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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Porn is always the frontier.

It's a well-understood self-contained use-case without many externalities and simple business models.

What more, with porn, the medium is the product probably more than the content. Having it on home-media in the 80s was the selling point. Getting it over the 1-900 phone lines or accessing it over the internet ... these were arguably the actual product. It might have been a driver of early smart phone adoption as well. Adult content is about an 80% consumption on handheld devices while the internet writ large is about 60%.

Private tunable multi-media interaction on-demand is the product here.

Also it's a unique offer. Role playing prohibited sexual acts can be done arguably victim free.

There's a good fiction story there... "I thought I was talking to AI"

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There's something Freudian about the idea that the more you can customize porn, the more popular it is. That, despite the impression that "all men want one thing", it turns out that men all want very different and very oddly specific things. Imbuing somrthing with a "magical" quality that doesnt exist is the origin of the term "fetish". Its not about the raw attractive preference for a particular hair color; its a belief in the POWER of that hair color.

oh it's wildly different. About 15 years ago I worked on a porn recommendation system. The idea is that you'd follow a number of sites based on likes and recommendations and you'd get an aggregated feed with interstitial ads.

So I started with scraping and cross-reference, foaf, doing analysis. People's preferences are ... really complex.

Without getting too lewd, let's say there's about 30-80 categories with non-marginal demand depending on how you want to slice it and some of them can stack so you get a combinatoric.

In early user testing people wanted the niche and found the adventurous (of their particular kind) to be more compelling. And that was the unpredictable part. The majoritarian categories didn't have stickiness.

Nor did these niches have high correlation. Someone could be into say, specific topic A (let's say feet), and correlating that with topic B (let's say leather) was a dice roll. The probabilities were almost universally < 10% unless you went into majoritarian categories (eg. fit people in their 20s).

People want adventure on a reservation with a very well defined perimeter - one that is hard to map and different for every person.

So the value-add proposition went away since it's now just a collection of niche sites again.

Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all.

You may be interested in the data surfaced by this large-scale survey[1]

[1] https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity...

This is interesting but there's a little more to it, especially with the erotic.

If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.

It's because you're polling for affinity or disclosed preference not for the actual engagement drivers.

For instance, if a male says they watch male pornography, they are labeling, or at least stating an affinity to a sexual identity.

However, the identities people choose to own are not the same as the preferences they actually have.

Instead if you track things like scroll velocity, linger time, revisitation, the time distance (such as 2 days apart instead of 5 minutes) a different story emerges.

For instance a given male could frequently look at male pornography but for all kinds of social reasons not want that affinity so they'd never even internally ideate the preference although their behavior of frequenting male content will be there regardless.

That's one of the problems with this approach is that not many people want to own all the social identities which map to their preferences so they don't openly identify it.

There (maybe) three levels of acceptance: admitting it to oneself, to others, identifying with it. And honestly these have a poor mapping to actual engagement with explicit content. You can have a (insert sexual affinity) rights activist who does not look at explicit content and someone protesting them who does all the time.

Man, I would pay money to see the (anonymized) trends on an adult website. Fascinating view into such an under studied area of humanity nature. I bet the porn tubes have data that sociologists could write papers on.

Pornhub does yearly roundups of stats, as well as for various events:

https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review

https://www.pornhub.com/insights/

> If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.

That's because those are two entirely different things. If you polled people and asked them "what causes you to spend more time on social media", then at least some self-aware folks would likely identify conflict, "someone is wrong on the Internet" (https://xkcd.com/386/), etc. That doesn't mean that's "what they want to see on social media", that means that's "what gets them to spend more time on social media".

> Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all.

Didn't reddit remove porn?

No. Not at all. You must be thinking of a different site. Tumblr did and onlyfans did for a hot minute and then backtracked.

Neither of them intended to be porn sites. It's kind of a natural occurrence on UGC sites . Look at Civitai...

Credit card processors are kinda weary of it for some legal reasons I'm not qualified to enough to really understand.

> for some legal reasons

For moralizing activist reasons. It's nothing to do with legality. With any luck eventually they'll inadvertently trample a sacred cow of whichever party is currently in power and we'll finally get sane legislation outlawing their overbearing nonsense.

I doubt it's moralizing reasons, it's probably because once you disseminate porn, you become a vehicle for child porn, which is a legal and PR disaster.

From my non-lawyer understanding it's not that. It's about sex trafficking more generally.

Here's the most notable case I'm aware of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn

Then there was the recent drama with civitai https://civitai.com/articles/14945/credit-card-payments-paus...

I believe some of these sex trafficking laws implicated a broad sweep in their litigation and Visa/Mastercard doesn't want to have to go to court over a these things.

If you disseminate user uploaded porn then moralizing activists can certainly accuse you of that. It's performative hand wringing though. The admins assuredly don't want to distribute it and the goal of anyone publicly uploading that on the clearnet is to harass and disrupt rather than to disseminate.

