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Lusting after illusions

As bad as America’s pornography problem is, pornbots will make it worse


Sam Altman attends a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education on Sept. 4. Associated Press / Photo by Alex Brandon

Lusting after illusions
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This is not the artificial intelligence armageddon we were promised. The AI apocalypse was supposed to feature nuclear war, or armies of merciless killer robots hunting down the last survivors of humanity. Or both.

Instead, AI is going to destroy civilization by giving us what we want. OpenAI boss Sam Altman recently announced that “as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.” Which is to say, they’re going into the pornography business, a choice that Altman doubled down on after his initial post provoked backlash. “As AI becomes more important in people's lives,” he said, “allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission.” He added that “we are not the elected moral police of the world.”

This may be a smart business decision. The internet has an endless appetite for pornography, and AI is positioned to address a problem that has plagued the “adult entertainment” industry in the internet age—with so much porn available for free, how do you get people to pay for it?

What the industry has found is that the person who will pay is the person who wants something distinct—whether that is a particular fetish, a specific sex act on a livestream, or content from a particular model (perhaps with a facsimile of intimacy or exclusivity via direct messages and special order content). AI will be able to deliver on all of that with text, images, and videos tailored to each user.

And AI-generated models and chatbots will never need to sleep or eat or anything else that might take them away from serving their customers. They will never say no, let alone quit. They will be endlessly customizable, always available, and utterly subservient—even users who want some cattiness, brattiness, or dominance from their AI content will be able to dial it up to just the level they like. Some users might consider it a personal heaven. But really it will be hell.

The negative external consequences are easy to see. Many of the men who use this will become unproductive, addicted drones who are utterly unsuited for relationships with real women. And though most consumers of hardcore AI-generated content will be male, many women will turn to AI chatbots for a simulacrum of companionship and romance, with some erotic content mixed in.

The plethora of sci-fi dystopias in which people are stupefied by easy, unreal pleasures are proving prescient.

The plethora of sci-fi dystopias in which people are stupefied by easy, unreal pleasures are proving prescient. People who are sexually and relationally shaped by artificial intelligence will not be good husbands and wives, mothers and fathers—as bad as porn-induced sexual disfunction and violence are now, they will only get worse when no humans are involved in making it.

Nor are people shaped by this likely to be good citizens, good scholars, good employees (or good bosses) and so on. The civilizational perils of giving everyone their own (sexual) illusion machine should be obvious. And there are still darker aspects, such as the deluge of AI-generated child pornography that will be unleashed.

But though the impending evils are evident, the response is halting and half-hearted, in large part because Americans, and especially those in our leadership class, are terrified of being seen as prudes or luddites. Opposing AI-generated pornography combines these fears—standing in the way of sexual pleasure and technological progress.

And banning the pornbots would also require rejecting the belief that pleasure is the essence of self-fulfillment, and therefore that happiness and flourishing consist of maximizing pleasurable experiences. The advent of AI porn is the consummation of this view—cultivating an addictive loop of self-indulgence lacking even the image of another real person.

The old porn business objectified people, the AI porn business does away with people entirely. The old porn business told us to lust after, rather than love, other people; the AI porn business will tell us to lust after the illusions of people, generated by a machine holding a mirror up to our lust. It will lead people into a self-contained world of illusions disconnected from any love or communion with other people.

In a word: Hell.


Nathanael Blake

Nathanael is a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All.


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