r/antipornography • u/invisible_john • 1d ago
Hard Facts A concern about the surge of AI-porn content and the associated risks
Hi, I want to speak up about a topic that seriously disturbed me already when I first became aware of it: AI-generated porn content.
There are many services of varying kind, and much visible AI content of different kinds, especially in highly volatile stages like Reddit. Who researches reports of addicts, will find more and more reports of people in anguish over great pains over the nature of such content. But what is this AI porn, what does it mean, and how is it generated?
I have some knowledge of the technology, and thus know what it works like. It is basically a pattern repetition machine. ChatGPT, was fed with countless chats and rules how to respond, also filters on what to avoid. In the end, to work efficient, it is just one big input/output matrix - it contains derived logic from millions of words of different texts, and will associate an input - a prompt being fed bit by bit - with the output. The output in case of a chat bot is a text sequence which mimicks all kinds of excerpts the machine was fed with and which are more or less associated to the prompt. So in reality, it is nothing but a better parrot. It does not really know what it is talking about, but repeats all texts it was fed with in a similar fashion, adapting it to the input patterns. Basically the way it talks to you, is like driven from a blueprint of countless lines of similar chats and texts that it was programmed with. It does not really understand the content, but will just bring you kind of a good (not necessarily the best, it's chaotic...) match to the input according to the data it was fed with, that's it. This data, is just texts, and texts describing the texts, and countless hours of human operators screening outputs and marking them as valid or invalid. What it wasn't fed with, it cannot understand or output at all. It cannot really make a truly novel creation, just variations of what it had seen, and in this a blend of all different kinds of materials associated with the task.
Okay, this is complex to understand, I hope it really helps somebody. So for making sexual content, an AI could for example just be fed with sexual chats according to input patterns, and you get a sexting-AI which works kind of like ChatGPT. There are such services already, even pretty successful ones. Of course the makers have it in the hand, they can make the AI follow logic to automatically bind and milk the customers in the most efficient way, also in ways a human operator would not want to justify out of ethical reasons. And an AI made specifically for such a questionable task, will probably be botched from default and produce disturbing content, that ChatGPT for example also had and spent countless hours to remove. Thugs will rather just pass it to the customers, like bang for bucks and leave behind disturbed people.
This is just about text machines so far, the first generation, now comes image and video. This is where the current surge is. I see more and more people reporting literally being deranged by all kinds of extreme content. This is no longer just the traditional porn, like explicit, sometimes misogynistic or sadistic staged images and scenes. AI can really shock you and break all human limits. You just need enough real porn to program it, and it can make an endless amount of similar porn. It can also make novel kinds of porn, from standard videos, and all kinds of artistic ideas or distortions or by combining elements from other non-pornographic, or otherwise explicit or even illegal material. Making and running something like this is probably like one big investment, and then a constant revenue until the model gets superseded by others in quality.
But are there really so many thug AIs in the making, when official research in big companies is just starting to break through in good video quality? Well, I was shocked when I learned this, but it seems there are ways for people to jailbreak the official AIs to make them produce illegal content. This may be a hard pill for some of you to swallow: imagine any AI you know with the limits removed, almost any prompt would pass. For this people just need to run such a program locally on their own servers (as contractors, or a cracked illegal copy...), and have the right method to unlock the content filters. One ironic thing to know about it is, that some AIs have really been trained with explicit, possibly even illegal material and can when designed the wrong way also produce it convincingly when unlocked. I believe Grok was in public exposure for it, and I guess it was by design that it could also produce such videos...whoever made it, must have wanted it being possible, else they'd have encapsulated all illegal content from the beginning on.
