@questionasker's banner p

questionasker


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2023 January 21 15:54:29 UTC

				

User ID: 2119

questionasker


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2023 January 21 15:54:29 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 2119

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?

I'm sorry if this question has been asked and answered before:

What is the best/steelmanned pro-HBD proposal for the actual evolutionary mechanism by which various populations (i.e. whites) have experienced selection-for-intelligence while others (i.e. blacks) haven't? What unique circumstances and thus evolutionary pressures did the human populations that migrated to Europe or Asia face, for which human populations that migrated solely around Africa wouldn't have faced?

Of course the most compelling explanation I have found is the 'cold winter' hypothesis, that a period of harsher winters in Europe during one of the world's most recent ice ages might have made human populations in Europe select for those with better longer-term planning ability (intelligence) because they could i.e. stockpile food better in order to survive said winters. However, is it then believed plausible that no roughly similar periods of relative food scarcity or famine could have struck (anywhere) in Africa in potentially the same vein, exerting at least a similar selection pressure, albeit with different ultimate causes, on at least one of Africa's many ethnic groups? Additionally, how does this address the IQ differences between ethnic groups when non-european ethnic groups are part of the discussion, such as middle-easterners, indians, south asian or even east asian people? These groups all have for the most part 1. different IQs from each other and 2. mostly higher IQs than sub-saharans. Assuming cold winter hypothesis, in order to explain i.e. indians and middle-easterner's lower IQ than europeans, should one presume that indian and middle-eastern ethnic groups did not migrate through a region of the world experiencing anything resembling a 'cold winter' like europe's? If so, what is then to explain why indians and middle-easterners have higher average IQs than sub-saharans?

Basically, I am in general looking for a steelmanned version of a logical argument by induction about how HBD might have actually occurred in history based on what we know about evolution, in a way that accounts for some of the difficulties I intuitively think any such argument must overcome. In other words, why do both i.e. Javanese and Irish have higher IQs than sub-saharans; Which evolutionary pressures could have plausibly faced the historical ancestors of the Irish as well as the historical ancestors of the Javanese, but not the historical ancestors of any sub-saharan populations? Or am I just thinking about this wrong?

I'm very open to seeing links to research about various mechanisms of evolution, or that put forward potential answers to some of the questions I'm asking via i.e. archaeology or anthropology, and in general I actually hope that there might be elucidating research to read among many contexts relating to the subject. However, please note that I am not particularly interested in seeing links to research of any type that claim to either prove or invalidate HBD that broadly falls under the category of "testing modern day ethnic groups' IQ and then trying to control for environmental factors." My adventure exploring that realm of the debate, in the form of stuff like genetic admixture studies or twin studies, I have found frustratingly inconclusive. So if you care to answer, please limit discussion the areas discussed, that is, steelmanned argument for a plausible mechanism by which evolutionary pressures to select for intelligence were exerted on the world's ethnic groups in such differing magnitudes.

Yeah that article was pretty unconvincing. Rhetorical reasons aside, the repeated use of "midwit" alone basically predisposed me to want to disregard the rest of the points. I don't think I can respect the intuition of a person regarding predictions on verbal/linguistic topics like 'is ChatGPT a convincing enough debater to permanently break online discourse' who can't themselves see that they are repeatedly overusing a cringeworthy term.

Social media addiction has clear psychological and societal downsides. It can shrink and monopolize our attention, make us more anxious and lead to damaging fads like stupid "challenges" that kids do.

I guess the whole argument fell flat for me because I am wholly unconvinced by this main premise, that tiktok is definitely bad for people.

First and most ridiculously, we can't seriously believe that 'damaging fads' like tiktok challenges are a serious source of concern. Kids filming themselves doing something silly hardly seems like a phenomenon that will lead to the breakdown of American society. At worst some of the most dangerous fads kill a particularly stupid kid or two on average every year, maybe. So the Chinese have created a superweapon that works by... exerting an extremely slight eugenic effect on the american population? Lol. Is the idea that kids should be studying instead of doing tiktok challenges?? Baffled by this point.

