> I love the porn industry. I cherish it, it's been so good to me, and I have always tried my hardest to be giving back and seeing what I can do.
I know that a lot, and I mean a lot of people watch porn - yet I don’t know anyone who would describe themselves as “cherishing” the industry for being good to them. Heck, most “performers” say… it’s absolutely merciless to them; because the moment they aren’t in the perfect prime of their lives, they’re done.
In addition, she's barely over 30 and a multi-millionaire. It could very well be true that porn has been good to her without it being good for performers overall.
You can also find interviews where she describes the way that porn negatively affected her personal relationships (family, friends, romantic interests).
Both can be true, and often are. It’s just like normal acting, sports, etc. Its a meat grinder for most but a few actually do win those lotteries and their appreciation of that is completely understandable
Well, there are some teachers who moved into the streaming side of the industry and started earning well over 10x their teacher salaries. And the streaming side is pretty tame compared to the "professional" production side of things.
At the end of the day, there's a lot of money in that profession, and I can certainly see how someone would cherish the money it produced for them. It's far from the only industry which participants will age out of quickly.
My suspicion is that at least some of that revenue is moated by social stigma: that a customer is only partially paying for the service received, and is mostly compensating for impacts to reputation and/or lost income in the future (effectively gating supply and therefore raising price). As such stigmas erode, I suspect we’ll see a reversion to the mean: a small handful of disproportionate successes, and a long-tail of subsistence wages (if not “Walmartification” of sex work). (I’m not taking a stance on whether such stigmas eroding is good or bad.)
While I’m certainly sympathetic to the “sex work is work” perspective, it’s worth considering the full implications: for instance, that there would be nothing stopping sexual services being included in job descriptions for other lines of work (“administrative assistant with benefits”). It’s the thin end of the wedge, to ask how truly “consensual” employment relationships can be, sexual or otherwise, in contexts of power asymmetry.
Instead of scoffing at the idea of it, why not ask questions to better understand _why_ they feel that way?
Why is it that your knee-jerk reaction here is just to discount their opinion entirely in place of your own (likely entirely un-informed) opinion about it?
It may the case that she has a strong enough personal brand, that her experience has been different than many of the horror stories. An analogy comes to mind of an NFL player vs an NCAA player: in both cases, the career might be short-lived and carry health risks, but the former at least carries more compensation and bargaining power, such that the career might end in comfortable retirement rather than destitution.
And/or: this could simply be the kind of quasi-Stockholm-Syndrome often seen of those in exploitative relationships, be they labor or otherwise.
But while I believe the many disgusting stories we’ve heard about that industry, I’d be hesitant to make assumptions about the motives and experiences of any one individual, in either direction.
> Heck, most “performers” say… it’s absolutely merciless to them
Sounds like work in general, really. Most people wills say that their work is merciless, yet the "top 1%" will tell you a completely different story. I expect Reid can be considered a "top 1%"-er.
Be open to the fact that people watch content of sex workers of all ages, genders sizes, and levels of attraction. What is 'prime' for you, might not be someone else's cup of tea.
There's a billboard for one of the clubs in town that has a tag line of "unlicensed therapists". Seeing how a lot of therapy is just letting someone vent/talk, I'm kind of okay with the FSA idea. There's plenty of other therapy chatBots already out there. <Insert talk about guardrails>
Porn driving a lot of the things on the Internet (which isn't quite the same sentiment) long predates Avenue Q and almost certainly the Web. There was a fair bit of porn on many BBS systems as well--not video obviously.
> Porn driving a lot of the things on the Internet long predates Avenue Q
Right, but "The internet is for porn" is also a specific song from the musical Avenue Q, and that's the song that's being sung in the WoW video linked above. So the parent poster wasn't talking about the sentiment in general, but the specific song being used.
Reid isn't suggesting porn, the medium, will be left behind (just the opposite, really). She wants to make sure that porn, the people who make up the industry, are able to reap the benefits of AI. She wants to make sure at the very least that some unaffiliated AI project isn't just stealing these people's work, names, likenesses, etc., and selling it.
> She wants to make sure at the very least that some unaffiliated AI project isn't just stealing these people's work, names, likenesses, etc., and selling it.
Sounds like thinly veiled ludditism to me, why would it be necessary for AI porn to steal anybody’s likeness? I’m sure the 100% generated content is fine without any need for that.
It’s hard to drum up any sympathy for such an exploitative industry (exploitative for both the participants and the customers). Am I supposed to care that pornographers ability to profit of their unhealthy and addictive product is in jeopardy?
> Sounds like thinly veiled ludditism to me, why would it be necessary for AI porn to steal anybody’s likeness?
Just look at what people currently do with the models. You already see a lot of deepfake attempts. This will only increase as the technology improves. If you can generate a scene from scratch people will ask it to generate a full porn movie with the actor/actress of their choice.