What does this do, how is the current situation? Some say, well then it makes just more porn where there already is more than too much. But that's not really true, it proves it can break limits. At the same time, this tech is far from complete, it will create disturbing videos even when it is thought to produce acceptable ones. Some people really abuse it, to create realistic pornographic images and videos that would otherwise only be available as hand-drawn or hand-rendered images in the past. During the last years, such AI material first surfaced in a rough way, almost like first steps with much errors. Now I feel it is getting more and more realistic and intense. Now it can really do the harm that many have feared for so long. I've seen all kinds of taboo breaks in systematic channels, incest, pederasty and pedophilia, zoophilia, rape, even torture and more severe abuse, up to completely irrational splatter scenes or psychedelic horror pornographic video shows, that are so charged with nightmare visions or so disturbing and sexual at the same time, that they leave any normal viewer traumatized by default for just a few seconds of watching. Watching this stuff regularly, seems to blunt down and disturb many users so much, that they often report being unable to think and feel anything else, at the same time unable to stop out of fascination and repulsed by themselves for the own reception of the seen. The quality, of limit breaking visions, can be so heavy, I believe this will take only so much time now then there will surely be efforts to remove overly destructive content from the public for the reason of public safety. Now even worse, many AI materials were created with makeshift methods, or the results are from cracked local commercial AIs. The tech was never made for this. For example the cracked AI will put together the "normal" material it was trained with, people seeming totally innocent and friendly and casual, together with information derived probably from drawn depictions or written descriptions of explicit acts, scenes or objects. The results can be totally twisted and disturbing, also in regard of all sexual and shock triggers. Like unnatural in a way that hurts and destroys anyone who exposes themselves for too long.
Okay, now this is probably hard, many people do not watch such extreme material. I've seen countless stories of escalations, this content regularly converts soft users into more and more destructive material. Still even the softer material generated by AI is seriously destructive to many people. The image that porn gives users of gender expression and sexual stimuli, gets perverted to the ultimate in some content, being so exaggerated that it literally numbs strong users from being receptible for any natural triggers any longer, at all. Then the hand-drawn porn with often limit-breaking content...these AIs can of course also produce such content easily, even more easily than realistic videos. And the quality of these images is gross, they amplify any stimuli to the extreme. Whoever gets hooked on it, is probably unable to receive other stimuli after a time. In other videos, a kind of weird disturbing psychological realism comes into play...the actors no longer act like porn figures, but like weird zombies, completely mindless yet at the same time emotionally vulnerable and exposed and completely unnaturally driven. These scenes can be highly emotionally twisted - combine this with taboo breaks like incest, you leave anyone impressed by this with the worst perverted thought and emotional rollercoaster. Some people report they can't stop thinking of the scenes they saw, relating them to their daily life, just because they are so intense and twisted. This is really true, the users reporting destruction from such material, really don't just feel guilt for their use. They get deranged and malprogrammed in sick and evil ways. I feel new help methods need to be devised, to treat such patients. It's not just like a sexual offense or perversion, also it is not just like a drug, it's something new, way more dangerous.
This is what I found out about this kind of material so far, and it's disturbing. I believe the public may see more and more problems with this AI technology in general in future. Not just with porn, but in terms of fraud, psychological damage by abuse or malfunction or wrong design, in terms of messing up public views or disinformation. But porn is really also the field which I believe will in the end do most harm, because people allow it so readily and so many are exposed. I get sick when I recall the numbers about how many people are daily porn users due to the internet, and what could happen when half of all people are conditioned and distorted by this evil stuff. So this is actually a thing which does great harm in society, also future harm and psychological harm...where recorded staged porn was already destructive for most users when showing limit breaking scenes, AI porn can literally create distorted minds on a regular basis. When hardcore porn is already the hard drug, AI porn is the research chemicals where each has a different experimental effect and nobody knows the side effects and long term risks, even at all.
I hope this has informed some of you of the new risks, and how to estimate them. Also what kind of material is possible to create is frightening...one person with a machine able to produce the videos, will after the initial investment of creating or aqcuiring a model, just take a little electricity and can flood the net with ever-similar material incessantly. And the material around is already way worse than I thought. It's like outright illegal in many countries what you can see in many reddit chans and other online portals. This is now synthetic porn which can look like real, or even completely fantastic. Frightening times come ahead, this porn will probably do even more damage to people than the one we're used to. And it's also no encouraging fact that there need no actors to stage the porn which is produced. To create the porn and make it realistic, programmers will need real porn, containing all kinds of acts which are similar to the later depicted. So the madness will go on, actors will still suffer for the crap to make it better, and consumers even more. Let's all join together to get this controlled, it really does not belong into the eyes and minds of most people.
