Drew Harwell in the Washington Post reports on how the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence in creating realistic images of human beings is, predictably, being used to satisfy that ancient urge: to create highly realistic computer-generated pornography. This is really a new way of doing something very old: Pornographic drawings have been around as long as humans could draw. For creators and sellers of porn for profit — or, for that matter, for personal use — realistic AI can drastically lower the costs and risks of making porn, whether it be hard-core or soft-core, still images or explicit films. Even there, however, every advance in the technology for making and sharing porn for money also lowers the barriers to entry for amateurs, so even in purely commercial terms, the ‘blessing’ of AI porn is mixed.
We are not, of course, simply homo economicus. To the extent that there is a sliver of good news here, it is that the porn business is degrading, sometimes abusive, and often a gateway to worse things, so the fewer people who are in front of cameras for that purpose, the better. That is doubly true where child porn is concerned. But just as with sending robots to fight our wars, enabling the creation of cheaper and perhaps more addicting forms of pornography has its own problems. Even leaving aside the obvious drawbacks of serving the sexual desires of pedophiles, pornography simply feeds into our social death spiral of unmarriageable and alienated men and declining rates of marriage, birth, and family. It is vital that we stop raising young men to treat women as disposable sex objects, which requires that we not raise them to see women as disposable sex objects — which is the entire point of pornography. Moreover, before the internet, it required a lot of effort and no small amount of money to amass a significant collection of porn. Teenage boys might sneak the occasional glance at a Playboy or a dirty movie, and that was also bad, but it did not have the same ubiquitous formative role in their thinking as a steady stream of digital porn. This is apt to be yet another monster whose creation we regret.