> It’s hard to drum up any sympathy for such an exploitative industry (exploitative for both the participants and the customers).
I think if you care about an actor losing income over AI generated works, you would naturally care about a porn actor losing income over this. Especially when the AI used your work as training data and might reproduce your likeness without you getting anything out of it. I can understand the dislike for the industry because parts of it prey on the weak to make money.
If we make a legal framework for movie actors it should also apply to pron actors.
> Just look at what people currently do with the models. You already see a lot of deepfake attempts. This will only increase as the technology improves. If you can generate a scene from scratch people will ask it to generate a full porn movie with the actor/actress of their choice.
Currently, people either make content with entirely generated personas, or make deepfake content of people who are not porn actresses at all. I've been following the commentary around this topic, and I've never even heard of somebody using AI to generate porn of people who are already porn actresses.
> I think if you care about an actor losing income over AI generated works, you would naturally care about a porn actor losing income over this.
In general I don't care about people losing their jobs to new technology. I do support the actors who were being strong-armed permanently signing away the rights to their likeness, and I sympathise with them, because what they do is valuable for society.
Apart from to the extent to which they themselves are exploited, I have no sympathy at all for pornography industry participants. What they do is detrimental to society, and generally revolves around exploiting their customers, especially the weird new parasocial only-fans model.
So none of the reasons why I might care about the actors union complaints apply to the porn industry.
> If we make a legal framework for movie actors it should also apply to pron actors.
There already is a legal framework for managing this. It is called personality rights or the right of publicity. There's no need at all for any new laws to regulate this.
While I see her point, I think her point will fail.
An avid follower, 'connoisseur' if you prefer, of say Riley Reid may well recognise that she, or parts of her, are not real in whatever they are watching.
But if they do not care but they like what they see they will be back for more.
Her reaction is the same as mainstream actors concerned about voice reproduction, likeness reproduction and more.
One day (famous actor) will die. Later, they will headline a movie that people rave about. They are not dead yet, but ABBA Voyage.
Audrey Hepburn is long dead, but a certain chocolate brand exploits her.
AI will exploit those in entertainment because there is money there.
Porn or otherwise, I think nearly all the excitement in the media GenAI space from 2024-2030 is going to happen in the courtroom, rather than the computer lab. A computer program that can generate infinite, believable episodes of Show Xyz is going to be made sometime in the future--it's a foregone conclusion, and I'll take that bet any day. The technical challenges on the path to getting there are relatively unexciting.
The question about who gets paid when I buy that program is going to take decades, maybe a lifetime to settle.
If you believe that a computer can and inevitably will create this content, it’s also a foregone conclusion that its origin will be obfuscated and diffuse. I can’t see how an actor working in country X will collect on use of their likeness generated by a computer in country Y. Similarly, if 10,000+ individuals with computers are producing infringing content, I fail to see how anyone could seek recompense with any effectiveness. Additionally, if the content is generated from a computer it would seem relatively simple to alter it just enough to call into doubt the likeness used and make it prohibitively difficult for an individual to claim it is in fact their identity and not a fictional derivative protected by some fair use laws. I’m not a copyright expert and I expect we’ll see attempts at legal battles as you suggest, but I expect they’ll pretty much go nowhere unless the ‘offending’ counterparty is seeking conflict, and the result will be a fundamental undermining of the authority that the current copyright system holds.
Edit: I think the closest approximation of a solution to the compensation/control questions re digital content in an age of on-demand generative AI will involve content creators of all stripes self-hosting and self-publishing to make it easy for fans to directly patronize. Trying to stop clones is a fool’s errand.
> One day (famous actor) will die. Later, they will headline a movie that people rave about.
Yep. This is one of the many things that I detest about how this technology will inevitably be used.
I have a problem with it at a deep level. It appears that the things about these technologies that excite people the most are those things that are direct attacks on reality. It's bad enough that large segments of society is already in a place where truth doesn't matter. Now comes tools to make it possible that reality itself doesn't matter anymore.
> My dad is a programmer, and he told me recently he’s working with AI because he realized his job is starting to become obsolete—and he will become obsolete if he doesn't know how to work alongside it.
I didn't expect myself to be agreeing with Riley Reid and her dad today.
A few years ago I was into Eric Weinstein’s content on YouTube. He interviewed Riley Reid, and she is definitely intelligent. It was actually an interesting conversation.
On the broader topic of AI companion chatbots: a bad idea! There are so many opportunities in life to develop real relationships, with real people.
Not everyone can or will develop those relationships though. There are people who have mental or physical limitations that make that difficult or impossible, and companion chat bots could be really helpful to them. It could even give them the tools needed to form “real “relationships down the road.
