Porn is doomed–that is, porn as an industry. Already there are AIs capable of generating images of women (it’s usually women) which are photorealistic, yet are of women who never existed in the real world. It’s only a matter of time before that will be extended to full motion video, and when that happens, porn stars everywhere, of either sex, will be out of work. Porn will, as it was in Orwell, be generated entirely on machines; once the AIs are coded to include variations on all the myriad behaviors humans engage in during sex, and once those behaviors have been motion-captured, there will no longer be any need for actual human actors. The scripts, such as they are, will be extruded by Chat GPT or something similar, and then the virtual porn stars will be set to work. At that point, the porn industry will consist entirely of the director and his webmaster.
But, of course, even that won’t last. These suites of porn-generating software will be pirated and escape out into the digital ecosystem. Anyone who wants to will be able to create bespoke porn, homespun porn, right on their computers at home. The user will upload the porn stars they like, the AI will synthesize them to create permutations on the user’s archetypal sex object of choice, and then the user will pick from a menu of plots (Pizza Boy, At The Office, Aliens Made Them Do It, etc.), at which point the AI will cook for a bit and then spit out one-of-a-kind, perfectly tailored porn.
Oh, I’m sure some artisanal porn will still be made, to cater to those hipsters who care more about “authenticity”, but the vast industry of porn which currently exists will be killed stone dead.
All of which made me wonder if something similar might happen to prudery, i.e. AI taking on the mantle of the traditional anti-porn counter-industry as the internet continues its seemingly inexorable mirroring of the human psyche.
It was an ‘American Dad’ episode that had been illegally uploaded and these videos typically only stay up for a day or so. If you examine the comments section on Youtube you will quickly start to notice the bots commenting, particularly the p*rn bots. Apparently they harvest the most popular comments and then regurgitate them, which is why you’ll find p*rn bots posting very insightful comments. It’s jarring when you first notice it.
Will it though? That was my first thought too. Then I wondered about all the women today whose partners use porn, harder and harder porn, because it is no longer taboo and then push partners into recreating the acts for them. I don’t have them to hand, but I remember reading stories recently (here, I think) about the increasing numbers of women being seen in hospitals for injuries related to sex, the acts being a nal sex and various choking or stranglings.
Yes – interesting moral questions here. If it’s AI generated, with no humans involved, never being “real” at any point, how different is it to thoughts and fantasies which exist only in the imagination?
Disagree, it’s the character of the performers, and their individual eccentricities that makes for viewing. Virtual Reality interactive porn has a future though, and there you could get away with robotisation of the performers, though the real machines seem a long way off.
Mangle Tangle
7 months ago
Tosh. The historical review is interesting but the conclusion, that modern porn is just like the old days, breezily poking fun at society and the establishment, is plain wrong. The sheer scale, intensity and ease of use of modern porn, and its consumption by the young, is profoundly damaging to society.
Profoundly damaging? How so? Evidence of the profound damage? I think what is at play here is that the writer finds porn immoral and disgusting so therefore it must be damaging. And, of course, how the dominant western societies dealt with sexuality can be seen as profoundly damaging. In the “old” days masturbation was seen as causing insanity and many parents bound their children hands at night. Now porn is really generally about masturbation and much of the anti porn rhetoric is a continuation of the condemnation of masturbation. Interesting, that the article never mentioned masturbation and reader comments so far have not mentioned masturbation. Is masturbation now the “unspeakable” moral violation? Of course, in past centuries Kellog had the answer to masturbation, eat more of his cereals.
Your evidence is the runaway sexualization of Western culture. We now promote drag queens performing lewd routines to school children. What was once considered consenting adults-only behind closed doors is now paraded in the public square. The reason this is wrong is unabashedly moral and ethical, by which I mean, that what makes human life worthwhile is the separation between inspiring and corrupting, between sacred and profane. We socialize to eat and drink, we go in private to defecate. It’s spiritual, because we are spiritual beings. The rules may change and the guidelines shift, but creepiness is still creepy, and honor is still honorable.
