Author here. Thanks for reading. I've been thinking about this for a long time. I used to work at Snapchat where a lot of the talking points were still centered around the "Social Dilemma".
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...
None of that sounds appealing in any way. I’m not too concerned about it. Who wants to spend 12 hours a day in a AI-generated VR haze? That sounds completely and utterly miserable. Anyone on that trajectory probably won’t live very long anyway. I’m sure there’s some minority who does, but I have a hard time believing it will be a majority to the point it becomes a crisis.
I tried to read this, but it feels like another attempt at the “AI 2027” meme where we’re only a couple years away from societal collapse due to AI.
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.
This "Coming Age" already happened, we're living in it. "The First Wave" was social media (or perhaps Google)? "The Infinite Stream" vaguely resembles TikTok: endless curated video, albeit TikTok is all short snippets and you occasionally swipe.
Putting aside the astounding material and resource cost of this fantasy, the claim made here is an example of why people call AI proponents 'out of touch' or 'anti-human.'
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.)
corporate AI will always be as dry as drywall. they will not risk controversy with adult content to make millions when they can make trillions by replacing jobs. Google and Netflix don't have adult versions of their services, even though they could, even though they would make tens or hundreds of millions.
> A new, insidious form of social currency emerges: digital blackmail, revenge porn so convincing it's indistinguishable from reality, and customized fantasies that feed the darkest corners of the human psyche.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 29.1 ms ] threadAs 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...
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.
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.