Unfortunately, the price will go down pushing the supply/demand curve out, and we'll get ever more garbage. Some of it will be dangerous or addictive to susceptible portions of society, mostly just boring and stupid to the rest of us.
Wait for first kid who dies trying an AI generated "challenge" or the first violent mob killing caused by AI generated outrage porn. AI generated video porn may look like triple breasted whores of Eroticon6 today, but with sufficient influencer content (playground videos) and porn (dungeon) footage, I suspect you can generate more than enough novel and relevant (child S&M) porn for everyone.
To play devil's advocate: If AI is producing content that would be morally objectionable because it harms someone, but nobody was harmed in the making of it, are we still right to find it morally objectionable?
If your 10 year old dies because of an AI created Tide-pod or Street-surfing challenge, I think you'll find it objectionable. Same for highly targeted fake news clickbait that causes a race riot.
Why does said 10 year old child have unfettered access to the internet?
Also why is an AI ultimately responsible for a child choosing to perform some challenge? What if the 10 year old child played amogus & then decided to re-enact irl?
I'd say it's less the source of a challenge or false factoid etc and more a cultural problem of no monitoring kids enough; parents give their kids phones & let 'em use TikTok to their heart's content cause it keeps the kids quiet. And immature kids love TT because it's easy to generate clout and therefore dopamine.
> Why does said 10 year old child have unfettered access to the internet?
Q: Of the kids in my 13 year-old's class, what % would you guess have WhatsApp on their phone?
Spoiler: "If you live in a country in the European Economic Area (which includes the European Union), and any other included country or territory (collectively referred to as the European Region), you must be at least 16 years old (or such greater age required in your country) to register for and use WhatsApp"[0]
Why does it need to be unfettered? They have peers.
Kids smoke/drink and it's literally illegal to sell them cigarettes/alcohol.
A significant percent of adults are also susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories... see QAnon. Now allow AI automation to target individuals and small groups to "optimize engagement" with apparently personal communications using A/B statistics. Everywhere all the time, because it's cheap, because it pays the rent. Some of them will be drawn to artificially generated violence inciting agit prop, because it works. There are negative externalities to that.
In terms of enjoyment, yes. In terms of overall harm reduction, no.
It's still a bad thing for humanity at large but it may have a knock-on effect of pacifying people who would otherwise pay significant amounts of money for new content to be produced. If we can placate those people, at least the money dries up for those other sources and maybe they would move on to doing something other than harming children.
I don’t understand why procedurally generated porn of made up humans is harmful to someone. How is this different from video games that allow you to shoot and stab thousands of virtual people without any proven deleterious effect on real life?
It would normalise that behaviour. There are plenty of studies that show pornography warps the watchers' minds.
Even video game violence would do it but a vast majority of the experiences are easily identifiable as cartoonish. So it may give you the idea that you slaughtered a 1000 NPCs but each kill is nowhere close to the visceral reality. The games which have a focus on realistic killing, either do so to aliens/monsters or they are so off-putting that they never manage to find a large audience.
In any case I look at the public discourse about war and violence and I find that people are eager to jump into fights and don't think twice about supporting their government in bombing and killing the shit out of other populations. They couch it in some shallow moral argument. Often the deterrent to war isn't some moral concern but the fact that the other side also has significant weaponry and might inflict casualties on your side as well.
In any case I hear a lot of this overton window concept and there is a lot of merit in the argument that excessive amount of AI generated deviant porn content will eventually make people think that all this depravity is normal and we should just look the other way.
> It would normalise that behaviour. There are plenty of studies that show pornography warps the watchers' minds.
Is there any evidence that it would normalize that behavior? That sounds like a moral intuition, not something backed by evidence. And even if the mind of the watcher was warped, is that any of your business as long as it's not increasing harm to society? In the West we let adults of sound mind harm themselves in lots of ways they choose, from eating terrible food to doing drugs to drinking to smoking to extreme sports. It's their body, their choice. As long as society doesn't have to bear the cost of it, like say with drunk driving, in the West we have accepted that adults have the right to do what they want to themselves.
> Even video game violence would do it but a vast majority of the experiences are easily identifiable as cartoonish. So it may give you the idea that you slaughtered a 1000 NPCs but each kill is nowhere close to the visceral reality. The games which have a focus on realistic killing, either do so to aliens/monsters or they are so off-putting that they never manage to find a large audience.
Great, then really deprived AI-generated porn will likely see the same lack of adoption and stay a niche phenomenon for a few people in a basement somewhere. What's the problem?
> In any case I look at the public discourse about war and violence and I find that people are eager to jump into fights and don't think twice about supporting their government in bombing and killing the shit out of other populations. They couch it in some shallow moral argument. Often the deterrent to war isn't some moral concern but the fact that the other side also has significant weaponry and might inflict casualties on your side as well.
Were people not eager to jump into fights and support their jingoistic government rhetoric prior to the creation of violent videogames? Do you have anything to back that popularity of violent videogame led to a rise in ultra-nationalism and aggressive foreign policy?
> In any case I hear a lot of this overton window concept and there is a lot of merit in the argument that excessive amount of AI generated deviant porn content will eventually make people think that all this depravity is normal and we should just look the other way.
Is there a lot of merit to that argument? How did you decide that?
The method of gratification is different from porn is different than to video games.
I don’t have to get off to enjoy obliterating people back in the quake days, but porn is a different psychological mechanism entirely.
