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by estimator7292 142 days ago
While this is a valid take, I feel compelled to point out Chuck Tingle.

The sheer amount and variety of smut books (just books) is vastly larger than anyone wants to realize. We passed the mark decades ago where there is smut available for any and every taste. Like, to the point that even LLMs are going to take a long time to put a dent in the smut market. Humans have been making smut for longer than we've had writing.

But again I don't think you're wrong, but the scale of the problem is way distorted.

4 comments

That’s all simple one way consumption though. I suspect the effect on people is very different when it’s interactive in the way an LLM can be that we’ve never had to recon with before.

That’s where the danger may lie.

You could commission smut of whatever type you want for quite a while. And many people do so. Even customised smut is not new. It's just going to get a bit cheaper and automated.
You couldn't talk to commissioned smut. Of course you could request changes etc. but the feedback loop was nowhere close to what you can get with AI. Interactivity is a very big deal.
There are absolutely people getting paid to roleplay smut in chat sessions and have been doing so at least since original Second Life and likely since the dawn of chat.
There are several large platforms for interactive 1:1 or 1:few smut in various media forms. “LLM enthusiasts” have been using smutai for a couple years now. Smut generation is probably on of the top three reasons for people to build local AI rigs.
Sounds like an improvement then. If people have more freedom to enjoy what they like how they like it, I see that as entirely a good thing.
At the degree of generalization you are working at, yes. More preference matching is a good thing.

This is spherical cows territory though, so its only good for setting out Birds Eye view of principles.

Alien 1: "How did the earthlings lose control of their own planet?"

Alien 2: "AI generated porn"

i've always wondered how much the increasing prevalence of smut & not so niche romance novels, that have proliferated since e-readers became mainstream, have had on Gen Z and younger's sometimes unrealistic view/expectations of relationship. A lot of time is spent on porn sites etc. but not so much on how mainstream some of these novels have become
They had similar wonderings in the Victorian era, and probably in the Roman empire and ancient Greece too.
Yes, human nature hasn't changed but there is a reason why only recently obesity epidemic has developed.

Cheap unlimited access to stuff that was always scarce during human evolution creates an 'evolutionary mismatch' where unlimited access to stuff bypasses our lack of natural satiety mechanisms.

That is completely discounting the effects of PFAS and plasticizers on the human endocrine system and the downstream effects on obesity.
But you don’t think there are big differences?
Well they are vastly more aware of the notion of consent now.
Have you ever stopped to realize that, from the Victorian’s point of view, they have been proven completely right about what would happen if ladies started showing their ankles?
They were right. We have largely had 200 years of socially and legally enforced morality being eroded with the conservatives saying "If you remove X then Y and Z will happen!". The liberals saying "Why do you care anyways? That's a slippery slope it won't happen!". The the conservatives immediately being proven right, but no one is willing to walk back on liberalization of moral issues since too many like hedonism.
What do you mean, "proven right"? Could you give three examples?
That only assumes that nothing else changed in society at the same time. Is all this happening because men saw some ankles? Or is it a symptom of other changes in society (like more individual freedoms and rights, more education, etc)
...sorry, I'm dense apparently, what did they predict vs what happened?
The Victorians were accidentally right about ankles, which is funny in hindsight. Once one arbitrary rule breaks, people start noticing the rest are kind of fake too, and it turns out "modesty" was load-bearing for a whole governance model.

Ankles -> knees -> jazz -> voting -> rock -> no-fault divorce -> Tinder -> polyamory discourse on airplanes. it's a joke, but also sort of how cultural change actually propagates. The collapse did happen, just not of morals. Of enforcement. After that, everything is just people discovering the rules were optional all along. Including money.

On the other hand (based on memory of research I did many years ago), in societies where nudity is common (e.g. African tribes where at least breasts are usually visible), there is a much lower rate of sex-related problems (sexual assault, etc)
Well, I wasn't speaking of a formal prediction by leading Victorian moral researchers... I was referring to our collective common knowledge of Victorian hangups.

Nevertheless, here is an example of Victorian anxiety regarding showing ankles: https://archive.org/details/amanualpolitene00pubgoog/page/n2...

It's easy to say "oh they were silly to worry about such things." But that's only because we see it from our own point of view.

Alternatively, imagine describing roads, highways, traffic congestion and endless poles strung with electrical wire all over the place to someone from the 11th century. This would sound like utter ruination of the land to them. But you and I are used to it, so it just seems normal.

They might well have been right - I'm no anthropologist.

Certainly they had neither the quantity nor ease of access that we do.

Is your take that the way we view sexuality today is not meaningfully different from the Victorian era?
I want smut that talks about agent based development and crawdbot to do dirty dirty things.

Does that exist yet. I don't think so.

Best I can do is [1] Sentient Lesbian Em-Dashes and [2] An AI hallucination made real for now.

The man's probably thinking something up though. "Pounded in the butt by Microslop Agentic Studio 2026" has a ring.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sentient-Lesbian-Em-Dash-Punctuation-... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Last-Algorithm-Pounded-Claimed-Sun-Ti...

> Sentient Lesbian Em-Dashes

Looked at the cover and saw “From Two Time Hugo Award Finalist Chuck Tingle”.

There’s no way that’s true. But I did a quick search anyway, and holy shit!

https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2016-hugo-awards/...

https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2017-hugo-awards/...

The story behind it:

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Chuck-Tingle-become-a-Hugo-Awa...

https://archive.ph/20160526154656/http://www.vox.com/2016/5/...

They wrote a book about it too, "Slammed In The Butt By My Hugo Award Nomination".
rule 34
> The sheer amount and variety of smut books (just books) is vastly larger than anyone wants to realize. We passed the mark decades ago where there is smut available for any and every taste.

It's important to note that the vast majority of such books are written for a female audience, though.