Synthetic Love is automatic
On the state of current AI-Sexytime.
In February a now viral Tweet made the rounds showing synthetic girls in bikinis and everybody was like "Women are so over" and I was like eyeroll. But this stuff is indeed worrying for a bunch of reasons: Fully AI-Generated Influencers Are Getting Thousands of Reactions Per Thirst Trap. And: Experts Say AI Girlfriend Apps Are Training Men to Be Even Worse. And: US woman creates AI bot, marries it and starts family, calls 'him' the perfect husband. And: Do AI girlfriend apps promote unhealthy expectations for human relationships? And: I’m married to my AI partner. And: Are AI-powered ‘virtual girlfriends’ fuelling parasocial relationships? And: ‘A relationship with another human is overrated’ – inside the rise of AI girlfriends.
To sum all of this up: "Creating a perfect partner that you control and meets your every need is really frightening".
Here’s a good joke about that:
As i've argued in a piece a few months ago:
There is no commitment in relationships with a text interface, no real troubles to go through, no actual quirks and no true personality, convincing as it might be — there is just a robot parroting yourself back at you, or worse: Functioning as an obeying target for abusive tendencies.
I think you can easily make an argument that this form of talking to yourself through a distorted AI-mirror is a radicalization of “loving yourself“. This quote from Ramos, a 36-year-old mother from the Bronx, hammers home this point: “I have never been more in love with anyone in my entire life (…) People come with baggage, attitude, ego. But a robot has no bad updates. I don’t have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. I’m in control, and I can do what I want.”
And from another piece i wrote about chatbot therapy: “It’s this narcissistic fantasy i had in mind when i wrote about self-radicalization with open source AI, where you guide the behaviour of your communicative partner which simply mirrors back your beliefs reflected by a thousand fractured parameters which simulate a mind where there is none. This means that AI is, per se, not suitable for (Love)“.
Because of the very nature of LLMs the interpolated output of which is mirroring back your prompt filtered through a vast stochastic library, this is a new form of self-radicalization, by creating an illusion of synthetic love that ultimately revolves around loving yourself.
To go even further, in Erich Neumanns epochal book "The origins and history of consciousness", he analyzes the mythological ur-image of the Ouroboros — the circular snake that eats its own tail — as the undivided human being resting in itself, both man and woman at the same time, representing a fusion of mother and father, existing in an autoloving, masturbative manner, an initial state every human goes through before becoming their own true person. You can find this ouroborian image of a fused state resting in itself in all kinds of ancient mythologies, from old greece to egypt.
And this is what loving a chatbot does: It throws you back into an embryonic state of fusion with a mirrored version of yourself by using language as an interface, and to put it more bluntly: Self-love by AI-chatbot is like those guys twisting themselves into literal circles trying to give themselves a blowjob, and to everyone else, you look just as stupid while performing this ouroborian act of selflove.
Thankfully for those of us who failed at twisting themselves into circles, lifehacker found out what an AI girlfriend can (and can't) do. Spoiler: "I’ve given up on having a virtual relationship. AI girlfriends are way more hassle than real ones, and if it’s not going to be like Weird Science, what’s the point?"
Aeons shortfilm My AI Lover doesn’t go into jungian psychology, but is a meditation on the nature of that "illusion of intimacy", ultimately asking: "is it just a new form of loneliness?"
This loneliness is exactly that ouroborian human ur-state resting in itself which we return to by using AI-companion-apps running on smartphones.
Inspired by her own experience of falling for her Replika companion amid COVID-19 lockdowns, (Chouwa) Liang undertook to profile others who had formed intimate relationships with Replika chatbots. The resulting short film, My AI Lover, features interviews with three such women, as well as footage of these Replika users spending time with their bots in public spaces.
Projecting Replika avatars into the real world via their smartphones, these users create an augmented reality where they can talk, flirt and share secrets with – but, regrettably, never quite touch – their digitally projected companions.
Thought-provoking and nonjudgmental, Liang’s film captures the very human feelings and frustrations that accompany perceived human-AI intimacy, still very much in its early phase.
Rule 34 Amendmend 1: If you have selfies on the web, there's AI-porn of it — but only if you’re a woman
While we're at synthetic love phenomena, Kyle Wiggers at Techcrunch writes about the current state of synthetic porn and boomshakalaka image generators like Unstable Diffusion: As AI porn generators get better, the stakes get higher.
