[vu0tran]

Author here. Thanks for reading. I've been thinking about this for a long time. I used to work at Snapchat where a lot of the talking points were still centered around the "Social Dilemma".

As I've transitioned to working on AI, I think the average person doesn't understand how there's a gigantic underbelly that's just purely dedicated to pornographic use – whether that's in erotic roleplaying with LLMs, or generating pornographic images with diffusion models. It's massive, but largely not talked about and remains out of view.

From my experience, when you go from text to image, it's basically an order of magnitude change in the dopamine response.

When you go from image to video, it's essentially another order of magnitude.

What I'm trying to say is... I don't think we're ready for what's to come...

[kmnc]

But a plethora of freely available, porn in every flavour already exists. In full HD video, even in full 8k VR. Whatever addiction epidemic that AI brings to porn, already exists, and doesn’t seem provably that damaging. Further, porn has a kind of cap for males, you can really only engage with it so often..with diminishing returns. It is nothing like gambling, drugs or alcohol.

[onecommentman]

Playing around with stable diffusion, I’m wondering if the act of prompting/“creating” pornography is somehow more engaging/addicting than simply consuming pornography. Watching gambling channels isn’t the problem. Actively making gambling choices leads to the problems. I suppose we will find out.

Also, the sort of inconsistent porn/IP controls these image creation AIs implement add a peep show element (will it or won’t it generate this image, or something close…let’s find out) which is oddly more engaging. It adds a puzzle element to the mix…”boudoir oil” prompts combined with historical eras lead to a range of sensual images most wouldn’t know even existed as part of the history of Western Art. Their training sets pretty obviously include sensual images of many eras, and clever folks with a knowledge of cultural history can ferret that content out with the right stream of legitimate prompts. So that gaming/discovery element unintentionally makes generating these “almost-porn” AI images under simple screening more engaging/addicting than a simple Internet search. Boy, I would have been a popular 14 year old boy in AI class in junior high…

[chasd00]

There use to be a saying like “no internet technology can be considered a success until it’s adopted by the porn industry”.

[mcphage]

> was subtly different for every single viewer.

…I don’t think you know what people want. People don’t want a 80 hour video that nobody else sees, they want shows that they can talk about with their friends and make fan content for that others will recognize. If nobody else can experience it, nobody will give a fuck.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Maybe. OTOH I feel rather immune, because I didn't really grew up with TV, and there were other, more interesting things to do anyway.

Have you read something from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan , or at least about him? Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation , maybe about the so called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere ?

I still don't watch that much media, because I mostly prefer reading, with the exception of documentaries and lectures which take full advantage of modern media, or so called 'explorable explanations'.

No matter how sophisticated new sorts of media may be, it would only feel more gross to me, than the stuff which is available now, and has been since almost the start of every medium, be it painting, photography, film, and so on.

IMO it's for people who haven't experienced real things, akin to pigs in industrial farming settings, happily chewing on iron chains dangling in there.

Let them have their shit and keep your distance. Bad luck when you can't.

shrug