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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:
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?
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.
It's a minor but non-trivial point that many of the female streamers flirt with openly encouraging guys to watch them based on their sexualized appearance. This dynamic is going to happen anyway--attractive news anchor has been a thing since TV started--but the streamers very often take it to another level. Pink cutsie hair, accentuated cleavage, tight pants and "accidental" butt shots, etc. To put it crudely, if their target audience is thirsty simps willing to pay for their streams, I think that should factor into whether they subsequently have a right to be creeped out when those simps imagine the streamers naked, beat off, whatever. 10,000 weirdos telling Martha Stewart that they jerk off to her is very different than 10,000 weirdos telling Pokimane the same thing. Pokimane is actively, if stealthily, cultivating that response in her viewers, Martha Stewart does not.
You're right that many female streamers cultivate an audience in this way, but some female streamers do not and yet still have deepfake porn of them made. So to avoid getting caught up in this we can just restrict the discussion to solely what is right or wrong regarding the porn made of the latter group.
I agree with what you're saying here, in general. And I think that even if the thirst streamers didn't exist, the ordinary streamers who are just streaming-while-female would still end up with subscribers just there to fantasize about dating them. Anytime a female does something on the internet, some guy will try to "send bobs and vagene" her. There's a hilarious example out there of a guy posting Botticelli's Birth of Venus on twitter and getting marriage proposals. With that in mind, deepfakes are inevitable. There are even deepfakes of Martha Stewart, after all.
At the same time, the rise of monetized streams and sites like onlyfans (spit) have really weaponized this tendency. That's bad for the guys whose wallets are getting drained, obviously, but it's also bad for the normie women who just want to share their hobbies. The thirst streamers are definitely part of the problem and they're making everything worse for everyone. Because of that, I have no sympathy for deepfakes of thirst streamers.
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Is this actually true? I'm curious to learn of some examples for, uh, research purposes.
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I’m reminded of the infames of Roman law, who, alongside certain other restrictions, were not granted reputational protections by the state. The category included nearly anyone involved in prostitution as well as most other entertainers(actors, gladiators, etc). It’s still in use in a few canon law contexts.
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