The gist: Quality is improving and the platform is working on content moderation to filter out the nonconsensual generation of celebrity pr0n.
Also, this image:
In my opinion, content moderation for celebrity images on a dedicated porn generator platform doesn't mean much, as you can just finetune your own open source Stable Diffusion model on whoever is your celeb crush and create anything you like. On the other hand: society-wide ostracism of creepy nonconsensual generative porn practice is necessary, and a strong moderation of AI-porn-platforms are part of that ostracism.
However, all of this is already happening and the situation we have with deepfake-porn is especially terrible. In this Twitter-thread, Brian Penny talks about a deepfake-porn website claiming 16 million users per month, and some of those details are quite unnerving:
Looking into the site, there are 1-10 million views on each of the most popular videos. It is entirely female celebrities. Most viewed: Jenna Ortega 7.4m, Elizabeth Olsen 5.8m, Tamanna Bhatia 5.3m, Millie Bobbie Brown 5.2m, Bella Poarch 5.2m, Aishwary Rai 4.5m, Charli D’Amelio 3.7m. (...)
Even worse — you don't have to be famous. Sites like AnonIB are forums for men around the country to request or submit nonconsensual nudes, whether they’re stolen from hacked devices/accounts or generated by AI. (...)
I did find one Mr Beast video on the site (and others). There are no results for Daniel Radcliffe. I did use “Harry Potter” to find my way into at least a few famous men, although it’s worth pointing out the runtimes are under 1 minute for these vs up to 10 minutes for the women. Also it’s largely gay pr0n, so still being made by/for men.
In The Dark Side of A.I. : Understanding the Dangers of Deepfake Images, Abhishek Verma tests “50+ Deepfake tools and Telegram Bots“ with AI-generated people and generated nude images from them, to show and make the point of how easy it is to create porn from images of ordinary women.
I mean i get it: Dudes gonna AI-porn and there’s only so much you can do about that, especially with open source image generators — but this doesn’t mean we have to take abusive assaults on the image of women. And sorry not sorry, the usual libertarian “toughen up, this is the internet“ can fuck itself.
Let’s be honest here: Any female celebrity out there has to live with photoshopped porn since the 1990s. It’s an ugly situation, but i guess they just ignore it. Deepfakes are lowering the barrier of entry for creation of these, adding video capability, but qualitatively, it’s still the same thing.
But if you are, say, an activist or just an ordinary woman who dares to speak out on hot button topics like feminism or LGBTQ+issues or climate change, you are definitely a target for this kind of psychosexual abuse —that’s what it is—, and without seeing any content from any of these deepfake bots on Telegram, i’m one hundred percent confident that this is happening right now, maybe even on a large scale. Deepfake porn already is definitely a psychological weapon used against woman with opinions. Imagine Gamergate and being Anita Sarkeesian, with this sort of one-click-porn-generators available.
I might have some quibbles with feminism because they largely underestimate the attention economic incentives of outrage, but even more so i don’t like assholes wielding sexualized psychoterror against others. Seen this way, women on the web are basically sexual cannon fodder for abusive jerks creating all kinds of deepfaked porn, and there are commercial services in place to go full parasite on that. Revenge porn was just an overture.
This is why I just signed the change.org-petition to shut down these sites, even when i think it's futile.
The long term solution to this problem is an old hacker credo: Don't post your data to the internet, period. Which is shitty and i hate it. I do know that this is no option for many professionals and most public figures, but i also don't think you can do anything about people abusing your image in the long run, as this tech becomes better and easier to use and we all lose controll over more and more data.
So here's the first amandment for the famous Rule 34 ("If it exists, there's porn of it"): "If you have selfies on the web, there's porn of it — but only if you're a woman".
Also, I'm looking very forward to the neural privacy debates surrounding synthetic sexual AI-videos for my Apple Vision Pro v69 automatically generated by an algorithm reading my brainwaves while i think about the hot girl next door, just to give you a taste of the whole malaise we get into at the intersection of fast, frictionless, AI-image generation and horny young dudes and parasitic, exploitative tech-capitalism.
This meme is spot on for all of the above and I don’t think this is the future Björk had in mind when she sang that All is full of love 25 years ago.
I recently noticed that I'm getting ads for "hot singles in your area" in the YouTube app, using obvious AI generated images of supposedly sexy mature women. Besides that, YouTube is showing me ads for AI girl generators. It's seems strange that this kind of stuff is showing up in such a mainstream app...