Ask A Genius 915: AI Revenge Porn and Ethical Considerations
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/17
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, after this experience, I Googled AI porn is a problem and that returned a bunch of articles and commentary that, yeah, it’s a freaking problem. I read an article or an opinion piece from August of last year entitled Why AI porn is terrible, it’s worse than you think on a website called www.aiconsequences.com, and it touched on a couple of things we’ve touched upon before, which is that AI point porn can normalize aberrant porn. It talked about the endorphin rush that you get from porn, which makes it very habituating and addicting, and that it can quickly generate corrosive images and accelerate your descent into the muck. This is an article from eight months ago, and AI has worsened since then. And then deep fake porn is a huge problem where you put real people’s faces on. So yeah, it’s a problem, not just legally but morally and just in terms of the consumer’s mental health.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the moral issues around things that tie into it, like revenge porn?
Rosner: That’s part of the problem of deep fake porn. There’s deep fake porn where there’s a bunch of porn that they put celebrities; they photoshop celebrities’ faces onto naked bodies, and that’s been around forever. There was a sitcom in the 60s called That Girl. There was an episode in 1968 where Marlo Thomas, the show’s star, her character found a photo; they didn’t call it Photoshop back then, but somebody had taken her face and put it on a centrefold in a nudie magazine. That was 56 years ago, and tools have become more accessible and easier to use. That’s a huge problem for celebrities, except for most celebrities who learn to ignore it, but now, with AI, it’s even easier. I haven’t tried to make any of that stuff, but probably, in looking at AI naked ladies, I’ve seen images that started with pictures of famous people. So, celebrities being presented realistically in pornographic poses is a problem, and then revenge porn is a problem where you use Photoshop, or I don’t know if you can upload images of your ex-girlfriend that you want to be mean to into AI and then make horrible stuff, I don’t know, but I’m yeah, it’s a problem.
Jacobsen: Do you think they’re going to develop AIs to combat this kind of moral quandary proposed by very narrow AIs dictating these images and videos that are morally questionable, and how do they portray people?
Rosner: Well, I’m sure that if they’re responsible, and I don’t know, it’s an AI porn website, like, how accountable are they? Indeed, if they were subject to prosecution, they would develop protocols that would (a) essentially prevent those images from being generated until creeps developed workarounds and (b) would maybe require somebody at the website to, I mean, it’s not like they’re generating a million images a second. This one website would generate a few dozen images every half hour. It’s like they could hire somebody for cheap to look at the images that are being generated and say uh oh, that one looks problematic and then look at the prompt that generated the image and develop a list of prompts that are prohibited and also get rid of the troubling images as they pop up. They’d still make a ton of money. All they would have to do is hire one or two people. Yeah, they could develop protocols.
Even this website was old school because I went to a list of favourite AI porn sites just to see how the landscape had changed, and one thing that had happened was this thing was like 25th in the list of best AI adult sites. It was still doing the old thing of just making pictures of naked ladies where all the ones higher on the list were generating AI girlfriends like it would give you a bunch of images, but also you could chat with an AI who’d probably talk sexy with you while simulating the idea that the person you’re chatting with is sending you naked pictures of her. I didn’t do any of those because I’m cheap, and I didn’t want to pay for anything, and it looked like you had to pay to build an AI girlfriend. I’d say then maybe it would be less of a problem because if you’re generating a simulated girlfriend, then maybe it’s easier to stop people from developing an underaged AI girlfriend, but on second thought, that’s just what happened in the last few weeks, a month since the last time I looked.
So, a month from now, I don’t know where the world of AI smut is going to go, but as with all AI, it rests on a foundation of massive amounts of human labour taking content that you want the AI to learn from and tagging it and otherwise processing it so the AI can add it to the appropriate Bayesian bins in its extensive database. So, on the adult AI website, you could see AIs understanding of boobs. It just gets more inclusive and weirder by the day. So, I was looking at this website for a week or so. When I started looking at it, the boobs were big and round, like Japanese anime boobs for the most part but by the time I said, okay, you’ve got to go away, the boobs had gotten weird, like with these weird prolapsed nipples as if the process seemed to be that over a few days, people creating these images had decided that boobs that lactated when a woman was aroused were suitable to add to porn. So, over a couple of days, the boobs started lactating, and then the boobs got prolapsed. They lactated so much they actually blew out the nipple, and so by the time I said goodbye to the website, the nipples were just like these big blown out, not even nipples anymore but like elephant noses… things got weird.
So, the next time I take a look, if I dare to take a look, I’m sure there will be all sorts of new weirdness-es in a month, but somebody has to monitor that junk. In the novel, I’m writing about the near future. Initially, I decided that Russia in the 2030s would be pulling the strings on many porn websites to make people hate themselves more for what they were consuming, but after looking at this stuff, I decided that’s not realistic. The stuff coming out of there and how fast it changes and gets weird and gross will make people hate themselves anyway, and Russia couldn’t even keep up. You know that Russia spends tens of millions of dollars every year to generate social media messaging to destabilize people in Western countries and increase anger in Western countries, but I think Russia is trying to make porn even more perverted to make consumers hate themselves; I don’t think it’s a productive area for them because it’s just a roiling sea of grossness anyway. Is that reasonable?
Yeah, somebody is going to, especially if they pass legislation on it and given who passes legislation on this stuff, they might F it up because the politicians in America are notoriously out of touch with tech, and whatever legislation passes might be obsolete before it even passes or off target. The article I read said it was in California that these efforts are being made, so they will get the legislation right, given that California is a vast tech state. But I wonder if you can even have legislation that gets it right because the perves, the entrepreneurs, might come up with workarounds like a lot of the images I’ve seen in the last week are furries, like semi-animalized heads on bodies. So, if you put a cat head on a human body that looks youthful, does that qualify as underage? It’s a freaking cat. Or an alien, like I don’t know and good luck to the legislators trying to figure this out.
[Recording End]
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