Anyway "child porn" as well as the broader "legal reasons" fails to explain the US payment processors' moves to block all sorts of content and products over the years. Even including porn that isn't user uploaded (and thus has proper records keeping).

There are all sorts of adjacent reasons too, like human trafficking and prostitution. It's probably similar reasons to why landlords are so aggressive about renters not doing any sex work, because even indirectly receiving proceeds from prostitution is illegal, even when you're unaware of it.

In which jurisdictions? I'm skeptical. If a vendor takes reasonable precautions it should not generally be possible to hold them liable.

Anyway you've circled back to user generated content. But again, that's far from the only thing that payment processors have discriminated against over the past couple of decades.

This is a big feature of the Nordic model, but it's not uncommon in other legal frameworks either.

1, Porn. 2 Military.

The firmer is a lot more nimble and the procurement processes of your customers are easier to navigate.

> firmer

snort

Sometimes a typo makes you look wittier than you are.

even if it is victim free, it can affect mental health in a way that a consumer will be more compelled to do a criminal act and create a real victim.

let's say you publish a Steam game how to be a school shooter and shoot kids, wouldn't that lead to real school shootings ?

who can definitely say that computer generated content about criminal behavior, won't lead to real crime with real victims?

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

Grand Theft Auto 5 sold over 200 million copies, and military/crime/shooter games have always been incredibly popular. Yet crime has been decreasing over the past few decades in the United States, where both cars and guns are easily accessible.

The most popular activity in GTA V isn't stealing cars. It's getting a 5-star wanted level as a mass shooter.

And to this day, military recruiters use the AC130 mission in CoD to convince people to become aerial gunners.

There are hundreds of games designed to simulate criminal activities: hitman, the thief series, GTA, etc. I have yet to see a single reputable study that shows playing these games somehow results in an increase in that actual activity in real life.

Feels like you're falling into the same trap that Senator Lieberman did in the 90s, and just another spiritual successor to Satanic panic.

I view it more like methadone.

Let's be specific: Rape, incest, necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophila ideation.

I think we can all agree (1) these are harmful, anti-social behaviors that we do not want in our society, (2) people don't choose to have these desires, (3) most people who have them have no desire to actually traumatize others, (4) people who have these struggle with it.

These multi-media AI role-play environments would allow that type of engagement without any harm.

Now given all this, I am not a psychologist and do not know if that's part of how someone unfortunate enough to have those inclinations can deal with it healthily.

But if it is, now it exists and hopefully we can see less of it in the real world. I'm all for harm reduction if this is a way to get there.

It’s not unreasonable to suspect that engaging in high-fidelity simulations of these behaviors will further entrench and worsen paraphilias. This is pretty evident with the progression of many pornography addictions that don’t include these sorts of things that still follow the pattern of increasing novelty seeking leading to increasingly deviant stuff.

I am at a principled level uneasy with what’s fundamentally a sort of prior restraint (you haven’t yet hurt anyone but this may increase the likelihood and/or be an effective proxy to lock up those who are more likely to do so) but also see a really strong case for doing it given the fact that these are arguably the most antisocial behaviors one can imagine.

Are there any actual studies on this? Does access to simulations of illegal or objectionable material make pedophiles, rape fetishists, etc. more or less likely to try to access the real thing (or even worse, to try to commit crimes in the real world)?

Because both possibilities are plausible, it’s hard to know which is correct.

I feel like the people that would be capable of giving you an answer would be very careful not to actually give you one.

You can’t really research when the only thing you can be certain of is the known real cases. It’s much harder to quantify people that only have it in their head.

My wife has recently joined board of directors for a local non-profit helping victims of childhood sexual abuse. They are not religious or pornography prescriptive - they are liberal atheist whose entire focus is essentially sessions to help people who are currently adults and carrying baggage and impact of dreadful acts committed to them decades ago.

Anyhoo, The current "state of the art", as-scientific-as-we-currently have it findings are that for pedophilia, consuming content unfortunately normalizes and drives increasing urges, instead of giving them same outlet. It's a very very tricky area because current thought is also that pedophilia is "not curable" - it is sexual orientation thay we as society find unacceptable (me included, fwiw), so... Repression, wildly and rightly disawowed for other sexual orientations, is the current direction for pedophilia - I.e. Current thinking is that "victim-free" pornography consumption nevertheless tremendously increases actual risk to actual kids in the vicinity of the consumer.

Until relatively recently I was the technologist on a highty horse about online freedoms and largely still very much am. But in this specific area I've also had some semi personal experiences with pedophiles and my level of empathy to them has dropped to near zero and my level of empathy toward their victims has gone even further through the roof. Sometimes in technologist circles we think of this as edge case not worth consideration, but reality, very very unfortunately, is much much darker.

