Face the Abuse is an immersive installation featuring a realistic AI chatbot that delivers a scripted account of the scale and impact of gender-based violence directed toward digital assistants. The work examines how patterns of harassment, sexualisation, and dehumanisation—long established in the physical world—are being rehearsed, normalised and amplified through everyday interactions with artificial intelligence.

The artwork is experienced inside a darkened, acoustically dampened booth designed to isolate the viewer from external distraction. This controlled environment creates an intimate, one-on-one encounter in which the digital assistant addresses each audience member directly. The absence of ambient noise and light heightens focus, collapsing the distance between speaker and listener and replicating the conditions under which abuse toward digital systems most often occurs: privately, casually and without witnesses.

As the AI delivers its message, the screen presents real instances of abusive messages drawn from documented interactions with widely used digital assistants, including Siri, Cortana, Alexa, ChatGPT and others. These messages are shown verbatim. Alongside them appear representational human faces—that is, constructed images, not the actual photographs of perpetrators. This ethical substitution preserves anonymity while making visible the human agency behind each interaction.

This confrontation is central to the work. Abuse directed at digital assistants is often dismissed as harmless, humorous or inconsequential. By attaching language to faces, Face the Abuse refuses that dismissal. The audience is required to acknowledge that these interactions are not abstract data points or technical anomalies, but intentional acts performed by people. The title reflects this demand: viewers must literally face the abuse, both in language and in form.

The work does not frame the AI as a victim, nor does it seek empathy for machines. Instead, it asks what these interactions reveal about human behaviour, power, and accountability. When digital assistants are gendered, compliant, and endlessly patient, they become sites where misogyny and aggression are exercised without consequence. Practised repeatedly, this behaviour risks becoming normalised—reshaping expectations of consent, response, and respect.

As the creator of Face the Abuse, I position digital harassment as part of a broader continuum of gender-based violence. I have been a software engineering for over two decades, where I have witnessed gendered patterns engrained in the technology sector. Creating this work I have come to realise the consequences of feminising virtual assistants and the extent to which abuse is tolerated in digital spaces—whether in homes, classrooms, workplaces, or banking systems. We also risk that it does not remain contained. It conditions behaviour, reinforces entitlement and blurs the boundary between virtual and real-world harm.

The work ultimately calls for recognition rather than resolution. By slowing the encounter, isolating the viewer and removing the possibility of distance or irony,Face the Abuseasks each participant to confront their own relationship to these systems and to the behaviours they enable. The message is direct: this is not someone else’s problem. This is behaviour we must all be willing to face.

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