AI porn will never be sexy | Hacker News Reader

AI porn will never be sexy

newstatesman.com

21 pointsO_Woosey60 comments

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I have never seen a prediction more obviously wrong about AI. Of all things, humans have shown their propensity to sexualize everything. Porn can be text, hand-drawn, animated, CGI; featuring tentacles, bears, fantastical creatures... and there's a market for it all. Porn isn't about what people "value." Quite the opposite in many cases. Hell, it's already wrong: people are forming romantic, sexualized relationships with AI and Replika's users got mad when they turned down the sexy.

Plus porn seems like one of the most optimizable problem spaces.

There's heaps of material, lots of images that come in series and are just slightly different, lots of pre-existing collections, categories, and tags for all of it. Everything has some specific name for it too.

Porn is probably one of the easiest datasets to train on.

You can also easily seek user feedback: ask people to rate images, point out defects, etc. You'll have your audience fine tuning it for free.

> For now, when we talk about AI, porn and sex, everything is speculative.

Ah, nice to see some humility in attempts to predict the futu—

> Broadly speaking, however, we exist in a culture that values humanity. We care, at least on paper, about the human element. AI is unlikely to change that.

Nevermind then.

Humans, you know, are also "trained" as they grow up. And the new generations, growing up much more exposed to the AI-generated media from the earliest ages, may as well end up finding AI porn just as — if not more — sexy as human-produced porn. That too is a speculation, yes, but considering the whole history of humanity full of vast shifts in cultural and aesthetic norms, it's a very mild speculation.

I liken this to the autotune songs. I cannot stand autotune. But since about 2005 or so, I can not think of a single song on the radio that doesn't use it.

And for the past two or three years, it seems like autotune isn't even used to emulate a human voice anymore. It's not like Cher augumenting some parts of her singing, rather, the whole song (all of them, almost, at least the garbage that I hear in my children's friends' circles) just sounds completely faked. But these kids grow up on it, and for them real human voices singing sounds unusual.

I can not think of a single song on the radio that doesn't use it

Do you mean that literally, speaking about FM or maybe even DAB, and if so: may I ask what region you're from that you have no access to radio stations featuring something else than only such songs?

I don't listen to the radio at all, but whenever it is on I can hear the autotune - almost without exception whether the music is in English or Hebrew. I do think that most Arabic songs don't use autotune, though. I'm in Israel.

If people can find cartoon or 3D modeled porn sexy (and they do), they will find AI porn sexy. Maybe not everyone, but enough people will. So yeah I agree with you.

Humans, you know, are also "trained" as they grow up. And the new generations, growing up much more exposed to the AI-generated media from the earliest ages, may as well end up finding AI porn just as — if not more — sexy as human-produced porn. That too is a speculation, yes, but considering the whole history of humanity full of vast shifts in cultural and aesthetic norms, it's a very mild speculation.

While I hesitate to use it in this context, reminds of one of Planck's principle - "progress, on funeral at a time"

This author has not visited https://civitai.com.

If you open an account, you will see the site is flooded with generated pictures from guys obsessing about the smallest details for hundred of hours.

Some users have trained models specialized in rendering vagina, boobs, or oiled body effects.

The dedications of this people and the cheer amount of work they produce for free is just going to compound into extraordinary results, like it always did in porn.

And they are having fun doing it. The models? They are called things like "better vulva" and "breast in class". The porn community is having a party right now, and after the hangover, we will be left with what they drunkenly chose as the winner.

Like they did with the VHS or flash streaming.

And it's going to generate trillions of dollars.

I can't help but note that the author is a woman, which is not the target audience of 99% of the porn, and seem to have no idea what man are capable of creating and enjoying when it's about jacking off.

Jokes on her, because the AI is probably going to be much better at emulating porn that women like than today's content, since it will be able to respond to the users.

Edit: damn, "porn" in the title and already flagged. This american puritanism is so hypocrite.

What you don’t mention is that this also isn’t like qn isolated porn bubble within AI art: a lot of the general purpose art models (most of the ones that are merges and aren’t specifically focussed on non-human-shaped subjects) are merges that use one or more of the porn models because those are obsessively trained on anatomy, and improve results for non-porn images.

Plenty of affirmation in there, that will have a hard time qualifying as truths, even if we give the author the benefit of the doubt about setting the provocation title.

One could try to do some semantic weaseling about the meaning of "sexy", but if it's to be in the context of Internet porn it could hardly be very far from something like 'eliciting sexual arousal', and that's already pretty much a game of supernormal stimuli on trigger signals. If the machine is actually set to optimize for that, it should be able to create every impression that can be reached with subjecting real people to assorted body paints, hair cuttings, physical excercise, and surgeries .. and then some. And the computer generated media is already strikingly good and seems to keep improving.

