The AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale
404media.co
404media.co
For content creators, it may become irrelevant who provided the original source material. Someone can take your likeness, voice, etc and produce more content, possible better than the original. There may come a day where being the original doesn’t really matter, and producing the best fake is where the money’s at so to speak.
Fake porn has been around for decades. When I was a kid it was easy to find fake porn of all major actresses in hollywood. Is it just that it's now easier to get and more realistic that makes it problematic?
I think there should be rules about publishing fake images of someone without their permission, and in the community they profile there are. The rest is just trying to manufacture a story out of nothing.
I'm curious who the intended audience of this is.
Edit: I just saw someone posted the following story also from that site: why are sex toy vibration patterns so terrible https://www.404media.co/sex-toy-vibrator-pattern-design/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/03/14/racist-deep...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/us/raffaela-spone-victory...
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/houston-area-student-accus...
'Nonconsensual' and 'illegal' are different words.
- it was possible to do this before;
- and we didn't do anything about it then;
- the only difference now is that it's easier;
- therefore, we have no justification to do anything about it now.
So, if there is one really weird guy who goes to great lengths to build a home nuclear reactor, we probably don't need new laws or practices against it. If suddenly home nuclear reactors are available for $20, we definitely do.
A world of backyard reactors is a world of spiralling cancer rates, until someone develops enough backyard plutonium to build the backyard bomb.
It's likely that we _can_ make home nuclear reactors that are pretty safe! We already pipe combustible gases into our homes in enough quantities to take out a city block. We cause multiple explosions per second in devices hurtling down the highway at 100mph. We have self-regulating hot water heaters, pressure cookers, and laptop batteries, all of which are bombs if mishandled.
But with home nuclear reactors, the consequences for stupidity aren't just "and then their home burned down". It's more like "and then the neighborhood was uninhabitable for the next century". And when these devices are everywhere, we will start to encounter real outliers in humanity.
Like with music, there was a historically brief period where distribution companies had a monopoly because the nature of the technology allowed artificial scarcity. That ended with the internet and digital music. We could (and did) try doubling down on enforcement efforts to support some unnatural state, or embrace it. And we ended up with streaming music that provides value by convenience instead of artificial scarcity.
I don't have a vision for how the fake porn industry will shake out, but I know it's a waste of time to try and build walls to stop anything that's inevitable. That probably means tools that let people do what they want in their own homes, and norms about public sharing that will be enforced in most places but can be circumvented by those who are dedicated. That's not a moral judgement of that being an ideal state, its just realistic, and given resource scarcity, there are more important things for law enforcement to deal with.
About why this is now an issue if it's existed for decades? When I was a kid, it was easy to find all kinds of illegal stuff on the internet. That doesn't mean it was OK then or now. I don't think fake porn has been that mainstream until recently. There were some high-profile cases that raised the issue in the media. Personally, I believe that it was always a bad thing to photoshop someone's head onto a porn star's body without their consent.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/if-signed-by-governor-cali...
I think most of us will agree that was bad. If I wanted to make it worse, I could have used another n-word. However, neither of those was illegal. If I said that, other than to make a point, I might be socially ostracised, but I wouldn't pay a fine or go to jail.
In most of these cases:
- I'm very supportive of banning anything with a profit motive (e.g. the Hollywood directors example). I don't think corporations need the same rights as people.
- Public disclosure / distribution has a lot more nuance -- in this case, I'm supportive of banning it, but in each case, we need a deeper conversation.
- I am strongly opposed to banning anything resembling free speech in the privacy of one's home. If you're making porn of me on your computer, it stays on your computer, and I learn about it, it's not clear the government ought to have a right to help resolve our dispute. If it does, it should definitely be civil (not criminal), with damages set at e.g. $5000 and not $150,000.
There's an urge when there's a clear evil happening to solve it by whatever means possible (e.g. address local issues at a federal law, or national/international issues locally). However, the older I'm getting, the more I'm realizing that how a problem is solved is often more important than that it's solved.
I've also learned that in policy, overkill usually causes more problems than it solves. We keep seeing that lesson (war on drugs, war on terror, war on [X]), but we never really internalize it. As soon as something really bad happens, it's politically advantageous to be tough, and anyone opposed is labeled something bad (pedophile, terrorist, rapist, abuser, ...).
I predict that by far the most common culprit for creation will be an immature, horny, nerdy, teenager. The most appropriate reaction will be within the toolkit of most adult caregivers (parents and schools), without any new laws required.