Everything You Should Know About AI Porn
5 Worrying Concerns About the Prospect of AI Porn Gaining Popularity
5 Worrying Concerns About the Prospect of AI Porn Gaining Popularity
The rise of artificial intelligence has been hard to ignore.
Significant leaps forward in the capacity of new software has meant that generating text and images, seemingly at the push of a button, is easier than it ever has been before.
Today, it’s hard to find an industry where AI is not impacting the way things function. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the question of AI porn has arisen, too.
Pornography, notoriously, is an industry that has a long and storied relationship to cutting-edge technology. So long as people are developing ways to depict and transmit visual content, porn, it seems, will be doing its best to figure out a way to make use of it — whether that’s silent film, VCRs, mpg video files, or virtual reality.
But, as with many of the other industries facing an onslaught of computer-generated content, there’s no shortage of ethical questions when it comes to sites producing AI pornography. What does it mean for the future of X-rated content that you can now create it without ever hiring a single human being?
In order to better understand the impact and implications of AI porn, as the technologies involved are likely to only get more popular and sophisticated, AskMen spoke to a number of people in the adult industry. Here’s what they had to say:
5 Concerns About the Prospect of AI Porn
1. AI Porn May Worsen Porn’s Young People Problem
As it stands, porn is facing serious issues around the reality that lots of minors begin watching it well before they turn 18.
This means that they can begin streaming hundreds of hours of X-rated content for adults before they have the cognitive capacity to process what they’re seeing, as well as before they’re exposed to quality sex education at school (if they ever are) and before they’ve developed relationships with their own bodies or those of others.
For instance, it’s not hard to see that the highly aestheticized bodies of porn stars can produce an impact on who and what seems sexy to young people today.
But, untethered from actual human bodies, will porn eroticize even more unrealistic things? And how will young people exposed to AI porn feel about their bodies when they grow up used to seeing private parts that are even more unrealistic than the already unrealistic real ones on screen today?
2. AI Porn May Be Soulless and Repetitive
There’s also the issue of the fact that porn, even though it may feel commercial first and foremost, is still a space for artistic expression.
Computer-generating “takes away any personal touch and completely turns it into an automated Siri at best,” says porn performer Sugar Love. “Even when AI is good enough to communicate with a human, do we want that? Do we as a society want to void all human connection?”
For anyone who’s ever found themselves especially connecting with a specific director’s aesthetic choices or vibed to a scene or clip that they felt stood out from the rest, well, AI porn is the absolute opposite direction of that experience — building the new out of reconstituted parts of the old, rather than genuine human creativity and expression.
3. AI Porn Will Likely Be Bad for Porn Workers
Will a glut of AI-generated porn depress the wages and worsen the working conditions of people in the adult industry even more than the explosion of tube sites already has?
“As a creator I see the value, and have explored the possibility of having an AI clone of myself created,” says porn performer Rae Richmond. But, she says, “after careful consideration, I’ve decided against it.”
“It’s a slippery slope,” she notes. “I think the realistic AI models could potentially replace creators someday as the technology grows, and as such, I’m not in favor. It would be detrimental to the industry as a whole.”
In the meantime, “AI is already being used to write scripts and hasten some aspects of production,” says porn scriptwriter Maddy Barton. “I don’t necessarily have a big issue with using artificial intelligence to make work easier, even if its usability is often overstated because it’s really finicky, and the results are not always great.”
However, the overall prospect of AI porn and the way it could blur the line between real and fake “scares me a bit,” says porn star Lexi Luna.
“First, there could be AI porn of me I didn’t license, which is both a personal and a copyright violation,” she notes. “Second, that porn could show me doing things I would never actually do.”
“Just as congress is moving fast to pass a law outlawing AI use in political ads, I think we need laws to protect actors, both porn and mainstream, from deep fakes,” Luna concludes.
4. AI Porn of Illegal Acts Raises Complex Questions
The rise of AI porn will certainly bring with it questions about “pornography that depicts illegal acts, as that will surely emerge as a new ‘cutting-edge’ ethical debate,” Barton says.
For instance, will AI-generated porn depicting disturbing scenes that skirt the boundaries of sexual consent raise complicated moral questions that consensually produced porn does not?
This is not an especially far-fetched hypothetical, as porn depicting staged non-consensual acts is hardly uncommon today — and we’re already seeing evidence of concerning requests being made of AI porn generators.
How does this genre of porn exist in the future? Is an AI-generated rape scene more or less concerning than one featuring fully consenting human actors, who are only pretending to engage in non-consensual acts?
After all, in the AI version, no one is being expected to pretend they are a participant in non-consensual activities, but on the flipside, there is no actual consenting team of actors involved. The anguish on the faces of AI-generated characters could therefore be both more and less real simultaneously.
Barton believes that tech companies are already dealing with these concerns in the field of AI chatbots, by “attempting to get kind of ahead of major issues of abuse or ‘violence,’” but worries that their efforts “will be, by nature, imperfect.”
5. AI Porn May Be Hard to Regulate
“Honestly, it’s such uncharted territory, I don’t even know where they’d begin to regulate it,” Barton says. “It frightens me because we’re witnessing in real time the collapse of places like Google, as reliable and ‘ethical’ websites that no longer prioritize accurate information or useability.”
“Even if companies do their best to minimize the worst consequences, there’s no reason to believe everyone will follow suit,” she adds. “Also, it’s a situation that I’m not too trusting when it comes to government regulation, as they have a terrible record when it comes to porn and protecting people; often instituting policies that cause more harm.”
We can look to the way that things like deep fakes and revenge porn have been handled to get a glimpse of what regulations on AI porn might look like — too little, too late, while real people’s reputations, livelihoods and lives are harmed in the process.
“AI is soulless and based on stolen images” says Sugar Love. “This opens up the door for [situations where] they change one or two details on the AI to be different from the human it’s based on. In the future if this persists, I see a large bout of ‘identity’/content theft and turning your favorite porn stars into AI”
AI Won’t Replace Real Porn. But…
“Ultimately, as with a lot of AI, I worry about some of the trickle effects,” says Barton.
She’s concerned about the blurring of “the boundary between reality and fiction, how developing this technology will hurt innocent bystanders due to bad actors, and the overall impact on sex workers, who may deal with an increasingly more difficult clientele and/or find their work even more legally precarious.”
“In my experience as a human being, I think there will always be a market for non-AI porn because the excitement derives from engaging with a real person — even if they are presenting a fantasy,” Barton concludes.
But, she notes, as AI porn grows in popularity, “there will be a parallel market — and I don’t think that the impact will just be financial for human sex workers.”
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Source: AskMen
