Porn has driven everyday tech. Online payment systems, broadband adoption.
Porn (visual and written erotic impression) has been a normal part of the human experience for thousands of years. Across different religions, cultures, technological capabilities. We're humans.
There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity.
Generate your own porn is definitely a huge market. Sharing it with others, and then the follow-on concern of what's in that shared content, could lead to problems.
> How do you know those relationships are "sexually fulfilling"?
You either believe what people report, the clearly-stated position on erotic material of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (1), or you can just imagine in your head what you think other people’s sex lives are like and just believe whatever you come up with.
Self-reporting isn't something to be taken at face value. It's not a dichotomy between they say, and you imagine, there's a healthy scepticism option. Also the URL leads to "Our mission" section of some organization's rather clunky website, so if it was intentended as a proof, it failed.
> It's not a dichotomy between they say, and you imagine
Buddy when it comes to strangers’ sex lives, those are pretty much the only two options.
I’m trying to figure out how “healthy scepticism” in this context means anything other than making something up in your head and then believing it. Do you mean that your imaginative process is really good?
> some organization's rather clunky website
Trying to figure out if “I don’t know what AASECT is and don’t like scrolling down a simple webpage” was meant to be a complaint or meant to be a brag.
>Porn (visual and written erotic impression) has been a normal part of the human experience for thousands of years.
You need to stretch 'porn', 'thousands if years', and certainly 'normal' definitions really hard to believe it. Even my granddad's (not thousands of years ago) exposure to porn was a one-time event when he served in army. My nephew's exposure is everyday. Which he realized to be an addiction at one point way stronger than nicotine.
This is a meme I see online often (and in the show Silicon Valley), but I don't think it holds up in practice.
Re: payment systems, Visa and MC are notoriously unfriendly to porn vendors, sending them into the arms of crooked payment processors like Wirecard. Paypal grew to prominence because it was once the only way to buy and sell on Ebay. Crypto went from nerd hobby to speculative asset, shipping the "medium of exchange for porn purchases" entirely.
As for broadband adoption, it's as likely to have occurred for MP3 piracy and being 200X faster than dialup, as it was for porn.
To be very fair here, a long time before gpt-5 porn was already being produced with stable diffusion (and other open models). Civitai in particular was an open playground for this with everything from NSFW loras, prompts to fined tuned models.
I had to work for a bit with SDXL models from there and the amount of porn on the site, before the recent cleanse, was astonishing.
The party of grindr-crashing sexual repression[1] outwardly denounces such depravity, but inwardly rejoices at all the shameful images they intend to generate.
1. Red states are way ahead on porn consumption, based on past annual reports by Aylo.
Porn (visual and written erotic impression) has been a normal part of the human experience for thousands of years. Across different religions, cultures, technological capabilities. We're humans.
There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity.
Generate your own porn is definitely a huge market. Sharing it with others, and then the follow-on concern of what's in that shared content, could lead to problems.