Not sure I like the implications of a prospective situation where every real person looks dull by habituated standards, and maybe we don't have to end up there, but the post really comes across as a lot of opinions about what ought to be true and saying essentially nothing about what is.

AI porn seems to be exploding[], and I suspect as the generations get better with less error, that we'll see generated-porn overtake a large portion of all porn.
NSFW warning for all links:

[] https://civitai.com/

[] https://huggingface.co/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-v1-4

[] https://www.reddit.com/r/WaifuDiffusion/

[*] https://deepnude.cc/

Most human produced porn is already unsexy

Thanks for doing the research, this is much appreciated.

For Science!

We wish. But that won't be true in the long run.

Hmm, flagged already? I'm guessing it's not b/c the topic is uninteresting, but rather more attempted engineering of what HN is allowed to discuss. Let people enjoy things, indeed..

Whatever the case, this feels like someone with no skin in the game i.e. a non consumer of porn (Magdalene Taylor) speculating about the whole thing from an "disinterested academic" viewpoint.

Basic things like:

> One can easily google “hot women” and find a functionally endless supply of free visuals

yeah, but are they the types of images that are of interest? The real advantage of generation is the ability to generate images with features of interest without having to search (some things are hard to search for - see any niche porn sub-reddit to see what kind of thing), even harder if in short supply.

If the author can't imagine this, I'm not sure what they have to say on the topic..

Horrible article, just gave a bunch of bland examples. Like 'it will be flawless and people like flaws'. The training set would be off a large range of people. Also I think we're a lot closer to the unethical use of deepfakes, even if it's not used by the big sites.

I never thought we'd hit a point in my lifetime where artificially generated porn would be compelling, but I'm utterly impressed by the quality of SFM adult content.

And I'm thinking if porn sites can combine the various forms of generative AI (including the voice acting) to allow viewers to create their own fantasies... look out.

If people lament the popularity of these fantasies I would say there's a segment of people not lucky enough to find a partner and are absolutely disillusioned about the prospects of finding someone. I know some men for example who occasionally end up using escorts after having no luck finding someone for long periods of time. And so yeah, is it really unexpected that people address these needs elsewhere even if it's not ideal?

> If people lament the popularity of these fantasies I would say there's a segment of people not lucky enough to find a partner and are absolutely disillusioned about the prospects of finding someone. I know some men for example who occasionally end up using escorts after having no luck finding someone for long periods of time. And so yeah, is it really unexpected that people address these needs elsewhere even if it's not ideal?

Porn is different to having a partner though. Being with someone is more than just sex.

To your point, I could imagine a world in which some people have long-term "committed" relationships with GPT-powered AIs in the near future though. An AI like the one in Her seems very much possible today if you did some custom fine tuning of GPT-4 and added a NLP layer to convert speech-to-text and vice-versa.

See;

They fell in love with AI bots. A software update broke their hearts : https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/30/replika...

Posted by wallflower 1 hour ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35423164

...making it similar to 99% of porn humans create.

This is a very subjective view?!

Most things we say, including many valuable contributions to dialogues, are subjective. We don't need to qualify them with "this is just my opinion, but..." every single time. You are of course free to disagree using as much or as little elaboration as you like, but the additional implication of "you shouldn't have even said it because it's not an objective fact" is not useful.

Whilst I don't disagree with your point (other than implying that I was suggesting the commenter shouldn't have said it), perhaps my reply was a little too subtle.

Porn is a ~$100bn a year market. It seemed rather obvious that to justify anywhere near those numbers some of it has to be objectively 'sexy'.

On one hand, this essay feels like a whole lot of "cope," but if we roll with the author's definition, I think that what people are (feeling/not feeling) is that all of our entertainment is deeply unsexy, even when it's trying to be.

E.g.the whole superhero thing. Good looking strong people, and nothing remotely "sexy" related comes up until She-Hulk, and then people hate it. It's wild to me how ostensibly straight dudes got confronted with a little booty-shaking in their superhero story and they were all like "ewwww."

>ostensibly straight

Why is their straightness "ostensible" but the sexiness in question is not? That comes off as pretty judgy, in terms of what people do and do not find sexy. Regardless, what did She-Hulk bring that other superhero media hasn't (I haven't seen it - surely you're not saying that "good looking strong people" are not sexy and "booty-shaking" is? I assume there's something else in She-Hulk that's qualitatively different from those two examples of shallow sexuality?)

