Man Running AI-Powered Porn Site Horrified by What Users Are Asking For | Hacker News Reader

Man Running AI-Powered Porn Site Horrified by What Users Are Asking For

futurism.com

31 pointspg_123431 comments

Open articleView on HN

"AI can’t replace [adult] performers, and people who say that are misunderstanding what performers do"

I disagree. You are just watching it on a screen. If it looks realistic enough and you can generate anything you desire, it will put the adult industry out of business.

There are already countless numbers of TikTok influencers that are AI generated and men continue to send them messages, watch videos/pictures as if they were real. This is only the very beginning stages of this revolution.

Crucial advances to consumer adoption of tech have had porn leasing the way. Certainly advances have been leveraged by the porn market quickly. This one should be interesting.

The betamax/VHS thing isn't really true by the way. Yes, betamax didn't have porn, but if VHS was never popular it wouldn't have either beyond very small productions. Porn goes to where the users are, because that's where they will pay for it.

Porn exists in literally every medium human beings have ever used. Sculpture, paintings, photography, phone calls, audio clips, drawings, animations, text, video games, 8mm film, digital video.

If there exists a way to transmit information from one human to another, it has been used for porn.

AI can replace porn stars in exactly the same way that drawn or animated porn does.

for a moment, I've read porn stars as physically stars (which transmit information if you do research)...though there was idk an ai that link stars to do porn-astrology? Or that detect gas clouds that have a porn-compatible shape?

sometimes, a second is long enough to have weird ideas ahahah

Conspirators of Pleasure by Jan Švankmajer enters the conversation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspirators_of_Pleasure

Can't upvote more. Very bizarre cult classic. Probably hard to find though.

AI is exposing a fascinating dichotomy, between those who consider art uninteresting without the context of human creation and intention behind it, and those who take art solely as its surface without caring about its context or subtext.

I think the history of art, particularly after the invention of photography, suggests that the context is all-important.

I suspect context is also more important to pornography than some here are prepared to give credit for.

This is a great conversation to essentially send up fireworks in a philosophy of art class.

I doubt it.

For some people, at least, the fantasy won’t be complete without the knowledge that real people actually did/are doing whatever act it is that floats their personal boat.

Hosting sites will simply advertise AI-generated porn as real people. Or the videos will go through a chain of transfers that give the sites plausible deniability for the false advertising.

AI-generated stuff will outcompete human-generated stuff, because it's cheaper to make an infinitely customizable. If someone wants a perfect body and face doing acrobatic sex in high def, AI can do that, and better than humans can. If someone wants realistic, amateurish girl-next-door stuff, AI can do that too, and every bit as much better than humans can the unrealistic stuff.

It will also be no problem making a video look like it was shot on a camcorder in 1996.

That is what still blows my mind about Midjourney images. Not just that it can do photo realism but photo realism as if it was shot on a specific type of film.

In ten years no one will care about the difference because years will have passed by then with people not knowing what was real vs AI.

Once it gets past the uncanny valley, how would you even know?

It won't happen overnight, but I think this is a one-way street. It already started on Instagram, it'll expand next to short-form video, and, with time, full movies. The curation and direction will still be human-led (or at least influenced), but characters and execution will be heavily AI-based.

And I'm not talking about porn only. I bet in the next 2-5 years we'll be watching lonelygirl15[1] season 2, made by AI. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonelygirl15

The person who said this is also the managing director of an adult performer management agency, so of course they're gonna think that. Whether or not it is true is irrelevant, they were gonna say that regardless.

Some of the animated stuff is way better than some of the real stuff could ever be, but I'm not sure that it can replace human performers totally, at least not yet.

Still need the voice acting at least sometimes.

How can someone running a porn website not not know about Rule 34?

I guess he anticipated it to an extent, but theory always pales in comparison to experiencing reality. And not just the reality of knowing it’s out there, but being asked to produce it…

Gift link to the original Washington Post story: https://wapo.st/49H3K0Q

Weird that it doesn't even name the porn site in question.

Overall this seems like pearl clutching. It's just pixels and text. Perhaps the easily horrified should avoid trying to run porn websites.