More reasonably, there is the claim that social media might make us more anxious. I was under the impression that sites like facebook and instagram might do this, because people compare themselves unfairly to the 'highlights' of other people's lives which make up the typical facebook feed, and thus feel anxious that they are not having as successful, exciting, etc. lives as their friends. I was not aware that tiktok had this effect. However, if I was to give the original argument the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that tiktok use indeed could play a part in causing anxiety, I'm still not convinced of this in itself as a deleterious effect. What actual downsides (in the sense of, geopolitically measurable downsides, if the assertion is that tiktok is a 'chinese superweapon' the intention or effect of which is presumably to influence geopolitics) is anxiety actually associated with? Anxiety is a potentially less-enjoyable subjective state experienced by an individual. But are individuals with anxiety for example measurably less productive citizens? Why isn't it plausible that they could be more productive citizens? Because it certainly seems that way to me. My intuitive perception is that hippies are the type of person you get when you lower the anxiety in the equation, and people who are struggling harder to get ahead in the rat race are the type you get when you turn the dial up a bit. Either way, I'd like to see an explanation or some data that would suggest societies with greater proportions of 'anxious' individuals are actually meaningfully less geopolitically competitive than less anxious societies.

Finally, there is the assertion that social media can both 'shrink' and 'monopolize' our attention. I'll admit I have no rebuttal for the claim that any sufficiently entertaining product could be a superweapon in the sense that it could 'monopolize' our attention, making people want to use it so much that they forsake other productive things they would have done otherwise. It is entirely possibly that tiktok is this sort of entertainment product. However, I suppose I ultimately doubt that tiktok will really cause people to use it instead of i.e. going to work. As to whether or not tiktok will 'shrink' our attention, I'm not skeptical of this but rather of how bad it is. I'm sure tiktok could cause attention spans to go down. But again, could someone point me to what actual geopolitically measurable loss will be incurred from this? Perhaps attention spans could shrink so small that people will no longer be able to appreciate instances of long-form of high culture such as historically important novels. Will this help China win the new cold war? Is the idea that maybe fewer people will become geopolitically important human resources like i.e. engineers, because they won't have the attention span to study the required material? Attention spans have already been declining for decades, over this timespan has the US produced fewer engineers per capita?

The point that China themselves is demanding domestic censorship of tiktok, or that we should generally appreciate their understanding of which social ills to prioritize ameliorating, is wholly unconvincing as well. Aside from the fact that china is already known for seeking complete control of the online information to which their citizens have access, they are also known for their leadership buying the claims of moral panics. A few months ago they passed a law highly restricting video game time for children under 18, and a few months before that they banned effeminate-seeming men from appearing on TV or being featured on other forms of popular media. Rather than smart, agile avoidance of new potential vectors of social decline, these seem more to me like the laws your asian friend's grandpa might pass if he was the dictator of a large country, i.e. motivated by the vague sentiment that these things are bad rather than an actual analysis that video game addiction or the feminizing of your nations men are serious social problems. Plenty of studies show that playing video games more than the average person is even associated with higher IQ or other benefits, but of course the most visible effects of gaming to an elderly asian man are probably that he thinks his grandson plays too much instead of studying, and that a small portion of people get addicted to the point of actual productivity loss.

Overall I guess I just think the whole 'social media bad' thing might be a moral panic itself. There are plenty of ways to easily criticize of social media use right now by pointing to things like declining attention spans. But honestly I bet there are also plenty of unexamined upsides, too. Reading books for pleasure was once widely regarded as a waste of time (before other forms of media were created to take its place as the 'time-waster' scapegoat). Now reading books is widely regarded as one of the best ways to become smarter. Who's to say social media use won't eventually be this in time? It almost seems to me intuitive that things that shower you with cognitive stimulus like the constant stream of information through a tiktok feed could be an intelligence-increasing activity. To me the jury's still out.

Sub in any trait you like for coin flips, and it's obvious that a little bit of variation is to be expected, especially when conditions are different. On close examination, the idea that all 5 would come up with exactly the same result is a strange and unjustified supposition. The real question is how much variation there is, and whether or not it matters.