Also, I really did not expect on HN to see the "what are you, gay?" deflection to somebody's dislike of something in media just because it involves a person/character of the opposite sex.

Further, what's wrong with an "ewww" response in the first place, in this case? You're implying there's something wrong with a person having that reaction, but haven't explained why.

Overall, this is a surprisingly un-generous post.

Tone doesn't come across that great here; people are of course allowed to like and hate whatever, I suppose that's what I was trying to get at with "to me it's wild," it's pretty close to what I mean -- if one thinks about it in the abstract it's kind of funny. And also (to get revealing) yeah, I kinda dig the booty-shaking of this sort, funny it doesn't resonate elsewhere.

I didn't mean to make that particular example the focus (and forgot perhaps where I was) -- but I stand on a broader idea: Superhero stuff as practiced in the movies today has made things very much less "adult/mature" in the literal senses of those words. They're "cartoons."

They end up being very simplistic childlike stories of GOOD v BAD, without a lot of grown-up nuance. So along with, e.g. philisophical stuff that you lose, you also lose what I think could properly be called "sexiness;" because there's nearly zero grownup treatment of human relationships, that includes the sexy ones?

I don't think it was as simple as "Booty shaking? Ewww.", it's just that the booty shaking scene serves as an excellent proxy for "this show isn't what we expected, wanted, or like".

By all means, write different shows for different people, there are plenty of shows that aren't for me and that's fine. You just have to be careful when you're counting on an existing audience to be your fans while also trying to write something that's not at all for them. Write a Star Trek spinoff crossed with The Bachelor if you want, but my TNG-loving self certainly isn't going to watch it, and I will be mad if you try and trick me into thinking it's more of something I love.

It's just that we don't communicate with any nuance anymore, maybe because it doesn't fit into our 140-character attention spans? So "ewww, booty shaking" is about the best we get.

Most shows seem to drip with contempt towards their original fanbases lately. Many many creatives seem to want to make shows for themselves or some mystical non existing ultra nice demographic.

She-Hulk is great example of all that especially the finale. The creators on Twitter insulted Marvel Fans, mocked Marvel, and attacked Kevin Feige.

She-Hulk WAS made for the original fan base. It was the original she-hulk. The problem was that people didn't realize what that original she-hulk was.

Jessica Gao (Showrunner for she hulk) literally asked herself: "“I was more squeamish about it than they were. I was like, ‘Are we going too far? Are we throwing Marvel and fans under the bus by putting down Marvel films?”"

So she was very self-aware of what she was doing.

Deeply sexual content can’t be distributed. People says it’s “wrong” and stop it.

There almost seems to be something simple as a basic polynomial in our brain that are sexy, which can be encoded into a picture and nonverbally extracted. I just know because artists who knows how to stroke that function gets accounts banned anywhere.

There's something more nuanced going on here. Depictions of sex and romance have essentially disappeared from American mainstream cinema as it has become dominated by franchise films. While prestige television is frequently more sophisticated and thematically 'adult', here too we've seen the 'love scene' disappear (with notable exceptions like Normal People).

It's harder now to include any element in a screenplay that will offend either the moral majority, or their mirror images on the left. Both of whom are deeply suspicious of anything approaching depictions of sex and sexuality for approximately opposite ostensible reasons.

Even shooting such scenes today is beset with issues with the rise of 'intimacy coordination' as a profession, and the perception that a director seeking to address these themes is lecherous. Sum total of this is a weird eliding of sex on screen. Where it is depicted, there's a clinical careful quality, often political (e.g.: I May Destroy You) rarely eroticism.

> It's wild to me how ostensibly straight dudes got confronted with a little booty-shaking in their superhero story and they were all like "ewwww."

I don't really consume MCU stuff, but having seen the scene in question, I think the "ewww" has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with the weird, annoying, try-hard-to-be-trendy vibe that it represents. It's the same cringe as the Hillary Clinton dancing on Ellen thing from a few years back.

There was a time when comics were counter-cultural, niche, and interesting, bringing new ideas and stories and art into the world. Now, they're under the control of the Mouse, downstream of the cultural shit funnel and as a result, completely, laughably uninteresting - and worse - no longer cool.

Sure -- but again, you're talking about SUPERHEROES as translated to BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES, which contain piles and piles of cringe all around.

For better or worse (I actually wasn't much at all intending to judge, just observer) it's interesting to consider why that particular cringe was some of the most notable?

This is excellent bait, and I'll take it.

You (hopefully) know as well as I do that twerking with Megan Thee Stallion is more of a "yas queen" than a "does this please you, viewer?"