Honor is still honorable? In the name of honor all sorts of horrible things have occurred from war to the killing of adulterous wives. I find killing in the name of honor creepy
I don’t think you can criticise honour because some cultures distort its meaning to justify behaviour that we find reprehensible. The original concept of honour incorporates integrity, courage, loyalty, decency and trustworthiness. These are desirable qualities, and the word is a useful one.
Some cultures have distorted the original meaning by passing it through the prisms of pride and control. But taking this very limited and twisted interpretation of the word and applying it to the whole virtue is a straw man argument. Like condemning democracy because North Korea calls itself a ‘democratic republic’.
You can research this for yourself. But in summary (not exhaustive),
Increased erectile disfunction among young men.
Porn addiction.
Young women reporting more experience of fear, discomfort & pain due to the sex acts being performed on them due to the sex acts their partners are learning in porn.
Trauma caused by seeing porn.
Women harmed & even killed by sex acts learned in porn or excused by porn
Increase in peer to peer child sexual abuse, where children are acting our acts seen in porn
Albert McGloan
7 months ago
“The modern proliferation of porn was a reaction to feminism, an attempt to intimidate women into subservience. Further, it was inherently totalitarian and genocidal.”
A necessary reminder that historians are no more trustworthy than pimps and pornographers.
John Galt Was Correct
7 months ago
The modern ‘proliferation’ of porn has nothing to do with trying to force subservience onto women. It’s a very simple thing. Never have so many people been single, therefore they are getting their rocks off using the internet. That’s really all there is to it. Female porn stars also get paid more than men apparently. How sexist.
There are no more female “porn stars”. Thanks to porn hub, the majority of pornographic images online are of trafficked women & children being raped. Porn hub is a rape factory: Shut It Down.
I’ve heard this charge before. Can you link or generally point to a reliable information source for this claim? There are acres and acres of porn videos online. I wonder how the claim of “the majority” can be confirmed.
Thanks.
William Shaw
7 months ago
I’ve no knowledge of Holywell Street but I can’t help finding its description as “a byword for filth” a strange statement.
Pornography, however much you disapprove of it, is only available because of widespread and common human desires without which our species would not have survived and proliferated.
As such, calling it “filth” seems like an effort to use shame to suppress nature.
Last edited 7 months ago by William Shaw
Dumetrius
7 months ago
True, it’s hard to fire the first shots in any rebellion with sticky & slippery hands.
That’s a scene that’s hard to unthink. Thanks a bunch!
Mike Downing
7 months ago
There’s also been the use of porn as a weapon in the battle between Cinema and TV.
In the 70’s when rules were far tighter for TV and cinema audiences were still in freefall, lots of soft-porn movies were made to lure reluctant punters back to cinemas.
Alas, lots of ‘serious ‘ directors also embraced this ‘freedom’ as they saw it as liberational. When you watch them now, most of these movies look as bad as the soft-porn equivalents and very few survive the giggle test.
Another ‘slippery problem’ with the porn/culture interface.
Ray Ward
7 months ago
Interesting. But please note how to spell the noun “peninsula”; “peninsular” is an adjective.
Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union, but post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it by and from the West in order to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. The rest is history.
That tactic was not new. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The pornogrification of our own society is no accident. Of course, there cannot be a “free” market in general but not in this, which is one of the many reasons why there must not be a “free” market in general. Every economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics. Sohrab Ahmari has come a long way since he was seconding Kevan Jones against me. Thank God for Opus Dei.
Ukraine understands the suppressive role of pornography, and in an astonishing departure from all previous practice, our Government casually admits live on-air that our Special Forces are fighting for this. The United States is supplying it with cluster bombs and with F16s, while, with American permission, the latter are also being supplied by Denmark and the Netherlands.