Those chatbots will only pull them deeper into an isolated bubble with all sorts of distortions manipulable by tech giants. Are we ready to deal with all that?
People say this but i actually don’t think chatbots can provide tools to help form real relationships until they model the kind of behaviors that fundamentally make it hard to form relationships. Chatbots need to be unavailable at inopportune times, have moods that are affected by more than just the person talking to them, take their time in forgiving slights, etc.
Even therapists consider it valuable to therapy that you don’t get to talk to your therapist 24/7. The ability to sit with your issues independently is important— just as important is the ability to not freak out when a friend doesn’t text you back asap.
I don't see how they could be actually helpful except perhaps as a tool used under the care of a therapist. At best, it would be like giving someone a morphine drip for pain rather than doing anything to actually heal the condition causing the pain. It may sound good, but it may also be an active disincentive to addressing their real issue.
>There are so many opportunities in life to develop real relationships, with real people.
To quote the Dude, "That's like, your opinion man". You're painting with a very broad brush based on your experiences and are expecting everyone else to be the same thing as you. This shows a lack of critical thinking on your part.
I think I disagree with the sentiment, but I definitely disagree with the conviction.
I think it's possible that chatbots will help people prepare and refine their relationship skills, such that "real" relationships are more likely and more successful. Think of chatbots as simulations, which are used in everything from medical to military to HR contexts. Maybe that's not all bad?
I'm 100% sure chatbots will be used in ways I'd characterize as "not healthy", but I'm not at all sure that's any of my business, or that those to-me negative uses will outweigh more positive usages.
There's at least some experimental evidence to suggest that race car sims with VR displays and steering wheel interfaces can train (some) real racing skills. But I really doubt that playing GTA with a console controller or mouse and keyboard do the same. Cars in GTA don't even behave like cars IRL, neither the ones you drive and certainly not the ones being driven by the computer. None of the muscle memory translates and any other hand-eye coordination skills transferring from one to the other is extremely dubious. With a VR headset you might have something to go off of, but otherwise GTA trains you to keep your head facing forward to the screen instead of on a swivel, so if anything GTA probably makes you a worse driver IRL.
Genuinely curious, why does it matter if a relationship is real if the person is happy and mentally healthy? Is a chatbot that talks like a genuinely real person that bad of a thing? (assuming it doesn't tell you go to kill yourself for example)
I suspect we're a long way from technology actually being able to trick our brain (all of it) into thinking it's in the presence of real companionship.
Similar to why social media, despite "everyone being on there and available to everyone," doesn't seem to mitigate loneliness.
> I suspect we're a long way from technology actually being able to trick our brain (all of it) into thinking it's in the presence of real companionship.
I remember the first time I played Echo VR. I'm not sure it was because I wasn't used to VR, because of the duration I played the first time or what, but the first minutes after removing the VR headset, I had some sort of disassociation with my arms in real-life.
That must have been back in 2017/2018 sometime. Add in current generation of voice recognition and generation, better performance for both headsets and the games themselves, LLM to help the "partner" to feel more alive regarding behavior and I think you could get pretty close to "fooling" someone if they use it enough.
I'd guess something like that would make loneliness worse in the world though, rather than better.
In our current world of seeming abundance, it's hard (for me) to wrap my mind around the fact that material considerations are actually important. This is why some people are concerned about shifts in demographics.
One example is that societies can reach a point where there are not enough people of working age to provide the services and goods for the "nonworkers" (retired + infirm + students + children)
Anything that has the potential to cause a step-decrease in birthrate has the potential to cause a big economic/political disturbance, and a 'distraction' from traditional human relationships definitely has that potential, as people only have so many years where they can reproduce.
I think one exciting side-effect of that is that investment in autonomy would go insane. We're talking countries devoting large portions of their GDP to eliminating menial labor. As of now autonomy has to compete with human labor which is still relatively cheap (down to minimum wage for certain tasks), but once human labor becomes extremely scarce, a lot of autonomy investment becomes profitable. Also, less population is the goal after all, as it helps with sustainability. The human race needs millions, not billions, to safely continue with a healthy genetic diversity.
Well, I'm a big fan of Her, so I won't argue that non-real relationships are implicitly bad.
But to the extent (some) people substitute chatbots for real relationships because chatbots are infinitely forgiving and don't promote maturation, I think the harm could be a group of perpetual children who don't have the real-world support structure to deal with real-world issues like needing long term medical care.
One underrated aspect of a real relationship is being on the giving end. I've no doubt that an AI could help me sort things out, but can't imagine a meaningful way to simulate being there for someone.
OTOH, it might prove useful in giving advice on how to help others.
> Genuinely curious, why does it matter if a relationship is real if the person is happy and mentally healthy?
