2. Lots of people like that stuff. Who are you, and who are OP to decide what content gets produced and consumed? The morality police?
3. The irony of complaining about that stuff on a site dedicated to the industry that platforms that kind of stuff is just astounding. Perhaps the real problem is not the content, but the medium that allows its mass dissemination?
4. The material misery that would be created by shifting entire industries out of work (if even for a "few" years to who-knows-how-long) would be measurably greater than the micro-miseries of the kinds of things OP seems to complain about.
No sane person doing this will push reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions.
It’s only true for them. Not for us.
From a moral perspective, a lot. From an amoral pragmatic perspective, not a lot – unless you think it'll somehow benefit you to give people the ability to effectively seek such things? Hah.
i don’t mean this as confrontational as it’s going to come across, but this is nonsense. it isn’t ineffective at all.
would you mind expanding on what you mean?
The whole point of social norms is that they define some boundaries of what is acceptable and not in some community. If someone violates the social boundaries because "they are looking for some way to make a living in any way possible" (which is not an excuse, I mean, "any way possible" would also justify stealing, robbing and murder to make a living) then they themselves choose to be "not us" and deserve to be shunned by our community.
This also does have a certain effect at solving this problem - if you know that telling people what you want to do is going to result in losing reputation and refusing to assist you, then that does act as some deterrent. The social pressure reduces the likelihood that people will choose to join that industry, and it reduces the likelihood that people in the industry will refuse some activities even if they are profitable. Even from pure game theory and evolutionary psychology we can observe that 'punishing defectors' is a viable strategy that gets some results.
It is important that we do not legitimize or normalize unethical behavior just because someone is trying to make a living through marketing; so whenever someone says "ah, we're all in the same boat, isn't everyone doing this?" it's important to loudly remind everyone that no, we're not all acting like this - ethics is a thing and proper people refuse to do improper things.
That sounds more like marquis de sade than nietzche imo.
i think nietzche is amoral only when what is moral is arbitrary and self deprecating.
Wait for first kid who dies trying an AI generated "challenge" or the first violent mob killing caused by AI generated outrage porn. AI generated video porn may look like triple breasted whores of Eroticon6 today, but with sufficient influencer content (playground videos) and porn (dungeon) footage, I suspect you can generate more than enough novel and relevant (child S&M) porn for everyone.
It's still a bad thing for humanity at large but it may have a knock-on effect of pacifying people who would otherwise pay significant amounts of money for new content to be produced. If we can placate those people, at least the money dries up for those other sources and maybe they would move on to doing something other than harming children.
Tricky spot, to be sure.
This is extremely unscientific, I know.
There are all of these unwritten but extremely obvious rules that dictate what is acceptable & what is not.
...so?
Should my preferences of what I find acceptable and not acceptable in that domain somehow influence what content others are allowed to consume? If the creation of that content actively causes harm, then sure. That content should be restricted. If we are restricting it because you think it's icky and it might lead to other things you find icky than we took a wrong turn somewhere.
That's like saying we should outlaw mozzarella cheese because it might lead to the consumption of triple cheese sausage pizza. Neither of those acts hurt me, so why should I care about people choosing to participate in either?
I don’t have to get off to enjoy obliterating people back in the quake days, but porn is a different psychological mechanism entirely.
I’m trying to assume you’re asking the question to spur conversation, and not that you actually hold the view that watching child porn, whether synthetic or not, is morally equivalent to playing video games.
Also, whose morality are we talking about here? Morality is all over the map depending on which culture you ask. Each cares more or less about sanctity, divinity, loyalty, freedom etc.
And you're correct, my personal opinion on this is irrelevant.
I think you're less trying to assume this, and more trying to cast aspersions without breaking HN rules. Barely.
You say "video games allow you to shoot and stab thousands of virtual people", this isn't true. In actuality, video games allow you to shoot & stab thousands of virtual _men_. Replace the baddies in a game with women and or children and people will go mental.
Same thing with media; Television/movies - plenty of men are brutally gored on screen with no one batting an eye, but generally the camera will cut away if there's violence against women &| children. The only time you do see it is when they want to make a very strong impact ie "this guy killing this woman is a V E R Y bad guy, and you know that because it's not just some anonymous dude he's goring".
