questionasker
No bio...
User ID: 2119
questionasker
1yr ago
So discussion of deepfakes should account for the fact that they aren't particularly novel.
Maybe. Couldn't it be true that these types of images were unethical to create/consume for as long as they've existed, and there just wasn't proper recognition of the problem?
Another commenter brought up the fact that perhaps a significant reason as to why at least distributing deepfake porn is immoral could be because, by nature of the fact that one makes them openly accessible on the internet in order to be distributed, one makes it likely that whomever the deepfakes depict will find out that such porn is being made of them, and it is specifically the psychological harm inflicted by knowing porn like this exists of oneself that accounts for (or accounts for the majority) of why such porn is unethical for people to make or consume. This would also explain why previous iterations of 'fake nudes' weren't as highly debated: because they weren't as commonly distributed until now (perhaps because they weren't as realistic, and thus not as popular).
questionasker
1yr ago
So is imagining what someone looks like naked/fantasizing about having sex with them a similarly non-coercive crime, then? Either way probably 'victimless' is the wrong word to use, but I'm not sure how much effect that has on my problem.
here doesn't seem to be a principled distinction between good impressions/drawings/etc. and deepfakes.
Maybe really good drawings of a non-consenting person's likeness having sex/naked are wrong to make as well, and should be illegal.
questionasker
1yr ago
Without meaning to move the goal posts, a single one of the main trio of characters (and the perhaps overly socially-conscious/goody-goody one at that) caring about slavery, therefore clarifying that at least in universe its something that the characters could conceivably care about, but for the most part, just don't, is almost funnier.
questionasker
1yr ago
societies that are supposed to mimick medieval ones
Harry Potter is set in basically the modern day (the late 90s to early 2000s, to be exact) and the main setting is meant to evoke the experience of students at a mid to late 20th century British boarding school, one perhaps a few decades 'behind the times' of the actual year during which the story takes place. I agree that more fiction that mimicks historical societies in setting should try not to transplant modern morality onto said setting, but that is not the situation of Harry Potter. The existence of slavery and the idea that a person who is basically a young millennial going through high school is so nonplussed by the widespread slavery that exists in his world actually is almost funnily bad.
Regardless of whether or not transwomen should coinhabit women's prisons, whether or not they do or do not seems like a problem of minuscule ultimate importance.
Then why do trans activists push for it so hard? Just concede it then.
I should clarify that what I mean is that it seems like a problem of minuscule ultimate importance to a person who claims to care about women's issues generally. It's clear why this would be a significant issue for trans activists, but not clear to me why it should be a problem of similar magnitude to women's rights activists in general, as Rowling claims to be.
To put it another way, trans activists care about issues that trans people face. They believe that one of the main issues that trans people face is the fact that elements of society do not recognize them as their chosen gender. They believe that this lack of recognition is expressed in many ways, for example in the prison system, via being compelled to inhabit the prison of their biological sex rather than their chosen gender. They might also believe that i.e. trans women who are made to inhabit men's prisons suffer greatly at an individual level, and care specifically about alleviating the suffering of members of their tribe. Thus it seems clear to me how this issue slots into the greater project of trans activists of having society recognize them as their chosen gender rather than assigned at birth gender.
However, JK Rowling claims to be interested first and foremost in women's rights in general. If she perceived the most important problem facing society to be the potential advancement of trans rights, and thus stated that her main mission was the frustration of the advancement of trans rights, in just the same way that trans activists have as their central mission being pro-advancement of trans rights, it would make sense for her to care about i.e. 'should they be assigned to the prison of their chosen gender or not' just as much as trans activists do but in an equal and opposite sense. But JK Rowling doesn't claim to be an anti-trans-rights-activist, or proclaim that the potential increase in trans acceptance is of significant importance in general. She even claims to be for trans-rights in some sense. What she most specifically claims to be is a feminist, and that her main mission is women's rights in general. Yet, she makes an almost disproportionate amount of her online presence and activism about combating these specific areas like trans people being admitted to womens prisons and etc.