It's like having an imaginary girlfriend in your head. If it makes that person happy then why do other people feel bad for the guy? Because although that guy may look happy, and maybe is happy right now, most people don't really believe that's a recipe for happiness in the long term. People see somebody on a path to loneliness and pity them for it.
> why does it matter if a relationship is real if the person is happy and mentally healthy?
If it does lead to happy, healthy people—maybe it isn't bad. However, I don't have any expectation that it would result in happy or healthy people, and a reasonably strong belief that it would result in the opposite.
> I think it's possible that chatbots will help people prepare and refine their relationship skills
By practicing with ai porn bots? Created by the advertising (manipulation) tech giants of the future? How skewed and messed up would your norms be after a while?
Guess it'd depend on the training data and how the bots act.
"Trash in, trash out" as they say.
The bots could be created with the intention of making human relationships better, not worse. It could call out harmful behavior or point people into better directions, and similar ways.
"No Dave, doing X to your partner might not be appreciated, talk with them about it or may I suggest these alternatives?"
Money rarely follows those that have good intentions. The intentions are rarely even part of the equation there. And as Tinder has already showed us, there’s a lot of money in keeping people lonely, giving them just enough but not too much. Something tells me that the large majority of those building AI companion bots do not have good intentions in mind. Of course, only time will tell, but considering the track record of such topics so far I doubt this is the way to go.
> The bots could be created with the intention of making human relationships better, not worse. It could call out harmful behavior or point people into better directions, and similar ways.
(1) Are those the kind of bots being created?
(2) Are those the kinds of bots that will be commercially successful?
> chatbots will help people prepare and refine their relationship skills, such that "real" relationships are more likely and more successful
Chatbots miss the point entirely and will only make the loneliness worse.
People who are intolerant of "bad" relationships aren't ready for relationships. Seeing the worst of each other, keeping things honest, and working through it together is the relationship. Doing that with a bot is cheating yourself hard out of life's most important moments.
Forgetting about the technology for a moment, it's already a bad idea to be overexperienced. People get jaded and turn into manipulators. The other problem with experience is that preferences change. The dating market is already bad enough and full of crazy expectations fueled by scammers and the corporate overlords.
Trying to do better and avoid pain just makes you less compatible and is very naive. Training your preferences on bots ensures you will stay alone and addicted.
I do not share that optimism. I see it as far more likely the technology will be demanded and satisfied, that the ai chat bot acommodate immature and depraved maladaptive behaviour patterns, e.g. allowing a sadist by habit and pleasure to indulge in his questionable choices. It's like expecting the car industry to 'teach' people from the midwest to prefer more environmental-friendly pickup trucks. My view is, that the exact opposite will be enabled.
There's a potential future where these discussions (about whether to work with AI or work against it) will be happening across ALL industries, not just in the x-rated one.
We're seeing it here and in the graphic design industry right now because that's what the large majority of people are using AI for. But just like with photography, and just like with the internet, it's not going to stop there.
In my personal opinion, this wave is coming EVEN IF AI ends up not being as perfect as people are currently envisioning it as. Because even if it's not perfect, it's convenient and that's already been proven thanks to the likes of ChatGPT and Midjourney.
The AI Revolution is here, and, unfortunately, everyone will need to figure out their place in this new world.
I read another article on HN where an illustrator was saying that if the tools evolve to be more designed for artists, they could be great for cutting down time-consuming aspects of illustration. I’m not an illustrator but I’m guessing things like coloring and shading are areas where AI could make quick work.
We saw technological innovations like Disney’s Xerox machine technique that was used for 101 Dalmatians, and of course we saw computer animation basically decimate hand-drawn animation almost entirely. Even in areas where animation is hand drawn, it’s usually done so in a digital workflow.
The people out there that are scared of AI and refuse to use it are making a mistake. It’s here. It’s not going to get less capable, it’s going to keep getting more capable. I think the average person should try to be an early adopter to have an advantage in our new world.
What does it mean to "work with AI" in the context of the future or even near future? A symbolic job of checking it's outputs?
Even if AI doesn't take your job, it almost certainly will take most of the value it has. I don't need a $175k dev when I can use a model and a $60k dev to do the same thing. Or on the graphics side, artists are a dime a dozen, I don't need the cream of the crop if they are just gonna be fixing up mangled AI hands.
> Even if AI doesn't take your job, it almost certainly will take most of the value it has. I don't need a $175k dev when I can use a model and a $60k dev to do the same thing.
Current trends in writing & editing appear to be that you need a rare and expensive person to get the kind of whole-number multiplier out of AI tools that people initially expected. And it's still not a large whole number.
Give the tools to someone who's not got exception taste and skill, and you're lucky if the multiplier's greater than 1 at all.
[EDIT] Exception if your output is expected to be crap and you don't care about accuracy. It's a huge boon to spam of most forms, and astroturfing.
I think it's a mistake to use current AI in current times as the status quo in ~5 years from now.