There's plenty of hypocrisy in it; Game of Thrones people famously complained about the Cersei rape scene (also in the books, although more ambiguous) meanwhile the average episode spends a good portion of the time showing us the insides of three dozen guys' ribcages.
Or Altered Carbon where in the book series where Takeshi is forced into a simulation as a woman, where he is tortured; media at the time said they were glad that it didn't make it into the show because it would be "mysogynistic torture porn" - apparently none of the gratuitous violence against male characters was considered to be bad.
And _that's_ why it's different. Because certain types of porn could be generated that infringe in the protected classes that society creates.
Very common in the liberal West where we think of ourselves as being above taboos and caring about divinity, except we still do very much. E.g. digging up the corpse of a dead relative and having sex with them doesn't harm anybody, but is highly taboo. Having sex with a dead family pet, doesn't harm anybody, but highly taboo. Siblings on contraception having sex, zero harm, but very taboo. Hentai of protagonists who could be underage, zero harm, very taboo. etc. etc.
Women, children, LGBTQ members, the involuntarily unhoused, minorities, Muslims and many others are all currently sacred groups whose sanctity you cannot violate even in a work of art and fiction.
So back to my point, it has nothing to do with harm, it's all about sanctity.
Even video game violence would do it but a vast majority of the experiences are easily identifiable as cartoonish. So it may give you the idea that you slaughtered a 1000 NPCs but each kill is nowhere close to the visceral reality. The games which have a focus on realistic killing, either do so to aliens/monsters or they are so off-putting that they never manage to find a large audience.
In any case I look at the public discourse about war and violence and I find that people are eager to jump into fights and don't think twice about supporting their government in bombing and killing the shit out of other populations. They couch it in some shallow moral argument. Often the deterrent to war isn't some moral concern but the fact that the other side also has significant weaponry and might inflict casualties on your side as well.
In any case I hear a lot of this overton window concept and there is a lot of merit in the argument that excessive amount of AI generated deviant porn content will eventually make people think that all this depravity is normal and we should just look the other way.
Is there any evidence that it would normalize that behavior? That sounds like a moral intuition, not something backed by evidence. And even if the mind of the watcher was warped, is that any of your business as long as it's not increasing harm to society? In the West we let adults of sound mind harm themselves in lots of ways they choose, from eating terrible food to doing drugs to drinking to smoking to extreme sports. It's their body, their choice. As long as society doesn't have to bear the cost of it, like say with drunk driving, in the West we have accepted that adults have the right to do what they want to themselves.
> Even video game violence would do it but a vast majority of the experiences are easily identifiable as cartoonish. So it may give you the idea that you slaughtered a 1000 NPCs but each kill is nowhere close to the visceral reality. The games which have a focus on realistic killing, either do so to aliens/monsters or they are so off-putting that they never manage to find a large audience.
Great, then really deprived AI-generated porn will likely see the same lack of adoption and stay a niche phenomenon for a few people in a basement somewhere. What's the problem?
> In any case I look at the public discourse about war and violence and I find that people are eager to jump into fights and don't think twice about supporting their government in bombing and killing the shit out of other populations. They couch it in some shallow moral argument. Often the deterrent to war isn't some moral concern but the fact that the other side also has significant weaponry and might inflict casualties on your side as well.
Were people not eager to jump into fights and support their jingoistic government rhetoric prior to the creation of violent videogames? Do you have anything to back that popularity of violent videogame led to a rise in ultra-nationalism and aggressive foreign policy?
> In any case I hear a lot of this overton window concept and there is a lot of merit in the argument that excessive amount of AI generated deviant porn content will eventually make people think that all this depravity is normal and we should just look the other way.
Is there a lot of merit to that argument? How did you decide that?
Morally objectionable acts require (IMO) a victim.
I think it's essential that before we decide that we are going to limit what people can do we determine if what they're doing is actually hurting someone to the extent that society should limit that behavior or if we're just limiting their behavior because it's different from ours and we don't like it.