A rational person who cared most about women's rights but did not specifically support some areas of trans-rights would still not spend as much time caring or thinking about these specific trans issues as Rowling does: there are bigger fish to fry facing women even in her home country, but especially around the world.
questionasker
1yr ago
Populations incapabale of planning many months into the future died off any time their migration crossed a temperate climate.
Did the path taken from africa to europe really pass into 'cold winter' areas? Africa -> the Levant -> Turkey -> Greece ends in europe without passing through any places that even really receive snow. Plus there are temperate climates in Africa. Are there really any climates on the way to Europe from Africa that you couldn't find i.e. in the temperate regions of south africa? If so, why aren't i.e. Zulus as high average IQ as white europeans, considering their ancestors would have had to make similar migrations? And furthermore, 'cold winters' aren't the only source of long famines. Couldn't there be plenty of (and different types of) causes of famines in the tropical parts of africa to encourage selection toward individuals capable of long-term planning?
questionasker
1yr ago
Appreciate the lesswrong link. I'm interested in conjecture and wild predictions and I don't particularly care about accuracy so its exactly what I'm looking for.
questionasker
1yr ago
I'd advise to forget all the stuff about "the brain is like a computer".
The brain is a computer and I'm not sure how you can meaningfully argue that it isn't
questionasker
1yr ago
You seem dismissive of your own comment, but the last three paragraphs here seem incredibly profound to me. Thanks for your interesting reply.
questionasker
1yr ago
Looking forward to your further answers and elaborations.
I've always scored around 130
In the interest of calibrating my understanding of this, anecdotal experience by anecdotal experience, may I ask what score you received on the SAT?
questionasker
1yr ago
Interesting perspective, thanks for the response.
questionasker
1yr ago
Along those lines, I'd say the only context in which the information that you've generated (hence your information) of a perfect prediction of the appearance of my naked body can become equivalent to the actual information of the actual appearance of my naked body is if you can see me naked and can confirm that it's a perfect prediction.
I suppose you're right about this.
questionasker
1yr ago
I suppose you're right.
If someone (not dearly beloved but clinically demented) cannot/isn't willing to distinguish real and fake images based on context, or just has strong emotional reactions to highly-likely-fake images and can change attitude towards me on their basis, that person is a long-term liability and should be discarded.
I think the matter is more subtle than this.
I obviously think most people can, on the abstract level, distinguish between real and fake images. However I'm not willing to use this fact to jump to the conclusion that most people, including many people valuable enough to keep in one's life, wouldn't have strong emotional reactions to some types of even fake images depicting a person, especially images of a sexual nature. And again however much on conscious level they know the images are fake, I feel like the reactions many people have to these images could at least somewhat change their attitude towards the person ostensibly depicted in a real and meaningful way.
I think most people think differently about a person after fantasizing about having sex with them, than they did before such a fantasy crossed their minds. I certainly think that most people would think differently about them, and would almost certainly in some unconscious way treat them differently, after fantasizing about such a thing 100 times. And I think as much is even more true if they've had access to photorealistic depictions of this fantasy that are fake but produced by something other than their imagination, in other words, images that are much easier for their sexual-lizard-brain to believe are real even if they on a higher more abstract level know that the images are fake.
Other than that, you're right that legally these things shouldn't literally be banned. It was a mistake to include that set of questions in the body of my post. And you're right that I think most of the online discourse surrounding the subject misses the mark one way or another, which is nothing new when it comes to subtle moral/ethical issues.
Aside from all this, though, the disconnect I felt existed in my intuition was resolved by another commenter, who described the delineation as such: anything in my head or on my hard-drive, and exclusively in my head or on my hard-drive, is entirely my business. But as soon as I i.e. start to publish online what is on my hard drive, the probability that persons depicted in even fake pornography will find out that someone has done as much starts to approach 1. And, that's where I've started to cross a line. This is more or less what the quoted 'steelman' arguments you found on twitter are getting at, even if still for somewhat wrong reasons: publishing that material, making it highly likely if not certain that the depicted persons will be made to know of it, is what is wrong, at least morally/ethically. By doing so I've made it their business, where previously it was only my own. Regardless of the particular way in which they're affected, that you might personally think shouldn't matter to them, i.e. loss of followers, family/friends potentially seeing it and not knowing its fake, or at minimum, that they just don't like having to know about it -- ultimately it wasn't necessarily my right to make them deal with any of these things, even if I think they shouldn't care about them. The commenter who described the analogy I found so apt likened it to fantasizing about a person sexually, and then directly telling them that you have, in fact, have fantasized about them sexually. Maybe you think they still shouldn't care. But as far as I'm concerned, by doing this you've made something that was formerly solely your business, into their business, in a way I don't think you should.
