How AI hype impacts the LGBTQ + community

Abstract

Hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a feature of this technology since its inception. However, the most recent wave of AI hype has been leveraged to encourage adoption of AI technologies that cause issues for marginalised communities. Hype is also a means to obfuscate real issues of bias, harm, and exploitation felt most sharply by marginalised communities when AI is implemented. This therefore raises the question of power imbalances as a feature of AI technologies as we currently know them. This paper will study the relationship of AI hype and marginalised communities, with particular emphasis on the LGBTQ + community, and look at the way that AI impacts on this community. This paper will pose two key questions: does hype affect marginalised communities, particularly hype around new technologies such as AI; and what impact does the LGBTQ + community experience as a result of hype. This paper will then move on to discuss areas that provide a focus for discourse of AI hype and the impact on the LGBTQ + community: policy and decision-making, the maintenance of the cisgender heteronormative (cishet) baseline, the ubiquity of a mythology of AI, and the role of market expansion.