The thing that takes an ostensibly (lol) enticing sexual act and turns it into an "ewwww" is when it's wrapped up in a big box emblazoned with the letters "POLITICAL POWER PLAY." Oh yes please, that's exactly what I want, serve me some tits and ass with a side of "why are you threatened by strong women?"

I like a hate-fuck as much as the next guy, but I'm kind of tired of being hatefucked by the media industry. To call this stuff propaganda is an insult to propaganda. At least propaganda has to be smart. This is just the writers and artists' daddy issues on full display. We all know it, and this hatred of the simple straight male has infected everything.

I disagree harshly with the parent, but I think your point of view is much more damaging. The artists don't need to exhibit any of these dramatic subversive attitudes, personality flaws, or political psychology plays to simply shoehorn booty-shaking into their superhero show (Occam's razor). I think your layering-on of all these other horrible things is actually indicative of a much more hateful attitude than the one you are accusing them of.

Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

I'm not. The kinds of things that people say that you are probably thinking of when you make a criticism like in your original post absolutely are real and deserve your criticism (in fact, I'd put jrm4's tone in that category!) - but over-applying that criticism does harm to a position that is justified in other contexts. Remember, when you see somebody (e.g. maybe a writer or fan for a show...) make a criticism of a group you are a member of, they are sometimes referring to something truly deserving of criticism. Always try to keep your criticisms as focused as possible in turn, to avoid the vicious cycle of political/social hatred (especially in the context of fictional media, where it produces a tone that is particularly obnoxious/petty).

> The artists don't need to exhibit any of these dramatic subversive attitudes

True, but if we take She-Hulk as an example, all the other stuff in the movie imply they do. In other words, they didn't simply shoehorn in booty-shaking, but rather included it in a political context.

If you disagree these layers exist, please, engage with the discussion and reason why - but simply gaslighting the poster, and implying they have a "hateful attitude" is itself a political play.

Of course.

But, I mean, we've now REALLY entered Rorschach-blot-test territory.

I think where you and I might agree: yes, that probably isn't much about "sexiness" but "power."

And that's about as far as our agreement goes, I think. I don't really have a problem with it. Perhaps, you're so vain, I bet you think that "yas queen" is about you?

Again, excellent trolling. I commend you.

This is such a weird thing to say. I genuinely don't understand what about I'm saying makes you think I'm "trolling?"

If anything, I find the idea of booty-shake cut-scenes as being remotely connected to anything called "political" extremely silly? Like, sure, it's not about "hey boys look at us," but instead "Go 'head, girl, do your thing!"

Seriously -- where does the concept of "politics" fit here? Even in the BROADEST sense of the term, it's just a (to me funny, because, you know -- booty-shake empowerment?) "hey girl" kind of thing?

There are plenty of straight white dudes buying comic books that that are serialised, and they find sexy (just look at the front covers in most comic book stores), one MU movie with bad CGI doesn't disprove that.

> but it will not replace or reflect the nuances of a human relationship.

This sounds like a boring mysticism but I fully believe this is the case - AI generated data looks like a machine-readable schema file to me, all format but no data. Compared to that, human output is corrupted media file; huge mess, of cohesive intents.

AI data looks good and fine if you don’t know what data is supposed to be in it, but only if you aren’t the supposed consumer of it.

I've spent a lot of time with AI in random conversations seeking to get it to explore interesting spaces that should theoretically exist although not in the training data, it's an expansive area to explore and quite the rabbit hole, I'm often flibblopped and have to retire to consider the implications. Maybe that's just me :)

I've heard things and I've seen things that make the entire argument behind this article moot.

It's not even "will". It's already here.

Brains are strange, a bizarre Bazaar of concepts, thoughts and ideas.

As I was reading this article, my mind veered to; R.E.M. - It's The End Of The World As We Know It (circa:September 1, 1987)

: https://genius.com/Rem-its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-i...

People find all sorts of grotesque things sexy. I hardly need to name examples.

Unstable diffusion certainly created a lot more horrors than non-horrors

That's where you're wrong. I'm in to polydactyls!

For a second I though you meant a dinosaur. Odd, as it may be, at least they have lips now [1].

[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/t-rex-had-lips-tha...

On the other hand, most porn lacks a human touch. IMHO.

For porn, it's enough that people jerk off to it.

Being sexy was never a major goal.

Most porn is even decidely unsexy. Just plumbing.

Making love to pixels is already unsexy. I don't know how AI will change this.

Never say never

We’ll… see. /s

Yeah it's not sexy unless there is some opportunistic woman trying to make a quick buck from men's sexualities in front of the camera, clearly..

edit: keep the reddit downvotes coming!

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