In my personal moral worldview, if a person can simulate a universe with no actual people in it in which they commit whatever debauchery they feel necessary without causing harm to anyone else, I say have fun. It has literally no measurable impact on me, so it would be immoral for me to insert my personal preferences into the matter.
Also why is an AI ultimately responsible for a child choosing to perform some challenge? What if the 10 year old child played amogus & then decided to re-enact irl?
I'd say it's less the source of a challenge or false factoid etc and more a cultural problem of no monitoring kids enough; parents give their kids phones & let 'em use TikTok to their heart's content cause it keeps the kids quiet. And immature kids love TT because it's easy to generate clout and therefore dopamine.
Q: Of the kids in my 13 year-old's class, what % would you guess have WhatsApp on their phone?
Spoiler: "If you live in a country in the European Economic Area (which includes the European Union), and any other included country or territory (collectively referred to as the European Region), you must be at least 16 years old (or such greater age required in your country) to register for and use WhatsApp"[0]
A significant percent of adults are also susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories... see QAnon. Now allow AI automation to target individuals and small groups to "optimize engagement" with apparently personal communications using A/B statistics. Everywhere all the time, because it's cheap, because it pays the rent. Some of them will be drawn to artificially generated violence inciting agit prop, because it works. There are negative externalities to that.
My 10 year old child just got fucked and I deserve vengeance. I want to see heads roll and I want to see the world burn.
...in the context of the texts that the LLM is built on. Not in the context of the real world, where P('Peru is a country') = 1.0 and P('Peru is a cat') = #cats named Peru / #things in the world (or something).
But if a LM looks up a topic and sees contradictory answers, and none of them is much more reputable, maybe it can still use that information to say it is inconclusive. Knowing a topic is controversial or not present in search engines is useful information. chatGPT would hallucinate, a search + chatGPT solution would refrain from hallucinations. It could also give references.
"Statistically correct" gobbledygook that signifies nothing.
One is that objective truth is internally self-consistent. If one AGW denier claims it's the sun, and another AGW denier claims the NASA falsifies the data, and they support each other, then you can judge these are conflicting claims and decrease your trust.
Also, false claims usually focus on attacking competing claims than to come up with a coherent alternative. And they tend to be more vague in specifics (to avoid inconsistency), compare for example vague claims about all scientific institutions faking data vs Exxon files containing detailed reports for executives.
I don’t know. People already pump out a ton of bullshit from content farms then litter their web pages with ads and last-click attribution.
End user value isn’t what drives a lot of “information” businesses. See any recipes site or “news” that’s regurgitating what someone “newsworthy” tweeted.
It will be interesting to see how search engines adjust. Maybe someone will make the GetHuman (https://gethuman.com/) equivalent of search.
They may (and, frankly, should) still feel something about what they're putting out into the world, but they can more easily blind themselves to it and just tell themselves almost everyone's doing something dumb to make a living and they're not even the ones actually "doing it" themselves.
No they're not. They're exploitatively torturing other people, while deploying machines to mine the coal. They deserve any bad thing that happens to them, because they have the education and resources to do better but choose not to.
I don't care that they're human. If they have agency and resources and leverage those in such willfully zero-sum fashion as you describe, they've chosen to gamble on profiting from the suffering of others. Empathy and kindness are good things, but empathy for willfully abusive people is maladaptive.
> Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, “engaging” tweet threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts.
I think there's a bright side if people can't compete with machines on stuff like that. People shouldn't be doing that shit. It's bad for them. When somebody makes a living (or thinks they're making a living, or hopes to make a living) pumping out bullshit motivational quotes, carefully constructed outrage takes, or purportedly expert content about topics they know nothing about, it's the spiritual equivalent of them doing backbreaking work breathing in toxic dust and fumes.
We can hate them for choosing to pollute the world with that kind of work, but they're still human beings being tortured in a mental coal mine. Even if they choose it over meaningful work like teaching, nursing, or working in a restaurant. Even if they choose it for shallow, greedy reasons. Even if they choose it because they prefer lying and cheating over honest work. No matter why they're doing it and whose fault it is, they're still human beings being wasted and ruined for no good reason.