questionasker
1yr ago
Interesting perspective.
questionasker
1yr ago
Women's breasts, in particular, come in a variety of shapes, and they are frequently not symmetric. Older women's breasts tend to be flat--think more like those pictures in the old National Geographic depicting women in some far-away hunter-gatherer tribe. The nipples and areolae come in various shapes and sizes, and change with temperature. Some have inverted nipples. Practically all of this variability is hidden by the kinds of clothes women wear, especially if they are into padded bras.
I'm aware of this. The point is that not everyone with good-looking (pornstar-like, if you would) breasts, decides to become a pornstar. Thus, these types of people are vulnerable to having very realistic versions of their breasts recreated with pornstar data, despite never themselves putting images of their actual breasts out onto the internet. Additionally, there's plenty of data of non-pornstar-like breasts out there to train data on. The point is not that AI will always generate topless versions of people that are very much like what their breasts actually look like, its that it can with at least some relatively degree of frequency.
questionasker
1yr ago
it's at least information that I wouldn't want to know about my friend's attraction to my wife.
The main body of your post seems basically right. But in regards to this bit in particular, I have to say from a purely anthropological standpoint I'm fascinated with how much unanimity of agreement there is in this thread that 'whether or not one knows that the act has taken place' is a very important element of the quandary.
Are there many other acts for which whether or not they have taken place isn't nearly as important as whether or not the relevant parties know that those acts have taken place?
questionasker
1yr ago
Maybe true, but I guarantee you that the vast majority of people paying money to host websites that distribute deepfakes are doing so for commercial purposes. I.e. the streamer in question had accessed a website which required him to pay 15 dollars to use
questionasker
1yr ago
Maybe that should have the same moral or ethical implications.
questionasker
1yr ago
This matches my intuition. For someone to just generate deepfakes they just keep to themselves? I've got no problem with that. For someone to distribute those deepfakes around, possibly (but not necessarily) passing them off as real has the potential for harm.
I'm starting to think along similar lines. It seems like its the actual distribution of the deepfakes that sets it apart in my intuition, not even necessarily because of the images being distributed in and of itself, but because distributing such images necessarily means they will be available publicly, and if they are available publicly that means that the depicted persons might learn that people are doing as much (creating realistic porn about them, 'viewing' them in a realistic way naked) which is what typically seems to cause the depicted persons psychological harm. Being that its wrong to cause people psychological harm, this is what makes it immoral. I'm starting to think a similar distinction would lie between i.e. masturbating while fantasizing about someone sexually (and keeping that you did as much entirely to yourself), and masturbating while fantasizing about someone and then telling that person that you did so.
questionasker
1yr ago
Thanks for the interesting response.
The law, what is legal and what isn't, I suppose isn't as much of what I'm interested in rather than what is moral/ethical. Plenty of countries have already at least de jure banned deepfake porn, the US probably will too eventually. So my bad for including that question in the body of my post.
Yeah he apparently was looking at the porn websites on the same computer he uses to stream, despite being more than rich enough to afford a second computer/tablet etc. He left the tab open after viewing, went to stream the next morning, and then when he alt-tabbed between his game and some other application, the thumbnail of the website was visible for like 1/4 of a second in the alt-tab menu. It didn't even come out until 4 days after the stream took place because it took that long for someone to notice it by scouring the stream VOD, which they must have only happened to do by chance. Either way yeah, idiotic on his end to be looking at any kind of porn on his streaming computer, let alone unethical porn.
I'm amazed at how succinctly this delineates ethical boundaries that appear basically airtight to my intuition (my intuition being where the problem lay in the first place). I'd go as far as to say that this essentially resolves the topic for me.
More options
Context Copy link