AI will likely improve dramatically, as will the general persons ability to work with it. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if typewriter operators outpaced nascent word processor users in the beginning.
> AI will likely improve dramatically, as will the general persons ability to work with it.
I'm not so sure about ability to work with it. Middling Excel skills still make you a wizard able to do things nobody else can, in most offices (though not most tech offices). Hell, I've seen knowing how to use the Windows file explorer at a very low level of competence put a person in the top five percent by computer ability in an office. Within the last couple years.
Most folks can barely use the tools we have, and aren't going to be able to get good output from anything like the current set of AI tools. The ones who can, won't be cheap, and may be hard to replace like-for-like—I think a lot of companies are going to settle on more, cheaper, more-interchangeable workers than replacing them with a few AI tool experts with hard-to-measure-or-quantify skills.
The tools themselves need an added ability to reflect and distinguish reality from imagination and suited-to-task from unsuited-to-task, to get as-much better as they need to be to deliver what some are supposing they surely will, and AFAIK that's not the kind of thing we're going to get with "LLMs, but more and bigger" and related techniques, but will require some new breakthroughs.
> Hell, I've seen knowing how to use the Windows file explorer at a very low level of competence put a person in the top five percent by computer ability in an office. Within the last couple years.
This is a really interesting point, phrased in a way that I wouldn't have thought to vocalize but that resonates with me. Tool-based and infrastructure-based changes that vastly improve efficiency and output based on competency with the tools/infrastructure are common; there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that is nevertheless uncommon for people to grab and use.
Assuming current AI generation improves in exactly the way its proponents are expecting (which is it's own separate conversation), it is still probably worth spending a little time trying to figure out whether it's a tool that will actually see mass adoption or whether it'll end up in the same category as many of the other excellent tools that exist today that have remained inaccessible or unattractive to most people.
Some tools do get mass adoption and people become competent with them at a mass-level. But only some, and it doesn't seem to strictly map to the quality of the tool. I'm not sure I can easily tell/predict the difference and where a theoretical future AI would fall; I would need to think about it more. But I just wanted to chime in and say that it's a good insight.
> Middling Excel skills still make you a wizard able to do things nobody else can, in most offices (though not most tech offices)
Do those skills translate directly to a job/pay, or are they simply nice-to-have competencies inside other jobs? I've always worked as an ops/analyst/spreadsheet guy but I've found over the years that those formula manipulation skills never actually translate to "advancement". They enable me and my company to do things easier than they would have otherwise, but appear as nice-to-have rather than valued in it's own right.
Put another way - Is there actually a career where the primary hard skill is "I'm good at excel"?
Productivity-increasing tools increase the value of human labor (they don’t take it), but, in a capitalist society, also facilitate the capitalist capturing more of the value of that labor.
> There's a potential future where these discussions (about whether to work with AI or work against it) will be happening across ALL industries, not just in the x-rated one.
Uh, that’s not a potential future, its today. It's happening in tech, today (as mentioned in TFA, that’s part of what got Reid interested), it is a big part of the issues behind the recent SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in mainstream film/TV. It's happening across a wide range of industries today, not just porn.
And for what its worth, HuggingFace does not seem to care. The model repo isn't mostly porn like CivitAI, but they seem to be OK with a significant amount of it.
> And for what its worth, HuggingFace does not seem to care.
Almost no one except the payment processors care about porn text/video/images. But once they find out what's hosted on huggingface, they'll be quick to react I'm sure.
Not because they are at the scale of Reddit or Twitter, but they are at the very center of AI World, and it would look really bad to shareholders and the finance crowd if they made a fuss over an AI company.
And HF themself trained an "uncensored" model (Zephyr 7B), and very specifically pointed out that model performance seemed to be better without the alignment.
I wonder what the difference between her chatbot and the chatbot that likely responds to you if you message her on onlyfans is. Probably the same thing. If you want to try a non guardrailed chat AI try Chai, for free. It is pretty good. Even still, I have found with these bots they either get repetitive very fast or will output some nonsensical thing that breaks any immersion.
Fully AI webcam girls are on the horizon, that will completely change the porn industry. These chatbots are just money grabs at horny dudes.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadI know that a lot, and I mean a lot of people watch porn - yet I don’t know anyone who would describe themselves as “cherishing” the industry for being good to them. Heck, most “performers” say… it’s absolutely merciless to them; because the moment they aren’t in the perfect prime of their lives, they’re done.
At the end of the day, there's a lot of money in that profession, and I can certainly see how someone would cherish the money it produced for them. It's far from the only industry which participants will age out of quickly.
While I’m certainly sympathetic to the “sex work is work” perspective, it’s worth considering the full implications: for instance, that there would be nothing stopping sexual services being included in job descriptions for other lines of work (“administrative assistant with benefits”). It’s the thin end of the wedge, to ask how truly “consensual” employment relationships can be, sexual or otherwise, in contexts of power asymmetry.