This doesn't make much sense for a few reasons. The first is that, when it comes to evolutionary lineages, we're not flipping a coin 100 times and expecting it to come up heads 50 times. An estimation closer to the magnitudes would be more like flipping a coin 1,000,000 times and expecting it to come up heads 500,000 times +/- a reasonably small difference. However sub-saharan IQ scores are more or less a full standard deviation lower than white ones, a difference so large that, if genetic, I wouldn't really expect it to be just the random result/chance given the massive scales of evolution and human populations.

It also doesn't make sense for a second reason: a commonly cited-fact about sub-saharan populations is that its actually the region with the widest range of genetic difference between its various ethnic subgroups. Wouldn't one expect that, if the supposedly genetic difference in intelligence is due to something like random chance, the large amount of genetic differences in Africa would offer plenty of opportunities for at least a handful of their ethnic subgroups to have 'lucked out' in the same way? But the reality is that IQs in the sub-sahara are low across the board. No ethnic subgroup across the whole continent has managed a lucky roll, in fact, all of them independently managed unlucky ones.

There is a ribbon of trade running from the tin mines of Cornwall to the silk plantations of China that has existed since the Bronze Age, and along that ribbon you'll find all the most advanced civilizations that have ever existed.

As far as I'm aware, India lies along this ribbon, yet (depending on who you ask) the national IQ on the Indian subcontinent is almost as bad as some places in the sub-sahara, and (regardless of who you ask) certainly worse than Europe and China. Is the assertion that this is mostly due to environmental differences, and that Africa suffers from both environmental and genetic ones? If not, what's the explanation for the difference in IQs between India and other regions like Europe or Africa?

In general I guess I also basically do not buy the assertion that civilizations were altogether more complex along a roughly europe->china silk-road-esque continuum compared to elsewhere, at least until the last six hundred years or so. However, even if I was to accept that, I would definitely dispute that human civilizations along that ribbon were measurably more complex i.e. at least 3,000 years ago (to be generous) and before, and I'm skeptical of 3,000 years being enough time for humanity to speciate into the sheer scale of IQ difference between ethnic groups that we know today.

There is also the whole element of the legal slavery of a race of sapient beings capable of thought, speech, etc. that is nearly unexamined at least as an institution by even the good characters of the universe. That part is so weird/'problematic' to almost be funny.

it looks to be a genuinely good video game,

The whole rest of the content of your post aside, can I ask what you're basing this on? I haven't seen any information one way or another regarding its quality. Both the prospects of the actual gameplay being either very good or very bad would be very funny/entertaining.

100 year copyright

This seems to me like we're far past the point of copyright-life-extension singularity. Examining past trends, it seems like almost a certainty that before the next 100 years is up copyright will have been extended by at least another 100 if not a factor of 10. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that to some extent copyright is based on years since the death of the creator, and surely human lifespan will soon start benefiting as we approach a medical singularity (especially considering rich and successful creators will have access to many of these benefits earlier than the average person) Thus excepting for the prospect that copyright law reform might one day place, (unlikely) most works currently under copyright will probably never enter public domain (unless all possible inheritors of the copyright are somehow killed/destroyed).

Are there really a lot of ways in which the trans movement harms cis women? Do you mean because of women's prison issues and things like transgender women's participation in sports? Or are you thinking of a different set of problems/potential problems trans movement might pose to women

except in the very narrow sense of being able to, for example, coinhabit women's prisons.

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. Do you really think Rowling would dedicate as much effort and energy into her activism if she thought problems on this magnitude were the main issues of the trans movement?

Eh, Kanye was a billionaire and it worked on him.

Yeah I mean I think its ridiculous to say that cancel culture can't affect billionaires or that it even hasn't affected Rowling. In the sense that, once a person is already rich, only them spending/giving away their own money can stop them from being rich, cancel culture obviously runs into a limit of potential reach. But in basically every domain except money, cancel culture clearly has power even over the wealthy. Rowling's influence over the groups of people she would like to have influence over is clearly less than it would be if she had not taken an anti-trans stance. Perhaps she has more influence over different some smaller, different groups of people. But I bet she would like to express her beliefs and not be 'cancelled,' too.

