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-People got along fine without it. Also, the ban would only affect digital porn, not physical or other hard to copy porn.
-it has potential of ruining the lives of 10-30% of population due to addictive behaviors.
Are you seriously claiming 60-80% of people having slightly more enjoyable masturbation sessions twice a week is worth ruining the lives of cca 10% of population ? No, really, you are saying that ?
-if you think porn is bad now, what do you think it's going to be like when people will be able to get whatever sexual fantasy they have generated within a few hours in high resolution by NNs ?
I'm exceptionally skeptical that 10% of the population are 'ruining' their lives over porn. Even groups promoting the concept give closer to ~6% as the upper edge for the entire class of porn addiction (not endorsed), which in turn is more built around self-identification than serious personal impact, which in turn isn't the same as actually going from correlation to causation, nevermind all the way to 'ruining their lives'. More mainstream analysis gives significantly smaller numbers.
((And, uh, 'motions to the entirety of alcoholism discourse, or football stuff' for the sort of tradeoffs we're demonstrably willing to make as a culture.))
I'm pretty skeptical.
More critically, I think this points to broader problems. You don't have a toggle of 'people masturbate/don't'. You're openly talking about situations that would require limiting access to pretty generic ML tools, and that's honestly just the starting point. Even fairly 'limited' laws like this will discourage a lot of not-solely-porn speech, and anything broad enough to seriously slow porn 'usage' will unavoidably touch on broader works.
A serious amount of addicts are completely in denial about being addicted.
Number of people 'self identifying' is almost totally irrelevant. In addition, you have religious nutters who think they're addicted for no reason at all.
Look at behaviors - e.g. the number of 30-40 yr old Japanese who are virgins and have never been in a relationship.
Being skeptical because of samey still images now, when there's no reason to think NNs won't eventually be able to translate narratives into film or 3d environments is kind of weird.
What ? No, I'm saying that tools that'd enable people to create endless sexual fantasy by prompting are going to be possibly even worse than just kids having access to endless porn.
These won't be basic tools, but probably something customized and specialised.
This is an interesting measure, and a growing one (at least where virginity = het virgin), but I don't think it gives the numbers you'd need -- the numbers only jumped six and four percent for women and men respectively from 1987 to 2015. I've not seen good information from the 2020 survey, but it doesn't look from google translate like a dramatic increase.
((And that six-and-four percent is from every cause, when there's a pretty wide number of separate social issues in Japan pretty strongly discouraging interaction between the sexes that's a far more plausible cause.))
Oh, I absolutely think it will translate to new spheres, and to some extent already is in the process of doing so. But at least for furries, film and 3d environments are not especially prevalent even today (and those that do exist often suck: there's a few dozen VR furry projects, each more forgettable than the last), and the overwhelming majority of that e621 scrape would have been mostly flat media, too. The bar for furry-interesting content is lower: the majority of interactions with the sexuality-side of the fandom are still images or short fiction already. But even if the quality can be more consistent and variety greater, it's not more interesting, and I think that problem will continue (and probably be augmented, due to less available and more samey material to train on) even as tools expand to different media forms.
This has historically been the failure mode for a lot of procedurally-generated or programatically-varied content in the fandom (and, to my knowledge, outside of it). You can pretty easily toggle species or background or orifice or
clothinglingerieaccessories (and there's a small industry of games like Lilith's Throne built around doing just that)... but there's a reason Lilith's Throne has a configuration system that borders on the obnoxious even to an overwhelmingly tech and nerdy playerbase, and even using it to the hilt can still run into some content you aren't really interested in. Yet it can as quickly become samey, not just in that there's a limit to the available human-written content that surrounds the procedurally-generated stuff, but even 'new' stuff repeats the same themes and the same phrases, as a rut of over-optimizing smut, and the more heavily you (have to) tune the configurations to your interest the faster that happens.What separates 'samey' pieces from novelty and interest is at least the potential for surprise. Now, it's porn. I don't want to overstate the artistic themes presented by the typical piece: someone invites a plumber, there's a joke about a lemon tree, money shot, yada yada. But there's a reason even tumblr adult gif fandom at its worst didn't turn into people just resplicing the same handful of images with slightly different subtitles. Tautologically, this could eventually be done through ML, but it's not clear how you'd do or define that, without going past the bounds of interested topics: either the consumer is taking a directorial role to some extent in the initial creation, or they get surprise cuckolding at best.
For an example, the furry porn-specialized fine-tunes of StableDiffusion took about 200GB of porn and a few days on commercially-accessible (if high-end) gaming hardware now, which could be fairly said to be outside of the realm of the typical user. But that's now, with people making random guesses and erring on the side of caution (and trying to make overinclusive sets so other people can use them). Specific concepts have been taught or identified from less than 100 source images, sometimes incredibly bizarre ones. ((And, conversely, a furry-non-porn-specialized fine-tune could still output racy images, mostly due to the limits of the SD2.x safety checker.)) I think the likely threshold is going to end up closer to a few gigs than to a few hundred. To the extent that a typical small porn stash can't be used to train a model, that's mostly because people don't tag downloaded images.
I don't think you can prevent pretty widespread access short of banning the entire models, or heavily restricting access to model training.
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