Women are being sold tools of their own dispossession—and, disappointingly, Reese Witherspoon, whose book club and media company, Hello Sunshine, have done much to promote women writers and female-centric stories, is one of the people doing the selling.On April 16, the Legally Blonde actor took to Instagram and Threads to inform her 35.5 million (3.5 crore) followers that women were lagging in adopting artificial intelligence (AI). “FYI: the jobs women hold are 3x more likely to be automated by AI, yet women are using AI at a rate 25% lower than men on average,” she wrote, asking women to adopt the technology that is being integrated across industries. A screengrab of the video Reese Witherspoon posted on Instagram and Threads. (@reesewitherspoon/Instagram)Jennifer Wright, author of Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time, was among many who took issue with Witherspoon’s call to action. “AI plagiarised all my books. It seems unlikely that I’ll be ‘left behind’ if I don’t use it, given that it’s trained on work I did years ago.”Selling ice to EskimosWright’s frustration has been echoed by thousands of authors whose voice and confessional writing have been exploited to train large language models, which allow them to reproduce the lexicon of trauma and rage, but the hollow writing is also increasingly giving readers—who are flagging AI-generated writing—”the ick.”Just last month, Mia Ballard’s novel Shy Girl—of the emergent femgore genre centred on feminine rage as a response to generational trauma—was pulled by its publisher Hachette after the New York Times presented evidence suggesting the novel may have been AI-generated. Readers had been speculating about whether large language models (LLMs) had been used to write it for months.If true, then LLMs were able to use the uncredited and uncompensated trauma and writings of millions of women to produce fiction that was then packaged and sold back to them. Besides, it was a woman author whose mental health and career took a hit, after she became the first writer to be publicly penalised for allegedly using the technology that is being marketed to women as an escalator to success.The AI industry has found in women a simultaneous market and a mine. As the Marxist feminist scholar Silvia Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch (2004), under a Capitalist regime, “women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.”Story continues below this adThe cost of AIApart from copyright and ethical concerns, there is another feminist concern which Witherspoon’s detractors have countered her on: the environment. Her critics argue that the data centres that run large language models consume water and electricity at scale, which ultimately harms the environment. Feminists have long argued that the communities bearing the cost of ecological damage and climate change are poor, female, and located in the Global South.According to the United Nations World Water Development Report, women are responsible for collecting water in over 70 percent of unserved rural households worldwide, and a one-degree rise in temperature already reduces incomes in female-headed households by 34 percent more than in male-headed ones. A 2024 study in Nature Climate Change projects that daily water collection times for women could increase by 30 percent globally by 2050, and up to 100 percent in regions across South America and Southeast Asia. The UN Women Gender Snapshot report estimates that, under a worst-case climate scenario, climate change may push 158 million more women into poverty by mid-century.Ecofeminism insists that technologies are not innocent of the systems that produce them, and a technology built on the extraction of women’s emotional labour does not become less extractive because women are invited to operate it.Also Read | Are we all starting to sound the same? The GPTfication of the human voiceIndian environmental activist Vandana Shiva has argued that development can lead to organised dispossession — of natural resources, but also of knowledge, biodiversity, and cultural practices. The same logic applies to AI today: under the guise of technological progress, creative work is seized without consent, processed into training data, and then sold back to the very creators who were dispossessed.Story continues below this adThe extractive logic connects the women whose writing trained the models, the women whose land and water run them, and the women now being told that adoption is the progressive position.Witherspoon has throughout her career played a major role in promoting women writers and female-centric stories, and her endorsement has undoubtedly the lives of not just artists but women who have seen echoes of their own fraught struggles play out in books or movies.It is inconceivable that a champion of women, their rights, and stories, cannot see the contradiction in championing the technology consuming them. Perhaps she believes that nothing can be gained by standing in front of a juggernaut, and if you cannot beat them, join them—she is wrong.(As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)