JK Rowling has ideological allies, because the stance she has taken is one of the main and most divisive culture war issues of our time. She has fallen back to these ideological allies. People who care about the culture war and aren't on her side have cancelled her among themselves -- everyone else, AKA people who either care about the culture war and take her side, or, the significant majority of people, those who do not care about the culture war, have not cancelled her among themselves. Kanye has no ideological allies, because he is taking a culture war stance from two centuries ago, of which one side has already emerged victorious. How much someone will or won't be cancelled and to what extent that cancellation will effect them really isn't anything more complicated of a function than 'how deep does this culture war issue that I deciding to participate in penetrate the public consciousness, and how much of an ideological share of the public who cares is occupied specifically by the side am I taking?'

Rowling is above any type of that retaliation.

I understand that the criticisms between them are distinct in a large way but neither of them did anything illegal.

I'm not sure how useful 'neither did anything illegal' is as a way to assert that what they did was or wasn't of similar magnitude. The difference that I am claiming exists between their misdeeds, and thus their levels of cancellation, still holds as a difference between these two examples: Louie CK's misdeeds have no 'supporters' in the culture war. There is no one out there who thinks people should be going around and randomly starting to masturbate in front of women who haven't consented to such a thing. Furthermore the question of whether or not its wrong to sexually assault people is a question with much greater cultural penetration, (especially penetration as a percent of the group of people who would otherwise be buying Louie CK's product). I would venture a guess to say that greater than 95 percent of people who would otherwise be interested in buying a ticket to one of his comedy shows would be turned off by the idea that the guy doing the performance was a sex weirdo who had non-consensually masturbated in front of multiple women.

On the other hand, again as stated, aside from having plenty of ideological allies, JK Rowling's issue just doesn't penetrate that much. People into harry potter are actually for the most part young children, who are too young to care about the discourse, and whose purchasing decisions are made by their parents, who are either too old to care, on JK Rowling's side, care more about satisfying their kid's interest in harry potter than their own interest in not supporting the Rowling estate, etc. Of the twitter-millenial-harry-potter-fan demographic who actually is most likely to care, not all of them do, some of them care but support the anti-trans position in the culture war, some that do care and support pro-trans but can pretend its warner bros that's getting all the profits and not rowling and that level of cognitive dissonance is enough for them, etc.

I think the careful wording of her tactics really does affect the level of retaliation she receives. The fact that she repeatedly maintains she has no hate for trans people etc. is important. That much seems obvious to me. If she started explicitly saying she actively hates trans people, I think its obvious that she would grow to a level of radioactivity at least somewhat more like the other listed examples, Kanye/Louie CK etc. Obviously you're right and that she wields a certain type of power that would insulate her somewhat, but I think overall you're understating the way in which the level of her cancellation is actually at least correlated with actual differences in her tactics, flavor of rhetoric, the specific CW issue she's chosen, etc.

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.

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.

Yeah, I mean, obviously he has some ideological allies. What I meant is that, right now the CW split on trans issues is almost 50/50 at best, depending on region. Trans people/issues are not popular in many societies. Whereas Kanye's beliefs are touted by are only a tiny proportion of the discourse, widely regarded as crazy extremists. Yes, I'm sure Kanye isn't cancelled among adherents of the Nation of Islam or other anti-semites. That isn't exactly saying much though.

Animals can't talk and most aren't regarded as sapient. On the other hand, house elves basically have a human equivalent mind in a small body, and are also non-consensual and generally unhappy servants of humans. As another commenter pointed out, this injustice actually is addressed in the books (though practically in passing) when a socially conscious/activist main character starts an organization opposed to house elf slavery, clarifying that it is conceivable to view it as i.e. worse than eating meat in-universe. Just that most characters don't care. This is silly to get into but again I regard it more as odd/funny than anything.

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.

Interesting. I hope the trend continues.

However much this might be the case, you're making a point more about how mis-percieved their actions are, more-so than about how poorly received (the common perception of) those actions are in absolute terms, compared to each other.

Maybe both of them are misunderstood generally. The truth is, though, that even some of the worst interpretations of Rowlings 'misdeeds' are not considered as heinous as some of the best interpretations of Louis CK's. If we're talking about 'Why is Rowling not as cancelled as Louis CK?' my point is only that the difference in this perception is indeed a factor.

My read of the quoted comment is different than yours.