I ran into something like this for an AI story generation site I run and despite not being easily horrified and generally bracing myself for misuse... I was horrified.

In theory I'm in the "it's not real people" camp, but when you see users intentionally generating CSAM, even if it's all made up text, it's impossible to not feel like leaving them to their devices would be tantamount to enabling a pedophile.

And I imagine it feels 100x worse the moment images get involved.

-

And an aside, but as a result of my experience running that site I personally look sideways at anyone I see being obsessive about local LLMs for roleplay. It seems like the people who would rail the most about privacy on the site (drilling me about the ToS, what can I see, etc.) were the people most likely to be doing this stuff.

"If you have nothing to hide" is again, not a mentality I generally buy into, but it really played out here, and I think the people most obsessed with secrecy for their "adult use" of generative AI are currently a group of people you don't want to cater to if you can avoid it.

I don't know the answer to this question, but isn't it possibly better (less dangerous to society) for a pedophile to have a computer screen that generates pictures to satisfy his cravings, regardless of how disturbing they may be to others, rather than trying to satisfy them in the real world with real people?

I guess one could argue that having access to digital images could increase a pedophile's cravings. I don't know if there are any factual studies or data to confirm or refute this. It's often bandied about that one reason young people aren't having as much sex is because porn is so easily accessible. If true, it seems that would apply to pedophiles as well.

Academically there might be an argument to be had, but part of the problem is when you're running the service you don't feel removed enough to have this kind of academic analysis of the situation.

You see CSAM, you see that you enabled someone creating it and as a result you're now hosting it, and you react accordingly without any thought of the larger picture.

People used to think that being exposed to violent VHS tapes, video games, or D&D would make all teenagers serial killers. That hasn’t happened obviously. Quite the opposite. Violent youth crime has gone down not up. So I bet that pedos using AI’s instead of real kids will keep more kids safe.

Have you determined for sure that it's real users and not bots doing this?

Behavior and volume a pretty clearly human, and there's no public posting so there's no "nuisance" reason to do it

fwiw, for some people, it's the express intention to 'shock' themselves. Yes its shocking. Yes its the whole point. (Not necessarily about csam)

> And an aside, but as a result of my experience running that site I personally look sideways at anyone I see being obsessive about local LLMs for roleplay. It seems like the people who would rail the most about privacy on the site (drilling me about the ToS, what can I see, etc.) were the people most likely to be doing this stuff.

You're not too wrong in my experience, but it has the same effect as storing your web browser history in a public s3 bucket. Even if you're cool with sharing yours, you're only ok with it because you haven't had your data "creatively interpreted" and your life ruined by the likes of whoever appoints themselves Cybercardinal Richielieu tomorrow. Mine would put me on every terrorist watchlist on the planet.

There are a lot of really sexually-frustrated males among us, in a culture that actively devalues men and doesn't offer them much of a righteous path to meaningful existence and companionship other than whining to their online therapist, jerking off to a banal AI Girlfriend Experience, and [coming soon] dying in some meaningless war to defend some other nation's fragile ego and exploitative interests.

"Go to college, get married, work/provide for family" is not a message supported by popular media anymore. You've seen the media people are turning to as a result of this breakdown. The demand for CSAM exploded once we stopped being encouraged to have families and PornHub normalized fucking them.

Jerking off to Claudia Schiffer or whoever was not "objectification," it was reinforcement of aspiration. FamilySexParty or whatever should not be aspirational.

With simulated parent-child/sibling sex getting top billing during a 10 year old boy's first visit to PornHub, are you really so surprised at the degeneracy that came across your site?

At this point they can't help it; those controlling the media have condemned an entire generation to terminal sexual frustration by conditioning them to crave this content. Therapy won't fix them.

I’m using yandex lately as it can sort images and videos by date. Lately almost 100% of images are coming from made.porn…

Oh the AI generated porn content are at best ridiculous levels right now.

Imagine building a full-ass AI site and not ever having heard of Rule 34. What kind of Jr Devs are we breeding? (answer: the same kind we always have).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com