Britain is even worse, supplying Ukraine with the weapon of mass destruction that is depleted uranium, and doing so on a cross-party basis that appears to extend to every single member of the House of Commons. With that level of support, a World War has begun over whether Kupiansk should experience its fifth change of sovereignty in the last 100 years, between Vladimir Putin and this.
Sorry, I lost the link between depleted uranium in Ukraine and pornography, which is the subject of this article. Perhaps you intended your comment to be posted somewhere more appropriate?
Depleted uranium isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. It’s used in armour-piercing shells because it’s a very dense metal and, when travelling quickly, carries huge kinetic energy. It can’t be repurposed as a nuclear fission explosive. At least, not without the sort of technology and huge expense that was able to produce one anyway.
Depleted uranium has been used in APFSDS shells by NATO countries for over 30 years, including both Gulf Wars.
How ingenious to ratchet in this fountain of Putin apologia into an article about pornography.
But if you must do so, fat from being more moral, the Russian Army is infamous for using rape as a weapon of war.
David Morley
7 months ago
The primary aim is arousal, the secondary to ridicule human aspirations to virtue.
Which makes it not only like satire, but like comedy in general. It is also rather like looking around the unconscious mind of the societies in which we live: all the dark stuff, the funny stuff, the ridiculous and unacknowledged stuff is gathered there.
Last edited 7 months ago by David Morley
Steve Hall
7 months ago
The principle I’m not hearing much of here, although it might be implicit, is that without repression of base sexual drives and desires there’s not much by way of culture, and certainly very little excitement. That’s perhaps something liberals of any stripe don’t like to think about. Maybe it has little to do with freedom or gender power and a lot to do with the crass and ultimately debasing commercialisation of all human activities.
Porn is doomed–that is, porn as an industry. Already there are AIs capable of generating images of women (it’s usually women) which are photorealistic, yet are of women who never existed in the real world. It’s only a matter of time before that will be extended to full motion video, and when that happens, porn stars everywhere, of either sex, will be out of work. Porn will, as it was in Orwell, be generated entirely on machines; once the AIs are coded to include variations on all the myriad behaviors humans engage in during sex, and once those behaviors have been motion-captured, there will no longer be any need for actual human actors. The scripts, such as they are, will be extruded by Chat GPT or something similar, and then the virtual porn stars will be set to work. At that point, the porn industry will consist entirely of the director and his webmaster.
But, of course, even that won’t last. These suites of porn-generating software will be pirated and escape out into the digital ecosystem. Anyone who wants to will be able to create bespoke porn, homespun porn, right on their computers at home. The user will upload the porn stars they like, the AI will synthesize them to create permutations on the user’s archetypal sex object of choice, and then the user will pick from a menu of plots (Pizza Boy, At The Office, Aliens Made Them Do It, etc.), at which point the AI will cook for a bit and then spit out one-of-a-kind, perfectly tailored porn.
Oh, I’m sure some artisanal porn will still be made, to cater to those hipsters who care more about “authenticity”, but the vast industry of porn which currently exists will be killed stone dead.
All of which made me wonder if something similar might happen to prudery, i.e. AI taking on the mantle of the traditional anti-porn counter-industry as the internet continues its seemingly inexorable mirroring of the human psyche.
It’s already happened. I’ve seen bots arguing with each other about Donald Trump in the comments section of a video uploaded by bots onto Youtube.
Do you have a link? Not asking to challenge you, asking as I am interested to read it.
It was an ‘American Dad’ episode that had been illegally uploaded and these videos typically only stay up for a day or so. If you examine the comments section on Youtube you will quickly start to notice the bots commenting, particularly the p*rn bots. Apparently they harvest the most popular comments and then regurgitate them, which is why you’ll find p*rn bots posting very insightful comments. It’s jarring when you first notice it.
You’ll also be able to map the faces of anyone you like onto your creations.
Video killed the radio star
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs
Anything that spares sentient human beings from this kind of brutal exploitation is a good thing to me.