To your point that 'community' is overused to the point of meaninglessness in liberal circles, well, I think that's what's actually going on here. My perspective is that the quoted comment isn't really arguing for any criminal justice reform because it will help mend communities in any real way. They're just pro-criminal justice reform community effects notwithstanding, with a focus on rehabilitation and reconciliation between the criminal and victim (which are goals one could have for criminal justice reform without caring about 'mending the community') and then at the very end of their comment, they merely happen to name-drop 'community' because, as you said, its become such a meaningless term in liberal discourse that they use it almost without intentional meaning.

Has this group had any discussion regarding AI use in pornography, specifically, 'deepfakes?' Its come out recently that a major up-and-coming twitch streamer 'Atrioc' (who was recently married, and ostensibly very pro-feminist, but while funny these facts are technically irrelevant to the matter at hand) had been viewing porn 'deepfakes' of multiple major female twitch streamers, including possibly his best friend's girlfriend (last part unconfirmed but highly possible). He's come out with an apology and its a whole thing but I'm sure this community is more interested with the moral/ethical questions therein than internet-celebrity drama so I won't bore you with it.

The following are my perspectives on a few of the potential questions regarding 'deepfake' porn, and AI porn in general. I'd love to hear what other people think about these perspectives, because my thoughts are currently very incomplete on the issue.

First and foremost, I have a strong intuitive feeling that it is deeply wrong, perhaps tantamount to some form of sexual harassment/assault (but of course the non-violent sort) to make 'deepfake' pornography of other non-consenting people. For example taking a picture from a celebrity's instagram and using AI to transform it into a high-fidelity (but technically fake) nude picture of them seems functionally the same as i.e. spying on them in the shower or when they're changing, which are actions I think we can all agree would be some form of wrong or illegal sexual violation (or perhaps we can't? you tell me). The way I think about this is by considering that a strong enough AI program would be theoretically capable of using a clothed picture of someone to actually reconstruct the way the exact way they look naked, which would be quite literally equivalent to the aforementioned situation/looking at them with x-ray glasses, etc. which again (I think) we and most people agree would be wrong. And so, less-powerful AI capable of doing something similar seem to be at least on that gradient of wrong, if not exactly as bad.

Furthermore, AI that actually transplants people's faces onto video depictions of sexual intercourse (which is ostensibly what 'Atrioc' was caught doing) seem worse, or maybe just bad in a different way. I don't have a similar thought experiment to justify why I feel that way but the wrongness of it is my strong intuition nonetheless.

However, I can also sort of see the argument, at least abstractly, that it's a victimless crime. On the other extreme of the spectrum, fantasizing in one's own imagination about the way people look when they're naked, or how it might feel to have sex with them, is not only generally recognized as a very benign behavior, but is also known as something almost everyone does, men and women both. Sometimes, people do this even completely unconsciously, i.e. in their dreams. And what's the difference between looking at a very (or fully) realistic recreation of the way someone might look with their clothes off, and using one's own imagination to do so? What if one's own imagination was very vivid, and you had seen many naked people before thus making your training data very good, and so you also could reasonably expect to make a relatively accurate recreation of the way someone looked while naked, only in your own mind's eye?

The thing is, acknowledging these potential similarities between an action I find morally acceptable and the one I find morally wrong, still doesn't make my intuition about the wrongness of 'deepfakes' any weaker. I feel like there must be some thing that I haven't considered about it yet, which is where I'm hoping you guys might have insight. The only distinction I've found somewhat convincing so far is maybe that the mass-distribution via the internet is what makes it wrong? In other words I find it less wrong (but still wrong somewhat) to make a highly/fully realistic nude of someone and keep it entirely on one's own computer, more so than I find it wrong to make such an image and then distribute it online. This is especially weird because the former is even more apt of a comparison to i.e. peeping on someone in the locker room which is obviously (?) wrong. So why does it seem more okay to me? Help!

I have a few potential explanations that I'm considering as candidates for the source of my cognitive dissonance here:

  1. Perhaps in reality none of the aforementioned actions are wrong. It's not wrong to spy on someone in the locker room, and so it's not wrong to use 'x-ray glasses' to see through their clothes, or use an AI to edit a picture to do functionally the same thing.

