rights.