The Coming Age of Super Entertainment and Super Porn
vutran.substack.com
vutran.substack.com
As I've transitioned to working on AI, I think the average person doesn't understand how there's a gigantic underbelly that's just purely dedicated to pornographic use – whether that's in erotic roleplaying with LLMs, or generating pornographic images with diffusion models. It's massive, but largely not talked about and remains out of view.
From my experience, when you go from text to image, it's basically an order of magnitude change in the dopamine response.
When you go from image to video, it's essentially another order of magnitude.
What I'm trying to say is... I don't think we're ready for what's to come...
Also, the sort of inconsistent porn/IP controls these image creation AIs implement add a peep show element (will it or won’t it generate this image, or something close…let’s find out) which is oddly more engaging. It adds a puzzle element to the mix…”boudoir oil” prompts combined with historical eras lead to a range of sensual images most wouldn’t know even existed as part of the history of Western Art. Their training sets pretty obviously include sensual images of many eras, and clever folks with a knowledge of cultural history can ferret that content out with the right stream of legitimate prompts. So that gaming/discovery element unintentionally makes generating these “almost-porn” AI images under simple screening more engaging/addicting than a simple Internet search. Boy, I would have been a popular 14 year old boy in AI class in junior high…
…I don’t think you know what people want. People don’t want a 80 hour video that nobody else sees, they want shows that they can talk about with their friends and make fan content for that others will recognize. If nobody else can experience it, nobody will give a fuck.
Have you read something from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan , or at least about him? Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation , maybe about the so called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere ?
I still don't watch that much media, because I mostly prefer reading, with the exception of documentaries and lectures which take full advantage of modern media, or so called 'explorable explanations'.
No matter how sophisticated new sorts of media may be, it would only feel more gross to me, than the stuff which is available now, and has been since almost the start of every medium, be it painting, photography, film, and so on.
IMO it's for people who haven't experienced real things, akin to pigs in industrial farming settings, happily chewing on iron chains dangling in there.
Let them have their shit and keep your distance. Bad luck when you can't.
shrug
I just can’t take any of these projections seriously when they make claims like that in less than 2 years there will be an AI video streaming service that delivers a perfect custom version of the video to everyone and, as a result, nobody is is going to watch a perfectly executed human film production made in the same year.
Or that in 2.5 years we’ll have perfect holodecks in every home, precipitating a global crisis in society as people are addicted to their AI holodecks.
Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.
Life in 2 years will be almost identical to what it is today but life in 20 years will be somewhat different, just not in any way people have predicted so far.
For example, my car is 20 years old but my phone can explain to me how to change many of its parts.
These are systems that are designed to capture attention and addict you to the dopamine rush. That's absolutely brutal on a brain that seeks novelty and dopamine hits by design. It's the perfect trap.
In his words (oldest son) "I really worry about good VR because I would never leave. There would be limitless things to do and explore."
Even just a regular videogame with limited immersion can grab him for 8-16 hours and he will forget to eat during that time.
It's a different type of brain that developed a different way.
Compared to some other things, such as social media feeds, gaming is pretty much benign. Social media is always there, one click away, and you suddenly end up noticing that you're wasting time on one without getting anything in return, feeling like a dopamine junkie. I never "find myself playing a game" like that, it's a conscious decision to start playing and VR only adds a few more "do I really want to do this right now?" checkpoints due to its whole physical nature. The goggles won't suddenly appear on my face with me standing in a safe distance from room's furniture unless I choose to.
Maybe it's because I've been always more focused on creation rather than consumption. It's easy for me not to start watching a TV series, because I know that if I do, I won't be doing anything else for several days until I finish the binge, and I know that merely watching a thing made by someone else won't be as rewarding and engaging as creating something by myself, so it usually seems like a poor way to spend my time. As a result, I get most of my mainstream media literacy from memes.
Part of the reason why mass media entertainment - Squid Games, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Minecraft Movie, etc - is so popular is because it is a shared experience that is commodified and then widely distributed. People watch things because their friends and families watch them, and the shared experience is a sort of asynchronous social experience. The same is true of games - just look at the popularity of Lets Play content on Youtube and Twitch. The same is true of music - concerts are still the primary way musicians make money.
So long as this is true, the 'dream' of hyper customised, personalised Netflix-style entertainment is an utter fantasy that denies the human need to experience, share and discuss their entertainment. I would go so far as to call it a delusional claim, and also very dystopian - to realise this goal is to atomise the social lives of billions via a complete walling off of the shared lived experience.
(Maybe this is not true with porn, given it is a commonly viewed in a, uh, solitary context; although at the same time Porntube and pre-Verizon Tumblr both show that it turns out that many people share their porn taste with others.)
You cannot have it both ways. Either it's ubiquitous and indistinguishable from reality and hence anybody, anywhere, can always invoke the "it's not revenge porn, it's deepfake" or it's not indistinguishable from reality and hence TFA has no argument.
I have no problem imagining a world where perfect vids can be created of anyone doing anything.
But when this world happen, vids are going to be worth exactly zero. They won't have any value in courtrooms, they won't work as fake revenge porn to pressure people, they won't be worth a lot of money.
Really you don't get to have it both ways: it's either ubiquitous and indistinguishable for reality or it's not.
I don't buy the digital blackmail thing using perfect AI generated porn.
If anything it'd be a godsend: no more digital blackmail using stolen tapes / hidden cameras.
Because even real vids can then be dismissed as AI generated perfect vids made with the sole intent of blackmailing / hurting.