Technology

For any skeezy technology, ask:

• Does it have legitimate uses?

• Would stopping it cause more problems than it solves?

People can fret about pornogrifying real people, but Photoshop already had this debate, and Photoshop kinda has to use real photos of real people. This software defaults to making shit up. Its output, however vulgar, doesn't need to look like any actual person. Even depicting acts that are extremely illegal is just a machine fantasy matching demonstrable labels. The only possible way to prevent that from including bad things would be to destroy this technology in its entirety, and that simply will not happen.

So stop fretting. You don't need a perfectly virtuous take on a do-anything program that can emit smut. There will be no version that somehow recognizes your coworkers and refuses to work with that. Nor will Photoshop treat a celebrity's copy-pasted face like a Eurion constellation. A network that can show you a spinning hot dog on the moon can obviously also show tits, because there's more examples of mundane tits than rotating moon dogs.

Empowering people to do science fiction shit with their computers includes bad things. That's what most science fiction is about! We have to deal with that, the same way we have to deal with people being capable of bad things using e-mail and motor vehicles and pointy sticks. You make a reasonable effort to stop people doing bad things accidentally - and if they do it anyway, you hit them.

This stupid gimmick is how we let everyone become a movie maker.

Whatever it's good at, with trivial input, we'll all recognize and become inured to. Like how Terragan was jawdropping until you saw the dozenth barren landscape. People will use this tech to tell stories, because humans can't help using things to tell stories. We'll get shows starring actors who don't exist, and judge them viciously among a sea of viewing options, even knowing the whole thing was produced by A Guy. That solitary authorship will allow things that weren't possible when they needed a budget and a crew. That will include bad things. But I'm less worried about seeing my actual face plastered onto generic gross hallucinations, than I am about missing a reality where everyone can make their dream project real.