  2. Perhaps instead, in reality it actually is wrong to imagine or fantasize about what other people look like while naked. The reason this is so commonly accepted as benign is because its so unenforceable to prevent. But if sexual mores are so arbitrary/constructed that something that would otherwise be wrong can just be arbitrarily agreed-upon as acceptable just because its unenforceable, how really wrong can any ('victimless') violation of sexual mores be said to be? And thus how really wrong is the other situation, where one uses AI?

This kind of segues into 3. which is: Perhaps in reality the ultimate causes of this dissonance are that modern-day sexual mores are completely stupid, so deeply incoherent that acceptance of any one of them will necessarily lead to cognitive dissonance when contrasted against some other. Is the solution to the 'deepfake' issue then to try and change our society's sexual morals/ethics into something more internally coherent?

None of these really address why I feel different about 'turning a clothed photo into a nude' and 'transplanting, in a realistic way, a non-consenting individual's face onto an actor in a depiction of sexual intercourse.' I have no concrete ideas as to why the latter feels overall worse, but also in some other (minor) ways not as bad. And the latter situation is what the whole controversy with the streamer is all about AFAIK. Very confused about all this.

What's right here, and why? What should even be done? Should 'deepfakes' be illegal because of these potential moral/ethical concerns? Should the act of making a deepfake be illegal, or just distributing it? (I think if we wanted to, we could make both of these things illegal. We might not be able to enforce preventing anyone from making them considering the AI-cat is out of the bag, but it still might be worthwhile to have its illegality on the books if it really is wrong. In other circles I'm seeing the claims that a ban would be unenforceable (motivated thinking?) but it seems trivially easy to functionally ban at least the distribution of 'deepfake' porn in a way that would almost certainly actually reduce the dissemination of such porn if not completely eliminate it. Just as i.e. child sexual abuse imagery or zoophilia porn.

I also see a lot of people in other circles being prompted by this discussion to argue about the ethics of AI image generation in general. I generally think this is basically stupid. The arguments which claim that AI image generation is tantamount to plagiarism (of the dataset images, I suppose) are all basically worthless as far as I can tell. But people who have bought into this line of thinking are thus now going as far as to say that i.e. photorealistic porn (even that depicting completely synthetic likenesses) that is generated with AI is a sexual violation (of all the nude or semi-nude women in pictures in the dataset I guess?) Either way I am wholly unconvinced by these arguments and think they basically all stem from a bad understanding of how the AI work, so I don't think I'm super interested in discussing this axis of the debate. But I mention it because this community sometimes surprises me so if anyone here has a really strong argument as to why this might make sense that they think I haven't seen before, feel free to mention it.

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.

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.

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 I'm pretty willing to forgive the streamer guy specifically, especially considering your points as well as that I have little-to-no horse in the race. As to your other points:

This can cause psychological harm in a person — humans are not designed to see something like that, I don’t think it computes properly in the brain. An AI scene of being sexually victimized (in essence, arguably) is fundamentally different than making a photoshop with a person’s face due to the sheer realism.

By this do you mean to say that the main reason that these videos might be unethical is because knowledge of the existence of the videos causes psychological distress in the people whom they depict, not necessarily because i.e. the depicted people's consents have been violated?

So knowing that someone you know, that part of his mind remembers the scene when he thinks about you, is truly disgusting.

This example prompted me to think, though on a tangent only somewhat related to what you're getting at. I'm not sure the 'part of the mind thinking the AI video really happened' thing is what sets it apart. But I think that the knowledge of whether or not someone thought about you in that way is definitely part of what matters. Whether or not someone made an AI porn of you isn't relevant to you unless you know about it -- this fits with my intuition, because re: the completely imagined sexual fantasies point, even though I and most people consider those benign, the calculation changes if person A who masturbated to an imaginary fantasy of having sex with person B then went and told person B that they had done as much. Suddenly that becomes immoral/unethical to me in a way almost similar to the AI nude situation. So I think this might be getting at the distinction for me: what really matters most is if people know that this stuff is being made about them. And in the case of these popular female streamers, the fact that the pics/vids are being distributed basically means they are being forced to know that such content is being made of them. It would be like if 10,000 weirdos were constantly whispering in their ear that they jerked off to the thought of them naked, which is different than those 10,000 weirdos jerking it but not telling anyone.