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?
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.
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?
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.
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 think you're less trying to assume this, and more trying to cast aspersions without breaking HN rules. Barely.
This is extremely unscientific, I know.
...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?
There are all of these unwritten but extremely obvious rules that dictate what is acceptable & what is not.
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.
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.