I’m trying to assume you’re asking the question to spur conversation, and not that you actually hold the view that watching child porn, whether synthetic or not, is morally equivalent to playing video games.
Is it? Are they not all dopamine pathways in the end, with addicts emerging from all of them? Where's the evidence against that?
People spent decades arguing that rock & roll, Dungeons & Dragons and videogames would lead to moral corruption and decay. Turns out there is no evidence to support any of it in the end. The immorality was always "self-evident". That's not enough to justify banning something though as evidence has shown again and again.
Also, whose morality are we talking about here? Morality is all over the map depending on which culture you ask. Each cares more or less about sanctity, divinity, loyalty, freedom etc.
And you're correct, my personal opinion on this is irrelevant.
>I’m trying to assume you’re asking the question to spur conversation, and not that you actually hold the view that watching child porn, whether synthetic or not, is morally equivalent to playing video games.
I think you're less trying to assume this, and more trying to cast aspersions without breaking HN rules. Barely.
I think sexuality is different to violence. I've heard plenty of stories about people developing weird kinks from porn, or having to turn to weirder and weirder stuff to get off. But I haven't heard of any cases of video games turning people violent.
OK, let's assume your argument is correct. (which I don't think is true, but let's go with that for now) Let's say that media depicting some kinds of sexual material warps what gives some people sexual satisfaction.
...so?
Should my preferences of what I find acceptable and not acceptable in that domain somehow influence what content others are allowed to consume? If the creation of that content actively causes harm, then sure. That content should be restricted. If we are restricting it because you think it's icky and it might lead to other things you find icky than we took a wrong turn somewhere.
That's like saying we should outlaw mozzarella cheese because it might lead to the consumption of triple cheese sausage pizza. Neither of those acts hurt me, so why should I care about people choosing to participate in either?
Nah, compare violence in media by sex/age breakdown of the victim. Excluding sexual stuff completely, it's many, many orders of magnitude more acceptable to show the gory killing of a male character on screen than it is to show the same of a woman or child.
There are all of these unwritten but extremely obvious rules that dictate what is acceptable & what is not.
Unfortunately I don't think we have data here to make conclusions, only a few moral intuitions, which historically haven't been the most reliable compasses for navigating these grey areas.
See I somewhat agree with you, but you have a limited perspective in a way, that maybe as a gay man I can help expand on without being shouted at for being MRA trash just because I notice things.
You say "video games allow you to shoot and stab thousands of virtual people", this isn't true. In actuality, video games allow you to shoot & stab thousands of virtual _men_. Replace the baddies in a game with women and or children and people will go mental.
Same thing with media; Television/movies - plenty of men are brutally gored on screen with no one batting an eye, but generally the camera will cut away if there's violence against women &| children. The only time you do see it is when they want to make a very strong impact ie "this guy killing this woman is a V E R Y bad guy, and you know that because it's not just some anonymous dude he's goring".
There's plenty of hypocrisy in it; Game of Thrones people famously complained about the Cersei rape scene (also in the books, although more ambiguous) meanwhile the average episode spends a good portion of the time showing us the insides of three dozen guys' ribcages.
Or Altered Carbon where in the book series where Takeshi is forced into a simulation as a woman, where he is tortured; media at the time said they were glad that it didn't make it into the show because it would be "mysogynistic torture porn" - apparently none of the gratuitous violence against male characters was considered to be bad.
And _that's_ why it's different. Because certain types of porn could be generated that infringe in the protected classes that society creates.
That all sounds about right. The point I was making is that the poster was looking at it from the standpoint of "reducing harm", whereas in reality they were merely following their moral intuitions about what's sacred and taboo in society, and then backwards-rationalizing it through the "harm" moral axis.
Very common in the liberal West where we think of ourselves as being above taboos and caring about divinity, except we still do very much. E.g. digging up the corpse of a dead relative and having sex with them doesn't harm anybody, but is highly taboo. Having sex with a dead family pet, doesn't harm anybody, but highly taboo. Siblings on contraception having sex, zero harm, but very taboo. Hentai of protagonists who could be underage, zero harm, very taboo. etc. etc.
Women, children, LGBTQ members, the involuntarily unhoused, minorities, Muslims and many others are all currently sacred groups whose sanctity you cannot violate even in a work of art and fiction.
So back to my point, it has nothing to do with harm, it's all about sanctity.
I think it's important to differentiate something that is personally icky to you and something that is 'bad for humanity at large' unless you can demonstrate how it's bad for humanity at large and demonstrate why that makes it morally objectionable.
Morally objectionable acts require (IMO) a victim.
I think it's essential that before we decide that we are going to limit what people can do we determine if what they're doing is actually hurting someone to the extent that society should limit that behavior or if we're just limiting their behavior because it's different from ours and we don't like it.
In my personal moral worldview, if a person can simulate a universe with no actual people in it in which they commit whatever debauchery they feel necessary without causing harm to anyone else, I say have fun. It has literally no measurable impact on me, so it would be immoral for me to insert my personal preferences into the matter.
Wait for first kid who dies trying an AI generated "challenge" or the first violent mob killing caused by AI generated outrage porn. AI generated video porn may look like triple breasted whores of Eroticon6 today, but with sufficient influencer content (playground videos) and porn (dungeon) footage, I suspect you can generate more than enough novel and relevant (child S&M) porn for everyone.