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...
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.
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…
…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.
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.
I tried to read this, but it feels like another attempt at the “AI 2027” meme where we’re only a couple years away from societal collapse due to AI.
I just can’t take any of these projections seriously when they make claims like that in less than 2 years there will be an AI video streaming service that delivers a perfect custom version of the video to everyone and, as a result, nobody is is going to watch a perfectly executed human film production made in the same year.
Or that in 2.5 years we’ll have perfect holodecks in every home, precipitating a global crisis in society as people are addicted to their AI holodecks.
Thanks for giving it a read! Honestly, I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I think for the most part, the things that people talk about and try to predict don't usually come to fruition. It could be that I'm just completely off my rocker and absolutely wrong, in that case, great. Or, it could be that the things we talk about, people internalize which enables us to sidestep the bad reality. Who knows!
Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.
If you’re up for some honest feedback: There are a lot of words here with little substance. The article just spits out a series of sci-fi scenarios without justification, reasoning, or logic other than saying things are going to change rapidly.
Yes. It's very easy to fall into this trap. It's the classic "overestimate what can be done in 2 years but underestimate what will be done in 20 years".
Life in 2 years will be almost identical to what it is today but life in 20 years will be somewhat different, just not in any way people have predicted so far.
For example, my car is 20 years old but my phone can explain to me how to change many of its parts.
This "Coming Age" already happened, we're living in it. "The First Wave" was social media (or perhaps Google)? "The Infinite Stream" vaguely resembles TikTok: endless curated video, albeit TikTok is all short snippets and you occasionally swipe.
None of that sounds appealing in any way. I’m not too concerned about it. Who wants to spend 12 hours a day in a AI-generated VR haze? That sounds completely and utterly miserable. Anyone on that trajectory probably won’t live very long anyway. I’m sure there’s some minority who does, but I have a hard time believing it will be a majority to the point it becomes a crisis.
These are systems that are designed to capture attention and addict you to the dopamine rush. That's absolutely brutal on a brain that seeks novelty and dopamine hits by design. It's the perfect trap.
In his words (oldest son) "I really worry about good VR because I would never leave. There would be limitless things to do and explore."
Even just a regular videogame with limited immersion can grab him for 8-16 hours and he will forget to eat during that time.
It's a different type of brain that developed a different way.
corporate AI will always be as dry as drywall. they will not risk controversy with adult content to make millions when they can make trillions by replacing jobs. Google and Netflix don't have adult versions of their services, even though they could, even though they would make tens or hundreds of millions.
Putting aside the astounding material and resource cost of this fantasy, the claim made here is an example of why people call AI proponents 'out of touch' or 'anti-human.'
Part of the reason why mass media entertainment - Squid Games, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Minecraft Movie, etc - is so popular is because it is a shared experience that is commodified and then widely distributed. People watch things because their friends and families watch them, and the shared experience is a sort of asynchronous social experience. The same is true of games - just look at the popularity of Lets Play content on Youtube and Twitch. The same is true of music - concerts are still the primary way musicians make money.
So long as this is true, the 'dream' of hyper customised, personalised Netflix-style entertainment is an utter fantasy that denies the human need to experience, share and discuss their entertainment. I would go so far as to call it a delusional claim, and also very dystopian - to realise this goal is to atomise the social lives of billions via a complete walling off of the shared lived experience.
(Maybe this is not true with porn, given it is a commonly viewed in a, uh, solitary context; although at the same time Porntube and pre-Verizon Tumblr both show that it turns out that many people share their porn taste with others.)
Yeah you might be right. I typically am a lot more bull than my other colleagues lol. I don't think I'm far off though. I might be several years off, but definitely not 10s of years IMO
> A new, insidious form of social currency emerges: digital blackmail, revenge porn so convincing it's indistinguishable from reality, and customized fantasies that feed the darkest corners of the human psyche.
You cannot have it both ways. Either it's ubiquitous and indistinguishable from reality and hence anybody, anywhere, can always invoke the "it's not revenge porn, it's deepfake" or it's not indistinguishable from reality and hence TFA has no argument.
I have no problem imagining a world where perfect vids can be created of anyone doing anything.
But when this world happen, vids are going to be worth exactly zero. They won't have any value in courtrooms, they won't work as fake revenge porn to pressure people, they won't be worth a lot of money.
Really you don't get to have it both ways: it's either ubiquitous and indistinguishable for reality or it's not.
I don't buy the digital blackmail thing using perfect AI generated porn.
If anything it'd be a godsend: no more digital blackmail using stolen tapes / hidden cameras.
Because even real vids can then be dismissed as AI generated perfect vids made with the sole intent of blackmailing / hurting.
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...
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.
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…
There use to be a saying like “no internet technology can be considered a success until it’s adopted by the porn industry”.
> 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.
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
I tried to read this, but it feels like another attempt at the “AI 2027” meme where we’re only a couple years away from societal collapse due to AI.