Why is it that your knee-jerk reaction here is just to discount their opinion entirely in place of your own (likely entirely un-informed) opinion about it?
And/or: this could simply be the kind of quasi-Stockholm-Syndrome often seen of those in exploitative relationships, be they labor or otherwise.
But while I believe the many disgusting stories we’ve heard about that industry, I’d be hesitant to make assumptions about the motives and experiences of any one individual, in either direction.
Sounds like work in general, really. Most people wills say that their work is merciless, yet the "top 1%" will tell you a completely different story. I expect Reid can be considered a "top 1%"-er.
I recall seeing - many many years ago - a WoW video "The internet is for porn" . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRgNOyCnbqg
Then more recently there was the "Pornhub. The biggest archive of nothing" advertising - SFW - https://www.adweek.com/files/imagecache/node-detail/pornhub-...
I cannot see any scenario where porn 'would be left behind'.
Right, but "The internet is for porn" is also a specific song from the musical Avenue Q, and that's the song that's being sung in the WoW video linked above. So the parent poster wasn't talking about the sentiment in general, but the specific song being used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJRAXjHwnOk
Edit: Seeing sibling replies, I'm glad most people do know.
Reid isn't suggesting porn, the medium, will be left behind (just the opposite, really). She wants to make sure that porn, the people who make up the industry, are able to reap the benefits of AI. She wants to make sure at the very least that some unaffiliated AI project isn't just stealing these people's work, names, likenesses, etc., and selling it.
Sounds like thinly veiled ludditism to me, why would it be necessary for AI porn to steal anybody’s likeness? I’m sure the 100% generated content is fine without any need for that.
It’s hard to drum up any sympathy for such an exploitative industry (exploitative for both the participants and the customers). Am I supposed to care that pornographers ability to profit of their unhealthy and addictive product is in jeopardy?
Just look at what people currently do with the models. You already see a lot of deepfake attempts. This will only increase as the technology improves. If you can generate a scene from scratch people will ask it to generate a full porn movie with the actor/actress of their choice.
> It’s hard to drum up any sympathy for such an exploitative industry (exploitative for both the participants and the customers).
I think if you care about an actor losing income over AI generated works, you would naturally care about a porn actor losing income over this. Especially when the AI used your work as training data and might reproduce your likeness without you getting anything out of it. I can understand the dislike for the industry because parts of it prey on the weak to make money.
If we make a legal framework for movie actors it should also apply to pron actors.
Currently, people either make content with entirely generated personas, or make deepfake content of people who are not porn actresses at all. I've been following the commentary around this topic, and I've never even heard of somebody using AI to generate porn of people who are already porn actresses.
> I think if you care about an actor losing income over AI generated works, you would naturally care about a porn actor losing income over this.
In general I don't care about people losing their jobs to new technology. I do support the actors who were being strong-armed permanently signing away the rights to their likeness, and I sympathise with them, because what they do is valuable for society.
Apart from to the extent to which they themselves are exploited, I have no sympathy at all for pornography industry participants. What they do is detrimental to society, and generally revolves around exploiting their customers, especially the weird new parasocial only-fans model.
So none of the reasons why I might care about the actors union complaints apply to the porn industry.
> If we make a legal framework for movie actors it should also apply to pron actors.
There already is a legal framework for managing this. It is called personality rights or the right of publicity. There's no need at all for any new laws to regulate this.
While I see her point, I think her point will fail.
An avid follower, 'connoisseur' if you prefer, of say Riley Reid may well recognise that she, or parts of her, are not real in whatever they are watching.
But if they do not care but they like what they see they will be back for more.
Her reaction is the same as mainstream actors concerned about voice reproduction, likeness reproduction and more.
One day (famous actor) will die. Later, they will headline a movie that people rave about. They are not dead yet, but ABBA Voyage.
Audrey Hepburn is long dead, but a certain chocolate brand exploits her.
AI will exploit those in entertainment because there is money there.
The question about who gets paid when I buy that program is going to take decades, maybe a lifetime to settle.
Edit: I think the closest approximation of a solution to the compensation/control questions re digital content in an age of on-demand generative AI will involve content creators of all stripes self-hosting and self-publishing to make it easy for fans to directly patronize. Trying to stop clones is a fool’s errand.
Yep. This is one of the many things that I detest about how this technology will inevitably be used.
I have a problem with it at a deep level. It appears that the things about these technologies that excite people the most are those things that are direct attacks on reality. It's bad enough that large segments of society is already in a place where truth doesn't matter. Now comes tools to make it possible that reality itself doesn't matter anymore.
I remember that too… what was it, 15 years ago?
