Melissa Zhu

1 week ago | bellingcat.com | Kolina Koltai |Melissa Zhu

Content warning: This story discusses non-consensual deepfake nude imagery. On the surface, Crushmate appeared to be one of many artificial intelligence “girlfriend” or “companion” apps. Its multiple websites said it specialised in “crafting the AI girl of your dreams”, and on Google and Apple’s app stores, it was described as an “AI chat product designed to provide users with a comprehensive emotional support and communication experience”.

Nov 4, 2024 | bellingcat.com | Pooja Chaudhuri |Melissa Zhu

In the lead up to the 2024 US presidential election on Nov. 5, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign mentioned the phrase “Donald Trump” more than they did “Kamala Harris” in advertisements that ran on Facebook and Instagram. Meanwhile, ads sponsored by the official campaign for her Republican rival Trump relied heavily on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” popularised during his 2016 presidential campaign, in their messaging on the same platforms.

Dec 21, 2023 | scmp.com | Melissa Zhu

At China’s largest AI event, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, in July, 20 speakers were scheduled to speak. Only one of them, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su, was a woman. This is disappointing but not surprising. Women in technology have long been sidelined, despite their significant contributions to the field. Earlier this month, The New York Times drew flak for an article listing a Who’s Who of AI that mentioned 12 men and zero women.

Sep 5, 2023 | medium.com | Melissa Zhu

There's a glaring disparity between the number of women and men that appear in the news. To tackle this issue, I prototyped an application called EquiQuote using GPT-4 - OpenAI's latest language model - to identify the gender of sources in news stories and a custom Google search to suggest alternative sources when there is an imbalance. This showed promising results, although it's not without its issues. Globally, men are quoted about three times more in the news than women.