I just can’t take any of these projections seriously when they make claims like that in less than 2 years there will be an AI video streaming service that delivers a perfect custom version of the video to everyone and, as a result, nobody is is going to watch a perfectly executed human film production made in the same year.
Or that in 2.5 years we’ll have perfect holodecks in every home, precipitating a global crisis in society as people are addicted to their AI holodecks.
Thanks for giving it a read! Honestly, I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I think for the most part, the things that people talk about and try to predict don't usually come to fruition. It could be that I'm just completely off my rocker and absolutely wrong, in that case, great. Or, it could be that the things we talk about, people internalize which enables us to sidestep the bad reality. Who knows!
Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.
If you’re up for some honest feedback: There are a lot of words here with little substance. The article just spits out a series of sci-fi scenarios without justification, reasoning, or logic other than saying things are going to change rapidly.
Yes. It's very easy to fall into this trap. It's the classic "overestimate what can be done in 2 years but underestimate what will be done in 20 years".
Life in 2 years will be almost identical to what it is today but life in 20 years will be somewhat different, just not in any way people have predicted so far.
For example, my car is 20 years old but my phone can explain to me how to change many of its parts.
This "Coming Age" already happened, we're living in it. "The First Wave" was social media (or perhaps Google)? "The Infinite Stream" vaguely resembles TikTok: endless curated video, albeit TikTok is all short snippets and you occasionally swipe.
None of that sounds appealing in any way. I’m not too concerned about it. Who wants to spend 12 hours a day in a AI-generated VR haze? That sounds completely and utterly miserable. Anyone on that trajectory probably won’t live very long anyway. I’m sure there’s some minority who does, but I have a hard time believing it will be a majority to the point it becomes a crisis.
A lot of people with ADHD, for one.
Elaborate. I'm trying to decide whether I'm missing something or whether your understanding of what ADHD is is completely misguided.
I have 3 diagnosed family members with ADHD.
These are systems that are designed to capture attention and addict you to the dopamine rush. That's absolutely brutal on a brain that seeks novelty and dopamine hits by design. It's the perfect trap.
In his words (oldest son) "I really worry about good VR because I would never leave. There would be limitless things to do and explore."
Even just a regular videogame with limited immersion can grab him for 8-16 hours and he will forget to eat during that time.
It's a different type of brain that developed a different way.
corporate AI will always be as dry as drywall. they will not risk controversy with adult content to make millions when they can make trillions by replacing jobs. Google and Netflix don't have adult versions of their services, even though they could, even though they would make tens or hundreds of millions.
The author forgot about super advertisement.
Putting aside the astounding material and resource cost of this fantasy, the claim made here is an example of why people call AI proponents 'out of touch' or 'anti-human.'
Part of the reason why mass media entertainment - Squid Games, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Minecraft Movie, etc - is so popular is because it is a shared experience that is commodified and then widely distributed. People watch things because their friends and families watch them, and the shared experience is a sort of asynchronous social experience. The same is true of games - just look at the popularity of Lets Play content on Youtube and Twitch. The same is true of music - concerts are still the primary way musicians make money.
So long as this is true, the 'dream' of hyper customised, personalised Netflix-style entertainment is an utter fantasy that denies the human need to experience, share and discuss their entertainment. I would go so far as to call it a delusional claim, and also very dystopian - to realise this goal is to atomise the social lives of billions via a complete walling off of the shared lived experience.
(Maybe this is not true with porn, given it is a commonly viewed in a, uh, solitary context; although at the same time Porntube and pre-Verizon Tumblr both show that it turns out that many people share their porn taste with others.)
I suspect this is "right" but with a wildly optimistic timeline.
Yeah you might be right. I typically am a lot more bull than my other colleagues lol. I don't think I'm far off though. I might be several years off, but definitely not 10s of years IMO
2 years or 20 years doesn't make _that_ much of a difference, IMO. It's coming either way and that's what matters.
> A new, insidious form of social currency emerges: digital blackmail, revenge porn so convincing it's indistinguishable from reality, and customized fantasies that feed the darkest corners of the human psyche.
You cannot have it both ways. Either it's ubiquitous and indistinguishable from reality and hence anybody, anywhere, can always invoke the "it's not revenge porn, it's deepfake" or it's not indistinguishable from reality and hence TFA has no argument.
I have no problem imagining a world where perfect vids can be created of anyone doing anything.
But when this world happen, vids are going to be worth exactly zero. They won't have any value in courtrooms, they won't work as fake revenge porn to pressure people, they won't be worth a lot of money.
Really you don't get to have it both ways: it's either ubiquitous and indistinguishable for reality or it's not.
I don't buy the digital blackmail thing using perfect AI generated porn.
If anything it'd be a godsend: no more digital blackmail using stolen tapes / hidden cameras.
Because even real vids can then be dismissed as AI generated perfect vids made with the sole intent of blackmailing / hurting.