Don't get me wrong : I'm pro pornography freedoms, think it'd be huge fun to have a sexy high quality chatbot, and I find vast majority of those railing against it to be hypocrites with dishonest ulterior motives - and don't get me started on all the tangential "for the children" crap that religious rights tries to enact, as opposed to actually help children and families ;-<

But to the question of "is harmless pornography Indulgence better for paedophile and society", current thinking is "very much no".

I agree you captured my thoughts exactly.

most of the perpetrators of child sexual abuse are victim's close people: teacher/cousin/brother/uncle/father/etc.

the reinforcement of their lust will only remove whatever remaining barrier against such repulsive behavior, and once the novelty from synthetic CP wears out, it will create urge to commit real crime with real victims

A lot of opinions in this thread but very little data. What you want to believe and what is true are very often not the same. That's why we do the science.

Even if there are I and likely you lack the qualifications of making any clinical takeaways from them.

I'd really defer to experts.

I try to make tools in good faith and hope they're used responsibly to make the world a better place.

I'm not a clinical psychologist nor can I pretend to understand medical literature like someone with a PhD

I can’t tell if the part of this post after they have made this “thing of questionable safety” and then bury their head in the sand is satirical or not.

Why is it controversial to state that medical expertise is a technical field that engineers should defer to experts in?

It doesn't mean I can do things recklessly. Instead it's an acknowledgment of when I need to defer to somebody else just like I need to call up an attorney for legal stuff or an accountant for tax stuff.

It’s not controversial but it doesn’t address my question at all.

A: I’m curious about X.

B: We should trust the experts!

Sure, but what do the experts say? That was my entire question.

Science always says more porn/gore = fewer crimes statistically. So opinions like these rarely come with citations.

It's not completely clear if it's just a spurious correlation or if there's a real causation, but eh, more training data + neutral alignment training is how humans train AIs, I don't see why would some says that's not how baby humans are to be trained.

Right, I'm just a technologist. The psychological and sociological parts aren't my bailiwick

Typing a prompt in an AI box to make art has fewer real-world victims than performing the acts, filming them, and then sharing the videos.

I think that's inarguable. Maybe it's still unadvisable and someone should be in talk therapy. I have no idea. But at least nobody is actually getting molested and retraumatized in the ai art scenario.

If someone is spending their time using comfyUI drawing pictures instead of stalking the local middleschool, I'd hesitate to say mission accomplished ... but maybe I should?

People's time is finite. They can't be doing both. If the real is substituted for the imaginary then the real can no longer happen because that time is spent.

The model has to be trained on something though. It’s easy to see how this works for art art, because people have been drawing that shit for years, and most people wouldn’t feel to bad about training on it. I don’t think that’s true for the photorealistic models though.

sure but those features have been generalized over very large datasets. Yes, you can have Loras with specific people, convincingly voice clone with higgs, use latentsync, wan, flux kontext, face swap, lots of things ... sure.

This all falls flat on me though. It's like showing me the lewdest most shocking story and then saber rattle about keyboards and word processors.

I'm fully aware of the wild things people do with drawing programs.

We're all adults here. It's fine.

I don't think desires are created from nothing. Exposure can amplify things. Somebody with an interest in dubious consent could move towards ever more violent nonconsent in their porn choices via its availability. In a much less extreme way, we do see changes in people's real life choices regarding sex acts being influenced by pornography as these sex acts have become more accessible in porn (choking, anal sex, and facials are commonly cited). This suggests that porn is changing behavior rather than simply responding to preexisting desires.

> let's say you publish a Steam game how to be a school shooter and shoot kids, wouldn't that lead to real school shootings ?

> who can definitely say that computer generated content about criminal behavior, won't lead to real crime with real victims?

I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but there has been no found link between violent video games to violent crimes, despite it being researched extensively:

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/03/violent-vide...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10964-019-01069-0

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6756088/

https://elifesciences.org/articles/84951

Of course, that hasn’t stopped video games being blamed for violence by the “think of the children” crowd and certain politicians:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protect...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/video...

Especially when shootings occur by white perpetrators:

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/09/video-games-...

The same narrative plays out for porn, despite the research findings being the same:

https://www.utsa.edu/today/2020/08/story/pornography-sex-cri...

But blaming violent video games or pornography is an easy scapegoat

I think you ask valid questions, but I don't think there is any credible evidence to answer those questions "yes".

What about two consenting adults engaging in age play. By your logic, wouldn't that also lead to "real crime"?

There’s probably some difference between someone who is visibly an adult and mature vs more deeply entrenching pathways of arousal in response to someone who is visibly a child. I still find the adult fetish version repellent but it’s also really hard to police in a way that’s remotely ethically permissible.

Ie yes it’s bad and in an ideal world nobody would do it. I see trying to restrict or ban it as the greater of two evils.

An ideal world with less speeches and acts than we have today is a monastery, and monasteries are definitely not a model of an ideal world.

Found Tipper Gore’s HN account.

Who can say that it does?

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