Technology

I'd rather have AI porn that doesn't involve human trafficking, massive exploitation, actors/actresses with a high suicide rate, child abuse, and all of the rest of the evil/bad things that the porn industry currently has.

Can [cars] be ethical? Can [rocking chairs] be ethical? This question is nonsensical. "AI porn" is the output of a production process.

Are we being asked if it can be produced ethically? Or possessed ethically? Distributed ethically? Ethics are things that apply to conscious creatures, not inanimate objects.

If hentai is ethical then ai porn is too.

Didn't read the article. Why? Don't care enough what the author thinks.

I've considered this before. IMO, it's kind of a fruit from the poison tree situation. If all porn in the model is consensual and legal, then it actually has the capacity to significantly undercut an industry that has a lot of exploitation in it (particularly the illegal, inconsensual part), because now you can just create what you want to see when you want to see it, and that seems like it's a lot easier and cheaper than paying a criminal or group of criminals to hurt someone. The reality, of course, is that the model almost certainly has ingested illegal or inconsensual content. Ethically speaking, that could mean that anything it produces will carry that stain with it. I think there's a potential here to reduce net suffering, but it's like any tool; it all depends on how people decide to use it, and I'm not sure that the bad actors won't just completely ruin this for everyone.

I don't give a shit what the AI was trained on.

Anything legally made public is fair game.

If human artists can look at stuff, then so can the idiot robot. So what if AI doesn't learn exactly how human artists do? Submarines don't swim like fish. What matters is, they share an environment. Those inputs influence the model's outputs. It discerns information from each image and its labels.

When things work properly, it can vaguely approximate certain specific images, without being a wildly inefficient compression method. That's why you can put in "chilidog chaise-longue" and get some comfortable abomination that satisfies both concepts. There's not a specific couch or hot dog involved. And yes, you can also put in "Darth Vader strangling Bugs Bunny" and get an image that violates all kinds of copyright laws, but (1) a human artist could also do that and (2) you fucking asked for that.

Any variation on "woman, but naked" is not a problem with AI. The model can be overtrained and shove results toward specific inputs, which is why it's so important to use a metric fuckload of inputs. But any model is going to generate what you asked for, based on all those inputs. A lot of truly unguided output will resemble existing things, because it turns out most images are of existing things. There's a lot of inputs with the Kardashians in them. Just... so many. Asking for a picture of a woman and getting Kim Kardashian is correct. If she's in a lot of the inputs, that will influence the output, even if her name was never an explicit label.

If you can guide the output away from that, you can guide the output toward that. It is literally the same mechanism.

This is one of many alleged problems that's impossible to solve without destroying the whole technology and pretending it never happened. In short: no. This genie's not going back in the bottle. The techniques are aggressively public and the underlying technology is consumer hardware. You'd have an easier time outlawing Photoshop, which has been capable of combining famous women's faces and strong pornography since Macs were in black and white. It's those results that are a problem - not the general capacity to create such results. Otherwise we'd outlaw scissors and glue.

We're not talking about guns, where even the correct uses are violence and threats of violence. These are art tools. They make jay-pegs. They can make them with specific celebrities' faces, or in particular artists' styles, but that's not any different from knowing what trees are.

This is not a Good Old-Fashioned AI situation. We sifted a zillion pixels through a thousand layers of matrix math. Some models come eerily close to decent punchlines, when asked to draw comics with word bubbles. They have never been trained on text. They've just seen a lot of comics. A model that learned to recognize and correct English grammar, visually, is gonna know where tits go. If you can't live with that then I suggest building a very large suborbital EMP.

The article seems to be mostly about imposing limitations over more taboo sex acts and uses the examples of bondage and vomit.

It does get into ethics near the end with the following section

One key difference between AI porn and traditional porn, however, is that adult content creators are human beings who can consent to what they will and will not participate in. AI isn’t conscious, ergo no consent. “It sets up a dynamic where you’re ordering the sex acts that you want, and they’re being delivered,” Lori Watson, a professor at Washington University who has written about the ethics of pornography and sex work, said of AI sexbots. “That’s not how ethical sex works.”

This is perfect 🍿 time.

There's seriously restrictions to stop you from treating an ai sexbot badly? Why are we treating these programs like they're human?