Will it though? That was my first thought too. Then I wondered about all the women today whose partners use porn, harder and harder porn, because it is no longer taboo and then push partners into recreating the acts for them. I don’t have them to hand, but I remember reading stories recently (here, I think) about the increasing numbers of women being seen in hospitals for injuries related to sex, the acts being a nal sex and various choking or stranglings.
Yes – interesting moral questions here. If it’s AI generated, with no humans involved, never being “real” at any point, how different is it to thoughts and fantasies which exist only in the imagination?
Disagree, it’s the character of the performers, and their individual eccentricities that makes for viewing. Virtual Reality interactive porn has a future though, and there you could get away with robotisation of the performers, though the real machines seem a long way off.
Tosh. The historical review is interesting but the conclusion, that modern porn is just like the old days, breezily poking fun at society and the establishment, is plain wrong. The sheer scale, intensity and ease of use of modern porn, and its consumption by the young, is profoundly damaging to society.
Profoundly damaging? How so? Evidence of the profound damage? I think what is at play here is that the writer finds porn immoral and disgusting so therefore it must be damaging. And, of course, how the dominant western societies dealt with sexuality can be seen as profoundly damaging. In the “old” days masturbation was seen as causing insanity and many parents bound their children hands at night. Now porn is really generally about masturbation and much of the anti porn rhetoric is a continuation of the condemnation of masturbation. Interesting, that the article never mentioned masturbation and reader comments so far have not mentioned masturbation. Is masturbation now the “unspeakable” moral violation? Of course, in past centuries Kellog had the answer to masturbation, eat more of his cereals.
And somehow, women bringing themselves off with vibrating bits of plastic is never an issue.
Can you explain the issue?
Your evidence is the runaway sexualization of Western culture. We now promote drag queens performing lewd routines to school children. What was once considered consenting adults-only behind closed doors is now paraded in the public square. The reason this is wrong is unabashedly moral and ethical, by which I mean, that what makes human life worthwhile is the separation between inspiring and corrupting, between sacred and profane. We socialize to eat and drink, we go in private to defecate. It’s spiritual, because we are spiritual beings. The rules may change and the guidelines shift, but creepiness is still creepy, and honor is still honorable.
Honor is still honorable? In the name of honor all sorts of horrible things have occurred from war to the killing of adulterous wives. I find killing in the name of honor creepy
I don’t think you can criticise honour because some cultures distort its meaning to justify behaviour that we find reprehensible. The original concept of honour incorporates integrity, courage, loyalty, decency and trustworthiness. These are desirable qualities, and the word is a useful one.
Some cultures have distorted the original meaning by passing it through the prisms of pride and control. But taking this very limited and twisted interpretation of the word and applying it to the whole virtue is a straw man argument. Like condemning democracy because North Korea calls itself a ‘democratic republic’.
You think that children viewing hard porn is not damaging? What planet are you on?
You can research this for yourself. But in summary (not exhaustive),
Increased erectile disfunction among young men.
Porn addiction.
Young women reporting more experience of fear, discomfort & pain due to the sex acts being performed on them due to the sex acts their partners are learning in porn.
Trauma caused by seeing porn.
Women harmed & even killed by sex acts learned in porn or excused by porn
Increase in peer to peer child sexual abuse, where children are acting our acts seen in porn
“The modern proliferation of porn was a reaction to feminism, an attempt to intimidate women into subservience. Further, it was inherently totalitarian and genocidal.”
A necessary reminder that historians are no more trustworthy than pimps and pornographers.
The modern ‘proliferation’ of porn has nothing to do with trying to force subservience onto women. It’s a very simple thing. Never have so many people been single, therefore they are getting their rocks off using the internet. That’s really all there is to it. Female porn stars also get paid more than men apparently. How sexist.
There are no more female “porn stars”. Thanks to porn hub, the majority of pornographic images online are of trafficked women & children being raped. Porn hub is a rape factory: Shut It Down.
Who downvoted this?