I definitely wasn’t expecting that video to resurface and be actually relevant lol
"I see your kineograph of a galloping horse and raise you this one of a burlesque dancer."
Relevant: <https://np.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/bmp1bt/why_im_ro...>
(Context: Retribution Paladin in "classic" (the original release of) World of Warcraft has weak attacks compared to other classes/specs.)
I didn't expect myself to be agreeing with Riley Reid and her dad today.
On the broader topic of AI companion chatbots: a bad idea! There are so many opportunities in life to develop real relationships, with real people.
Even therapists consider it valuable to therapy that you don’t get to talk to your therapist 24/7. The ability to sit with your issues independently is important— just as important is the ability to not freak out when a friend doesn’t text you back asap.
To quote the Dude, "That's like, your opinion man". You're painting with a very broad brush based on your experiences and are expecting everyone else to be the same thing as you. This shows a lack of critical thinking on your part.
I think I disagree with the sentiment, but I definitely disagree with the conviction.
I think it's possible that chatbots will help people prepare and refine their relationship skills, such that "real" relationships are more likely and more successful. Think of chatbots as simulations, which are used in everything from medical to military to HR contexts. Maybe that's not all bad?
I'm 100% sure chatbots will be used in ways I'd characterize as "not healthy", but I'm not at all sure that's any of my business, or that those to-me negative uses will outweigh more positive usages.
Similar to why social media, despite "everyone being on there and available to everyone," doesn't seem to mitigate loneliness.
I remember the first time I played Echo VR. I'm not sure it was because I wasn't used to VR, because of the duration I played the first time or what, but the first minutes after removing the VR headset, I had some sort of disassociation with my arms in real-life.
That must have been back in 2017/2018 sometime. Add in current generation of voice recognition and generation, better performance for both headsets and the games themselves, LLM to help the "partner" to feel more alive regarding behavior and I think you could get pretty close to "fooling" someone if they use it enough.
I'd guess something like that would make loneliness worse in the world though, rather than better.
In our current world of seeming abundance, it's hard (for me) to wrap my mind around the fact that material considerations are actually important. This is why some people are concerned about shifts in demographics.
One example is that societies can reach a point where there are not enough people of working age to provide the services and goods for the "nonworkers" (retired + infirm + students + children)
Anything that has the potential to cause a step-decrease in birthrate has the potential to cause a big economic/political disturbance, and a 'distraction' from traditional human relationships definitely has that potential, as people only have so many years where they can reproduce.
But to the extent (some) people substitute chatbots for real relationships because chatbots are infinitely forgiving and don't promote maturation, I think the harm could be a group of perpetual children who don't have the real-world support structure to deal with real-world issues like needing long term medical care.
OTOH, it might prove useful in giving advice on how to help others.
It's like having an imaginary girlfriend in your head. If it makes that person happy then why do other people feel bad for the guy? Because although that guy may look happy, and maybe is happy right now, most people don't really believe that's a recipe for happiness in the long term. People see somebody on a path to loneliness and pity them for it.
If it does lead to happy, healthy people—maybe it isn't bad. However, I don't have any expectation that it would result in happy or healthy people, and a reasonably strong belief that it would result in the opposite.
By practicing with ai porn bots? Created by the advertising (manipulation) tech giants of the future? How skewed and messed up would your norms be after a while?
"Trash in, trash out" as they say.
The bots could be created with the intention of making human relationships better, not worse. It could call out harmful behavior or point people into better directions, and similar ways.
"No Dave, doing X to your partner might not be appreciated, talk with them about it or may I suggest these alternatives?"
(1) Are those the kind of bots being created?
(2) Are those the kinds of bots that will be commercially successful?
2: ...Nope.
Well... shit.
Chatbots miss the point entirely and will only make the loneliness worse.
People who are intolerant of "bad" relationships aren't ready for relationships. Seeing the worst of each other, keeping things honest, and working through it together is the relationship. Doing that with a bot is cheating yourself hard out of life's most important moments.
Forgetting about the technology for a moment, it's already a bad idea to be overexperienced. People get jaded and turn into manipulators. The other problem with experience is that preferences change. The dating market is already bad enough and full of crazy expectations fueled by scammers and the corporate overlords.
Trying to do better and avoid pain just makes you less compatible and is very naive. Training your preferences on bots ensures you will stay alone and addicted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDFzOjw0pFU
We're seeing it here and in the graphic design industry right now because that's what the large majority of people are using AI for. But just like with photography, and just like with the internet, it's not going to stop there.
In my personal opinion, this wave is coming EVEN IF AI ends up not being as perfect as people are currently envisioning it as. Because even if it's not perfect, it's convenient and that's already been proven thanks to the likes of ChatGPT and Midjourney.
The AI Revolution is here, and, unfortunately, everyone will need to figure out their place in this new world.
