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You're going a bit far with VTubers / Twitch, as they're a bit more generic than pornography, and I don't know about the timeline, but yeah. If AI GFs / AI generated porn becomes good and cheap enough, I fully expect their human-generated variants to crash.
It depends if you think the typical consumer consider it positive or negative value that lives are ruined by the production of pornography.
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This will be interesting to see play out as the tech gets better and better. I'd fully expect there to be a sort of bimodal distribution, with cheapo/free AI-generated porn dominating/taking over much of it, and with expensive niches with verified human performers making bespoke videos for people who demand videos of the real thing or text typed out by the real thumbs. With generative AI getting better and better, a credible way of verifying that the performer/chatter is real might be downright impossible. Perhaps some professional organizations to certify that performers are actually performing the old fashioned way could rise up, but how would they gain credibility?
But if that happens, we could see a landscape of basically free basically limitless custom AI-generated porn that makes the current Pornhub look limited and small in comparison, along with expensive luxury-priced services to guarantee the real fake GFE with a real human who is really filmed for the videos she produces and really types out her messages. Pornhub itself should probably look into pivoting to the former, while I wonder if OnlyFans could actually find a way to make an organization that can actually certify its performers as real humans doing real things for camera, to capitalize on the demand for that.
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So we're still projecting. Sure, hypothetically, if.
From @faceh's toppost I got the impression he was saying the new, dangerous superstimulus is already here in the form of this questionably dubbed Death Note Misa reading you Grok responses.
Didn't you just say "The decline should be observable within a few years"? Isn't that projecting to begin with?
And if it AI doesn't become cheap / good enough, how does that affect the question of whether AI GFs / porn being superstimuli? The question seems completely unrelated to me.
Of course not, it's a testable prediction to confirm/disprove my priors on the present or near-term state of technology. @faceh said that a terrifying new superstimulus has entered the market that will destroy young men; I say that is ridiculous, and that in this current AI companion technology will barely move the needle at all in terms of parasocial escapism. The only way to adjudicate these wordviews is to make predictions that will either pass/fall, which necessarily involves wait time to see this technology hit mainstream society. This is something I note that AI maximalists generally decline to do, merely making breathless statements about how AI will change the world "soon". (These inevitably fail, but the AI keeps getting better at wordceling or shaperotating, which was not in dispute from most AI skeptics.)
I would be happy to make a 6 month window prediction, or a 10 year window prediction — eg "fewer than 5% of teenage boys will spend more than ten hours talking to AI girlfriends per year — but I doubt you/faceh would accept the first, and I wouldn't even remember the second prediction by the time it proves correct.
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The question is not AI GFs being superstimuli; it is them being significantly better, more seductive, and thus more dangerous superstimuli, which was OP's claim. There is no evidence that that's here; there's no reasonable evidence that it will shortly be here, and there I plant my flag.
I can agree he's wrong in that XAI is not even the first company that has developed AI GFs, and gooners have been working on it since day 0 of mildly competent LLMs. But you're wrong in calling it ridiculous. Qualitatively current technology is all that is required to have the impact he predicts, the rest is a question of training customized models, giving them access to your personal data, etc.
Do you think you'd be able to predict the exact inflection point for all the other technologies, as they were being developed? There was quite a few years between the first tittie I saw online, and the displacement of other forms of porn, for example.
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I might be willing to take you up on that.
Consider for a second that many Gacha games are already basically waifu simulators.
And millions of people in the U.S. already play those games. I mean, there's a lot of other games that they play too, but this is a POPULAR genre.
If we limited it to Gen Z males, we're talking 33 million guys, give or take, and 5% of that comes out to 1,650,000.
Among a generation that has already grown up using ChatGPT for everything, I would not find it hard to believe that 5% or so of them spend copious amounts of time talking to a digital AI avatar in a fairly intimate way... and don't feel weird about it either.
The audience is clearly there.
5% of ALL males is a bigger lift.
And I'm not sure where we'd pull reliable stats on these numbers either, but from the cursory amount of research I've done I've just about convinced myself that within a year, we'll see 5% or so of Gen Z folks having ongoing dialogues with personified AIs almost as much or more than their human friends.
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