I’ve heard this charge before. Can you link or generally point to a reliable information source for this claim? There are acres and acres of porn videos online. I wonder how the claim of “the majority” can be confirmed.
Thanks.
I’ve no knowledge of Holywell Street but I can’t help finding its description as “a byword for filth” a strange statement.
Pornography, however much you disapprove of it, is only available because of widespread and common human desires without which our species would not have survived and proliferated.
As such, calling it “filth” seems like an effort to use shame to suppress nature.
True, it’s hard to fire the first shots in any rebellion with sticky & slippery hands.
That’s a scene that’s hard to unthink. Thanks a bunch!
There’s also been the use of porn as a weapon in the battle between Cinema and TV.
In the 70’s when rules were far tighter for TV and cinema audiences were still in freefall, lots of soft-porn movies were made to lure reluctant punters back to cinemas.
Alas, lots of ‘serious ‘ directors also embraced this ‘freedom’ as they saw it as liberational. When you watch them now, most of these movies look as bad as the soft-porn equivalents and very few survive the giggle test.
Another ‘slippery problem’ with the porn/culture interface.
Interesting. But please note how to spell the noun “peninsula”; “peninsular” is an adjective.
In Ukraine, they are tearing down statues of Alexander Pushkin, and renaming streets that had been named after him. But don’t worry, they are also going to legalise pornography to help pay for the war, with some people already taking payment to strip on camera via a “charity project” called Teronlyfans, giving the money to the Armed Forces.
Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union, but post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it by and from the West in order to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. The rest is history.
That tactic was not new. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The pornogrification of our own society is no accident. Of course, there cannot be a “free” market in general but not in this, which is one of the many reasons why there must not be a “free” market in general. Every economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics. Sohrab Ahmari has come a long way since he was seconding Kevan Jones against me. Thank God for Opus Dei.
Ukraine understands the suppressive role of pornography, and in an astonishing departure from all previous practice, our Government casually admits live on-air that our Special Forces are fighting for this. The United States is supplying it with cluster bombs and with F16s, while, with American permission, the latter are also being supplied by Denmark and the Netherlands.
Britain is even worse, supplying Ukraine with the weapon of mass destruction that is depleted uranium, and doing so on a cross-party basis that appears to extend to every single member of the House of Commons. With that level of support, a World War has begun over whether Kupiansk should experience its fifth change of sovereignty in the last 100 years, between Vladimir Putin and this.
Sorry, I lost the link between depleted uranium in Ukraine and pornography, which is the subject of this article. Perhaps you intended your comment to be posted somewhere more appropriate?
Depleted uranium isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. It’s used in armour-piercing shells because it’s a very dense metal and, when travelling quickly, carries huge kinetic energy. It can’t be repurposed as a nuclear fission explosive. At least, not without the sort of technology and huge expense that was able to produce one anyway.
Depleted uranium has been used in APFSDS shells by NATO countries for over 30 years, including both Gulf Wars.
How ingenious to ratchet in this fountain of Putin apologia into an article about pornography.
But if you must do so, fat from being more moral, the Russian Army is infamous for using rape as a weapon of war.
Which makes it not only like satire, but like comedy in general. It is also rather like looking around the unconscious mind of the societies in which we live: all the dark stuff, the funny stuff, the ridiculous and unacknowledged stuff is gathered there.
The principle I’m not hearing much of here, although it might be implicit, is that without repression of base sexual drives and desires there’s not much by way of culture, and certainly very little excitement. That’s perhaps something liberals of any stripe don’t like to think about. Maybe it has little to do with freedom or gender power and a lot to do with the crass and ultimately debasing commercialisation of all human activities.
This map reveals that Holywell Street ran parallel to Strand, in front of what is now the Australian High Commission, and not behind it. Credit: Lost London: a Victorian Street for Friggers and Radicals | http://www.unofficialbritain.com/lost-london-a-victorian-street-for-friggers-and-radicals/