We saw technological innovations like Disney’s Xerox machine technique that was used for 101 Dalmatians, and of course we saw computer animation basically decimate hand-drawn animation almost entirely. Even in areas where animation is hand drawn, it’s usually done so in a digital workflow.
The people out there that are scared of AI and refuse to use it are making a mistake. It’s here. It’s not going to get less capable, it’s going to keep getting more capable. I think the average person should try to be an early adopter to have an advantage in our new world.
Even if AI doesn't take your job, it almost certainly will take most of the value it has. I don't need a $175k dev when I can use a model and a $60k dev to do the same thing. Or on the graphics side, artists are a dime a dozen, I don't need the cream of the crop if they are just gonna be fixing up mangled AI hands.
Current trends in writing & editing appear to be that you need a rare and expensive person to get the kind of whole-number multiplier out of AI tools that people initially expected. And it's still not a large whole number.
Give the tools to someone who's not got exception taste and skill, and you're lucky if the multiplier's greater than 1 at all.
[EDIT] Exception if your output is expected to be crap and you don't care about accuracy. It's a huge boon to spam of most forms, and astroturfing.
AI will likely improve dramatically, as will the general persons ability to work with it. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if typewriter operators outpaced nascent word processor users in the beginning.
I'm not so sure about ability to work with it. Middling Excel skills still make you a wizard able to do things nobody else can, in most offices (though not most tech offices). Hell, I've seen knowing how to use the Windows file explorer at a very low level of competence put a person in the top five percent by computer ability in an office. Within the last couple years.
Most folks can barely use the tools we have, and aren't going to be able to get good output from anything like the current set of AI tools. The ones who can, won't be cheap, and may be hard to replace like-for-like—I think a lot of companies are going to settle on more, cheaper, more-interchangeable workers than replacing them with a few AI tool experts with hard-to-measure-or-quantify skills.
The tools themselves need an added ability to reflect and distinguish reality from imagination and suited-to-task from unsuited-to-task, to get as-much better as they need to be to deliver what some are supposing they surely will, and AFAIK that's not the kind of thing we're going to get with "LLMs, but more and bigger" and related techniques, but will require some new breakthroughs.
This is a really interesting point, phrased in a way that I wouldn't have thought to vocalize but that resonates with me. Tool-based and infrastructure-based changes that vastly improve efficiency and output based on competency with the tools/infrastructure are common; there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that is nevertheless uncommon for people to grab and use.
Assuming current AI generation improves in exactly the way its proponents are expecting (which is it's own separate conversation), it is still probably worth spending a little time trying to figure out whether it's a tool that will actually see mass adoption or whether it'll end up in the same category as many of the other excellent tools that exist today that have remained inaccessible or unattractive to most people.
Some tools do get mass adoption and people become competent with them at a mass-level. But only some, and it doesn't seem to strictly map to the quality of the tool. I'm not sure I can easily tell/predict the difference and where a theoretical future AI would fall; I would need to think about it more. But I just wanted to chime in and say that it's a good insight.
Do those skills translate directly to a job/pay, or are they simply nice-to-have competencies inside other jobs? I've always worked as an ops/analyst/spreadsheet guy but I've found over the years that those formula manipulation skills never actually translate to "advancement". They enable me and my company to do things easier than they would have otherwise, but appear as nice-to-have rather than valued in it's own right.
Put another way - Is there actually a career where the primary hard skill is "I'm good at excel"?
Uh, that’s not a potential future, its today. It's happening in tech, today (as mentioned in TFA, that’s part of what got Reid interested), it is a big part of the issues behind the recent SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in mainstream film/TV. It's happening across a wide range of industries today, not just porn.
Twitch-like live streaming with micropayments was first seen in porn.
Subscriptions, micropayments, VR, etc.
They also seems to be driving "research" in stuff like merging methods, model "grafting," and llm evaluation. Some examples:
https://rentry.co/ayumi_erp_rating
https://huggingface.co/NeverSleep/Mistral-11B-OmniMix-bf16
https://huggingface.co/Sao10K/Euryale-1.3-L2-70B
And for what its worth, HuggingFace does not seem to care. The model repo isn't mostly porn like CivitAI, but they seem to be OK with a significant amount of it.
Almost no one except the payment processors care about porn text/video/images. But once they find out what's hosted on huggingface, they'll be quick to react I'm sure.
Not because they are at the scale of Reddit or Twitter, but they are at the very center of AI World, and it would look really bad to shareholders and the finance crowd if they made a fuss over an AI company.
And HF themself trained an "uncensored" model (Zephyr 7B), and very specifically pointed out that model performance seemed to be better without the alignment.
Fully AI webcam girls are on the horizon, that will completely change the porn industry. These chatbots are just money grabs at horny dudes.