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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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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.

Should 'deepfakes' be illegal because of these potential moral/ethical concerns? Should the act of making a deepfake be illegal, or just distributing it?

The fact that this is even a debate kind of sickens me. Only in this fallen modern era would it even be a question whether or not the discomfort of primarily women (which has been elevated in the current era not according to any reason but only according to an emotional hysteria, driven primarily by the same women who benefit from it (or at least feel compelled to use it to pathologically seek power that they can't even healthily enjoy as an expression of sadistic bitterness over the modern widespread weakness and hence unattractiveness of the opposite sex) and their male followers ("simps") who have often become so emasculated that they no longer even try to conceive much of a path to earning the favor of such women other than by slavishly obeying them for temporary headpats, that has amplified itself almost into a religious fervor) and their investment in the "sanctity" of their image (obviously highly debatable given how many of them choose to present themselves) takes precedence over the basic rights to freedom of expression, freedom to fantasize, freedom to create, etc.

The answer is obviously no. There is nothing about deepfaking that is categorically different from writing stories about someone, drawing/painting them (and even before the recent AI explosion, some people could make remarkably photorealistic artwork), Photoshopping (which has been possible for decades) their head on to someone else's body (and it's worth noting that modern deepfakes are essentially as primitive, just in motion, as the most used method at the moment just involves finding a video of someone with a body that is hopefully somewhat of a plausible match for the desired face and then inserting that face on to it, again just in motion), etc., and hopefully there is still a general agreement (not saying this to build consensus, just expressing what I have only ever been aware of the general consensus in the modern era always having been) that anyone who wants to use the state monopoly on force against people who do these things because the subjects of them might be made *uncomfortable* is a totalitarian lunatic. (I remember that before JK Rowling was a villain for opposing alternative sex lifestyle roleplaying (not a sneer, just my attempt to more accurately describe the phenomenon of "transsexualism"), she was a villain to some for vociferously opposing Harry Potter fanfiction, with the argument that Harry Potter sex stories for example would violate the rights of its movies' young actors by likely imposing their images on scenarios they didn't consent to being widely mocked.)

The whole "deepfaking" controversy is just using slightly new technology to launder into the public discourse the same old big brother bullshit that's been rightfully rejected many times before, except they may yet succeed this time (with "yet" being relative, as it's actually already illegal in a few states) because the rational faculties of their targets have been so broadly degraded and their discourse so thoroughly poisoned with mindless, kneejerk reactionary (which I've, ironically enough, almost always found those who are the most anti-reactionary in the political sense to be the most in the general sense) feminine emotionalism, safetyism, and exaggerated negative utilitarianism (so long as it's in favor of protecting the right demographics, the most sacred demographics, of course, as obviously this issue would not be one at all were men the primary subjects of discomfort here).

It is also quite ironic that it is mostly the side of people pretending to be highly opposed to/seeking a severe contraction of the carceral state pushing this. This is just more evidence to me of what has seemed obvious from the beginning, that these people are not against harder "crime and punishment" and "law and order" crackdowns than they've ever bemoaned, just against the punishment of particular crimes they associate with their favored client demographics (particularly/only when committed by members of those demographics who are also in good ideological standing, but they can't quite say that so explicitly yet) and the opposite for their disfavored ones. In their ideal world, Kevin gets 20 years of hard time for putting Pokimane's face on Viper Vixxen or whoever (especially if he seems like a "chud", maybe less if he has a history of serving the regime loyally, in which case he may get to lessen his penalty via subjecting himself to a routine of humiliation and self-criticism), but Tyrone gets therapy and cookies for stabbing him to death. (And does anyone want to bet how much they'd push for women to get punished for deepfaking Bieber or the BTS boys? Of course most men are still not invested enough in their egos to be incapable of separating fiction from reality, so they're unlikely to care anyway.)

If they were really against the worst excesses of modern surveillance authoritarianism as they claim, the last thing they would do is try to invent a fifth horseman of the infocalypse to give glowies and spooks yet another reason to treat any bit flowing through any digital system as a possible if not likely piece of illegal contraband on the run, "justifying" even more invasions of technological/digital freedom and privacy. But this is again because they're not actually against hammers as they claim, only against them being used on certain nails. This is after all the side that invented the "No bad tactics, only bad targets" mantra.

I think part of this is because so many have forgotten what rights are, or at least what they should be in practice, that is how they should function. They have fallen into the trap of, because "rights = good", consequently thinking that rights can only protect fundamentally also 100% good, squeaky clean, Reddit-certified Wholesomeâ„¢ Mr. Rogers behavior (or at least what they see as that through their ideological lens), or at least not what they see as its opposite, which is how nonsense like "Hate speech isn't free speech." spreads even though such a statement is blatantly contradictory on its most basic semantic level. In actuality, as a loose heuristic, rights are more appropriately understood as restrictions on power (as they are formulated in the US Bill of Rights for example).

Rights are rules where giving authorities the power to violate them would likely make those authorities shittier and more prone to causing problems/hurting more people than whatever problems they could solve by violating them. Rights are when giving authorities the right to search anyone's asshole at any time is worse than whatever people are smuggling in their assholes, thus we say "no searching assholes except in very strict, limited, and justified circumstances", thus "people have a general right not to have their assholes probed for contraband." This isn't based on any determination that most of what anyone is smuggling inside their asshole is any good; indeed most people who have to smuggle things in their asshole probably aren't smuggling much nice (depending on your stance on drug use anyway, though I'd say at least fentanyl which is probably a very common asshole passenger nowadays is close to objectively evil).

So to tie it back to deepfaking, the choice comes down to preventing women from occasionally feeling uncomfortable about fiction about themselves vs. trying to protect what's left of the chastity of all of our digital, informational, expressional, and private assholes. Again, I think only in modern femworld would this even be considered a choice worth pondering for more than a second.

Women's feelings are not god. They don't even warrant being taken that seriously in many cases (to be fair the same is also true of men, though not as often I don't think). That's really all that needs to be said about it. Sorry you're uncomfortable ladies, but that doesn't mean that the entire boot increasingly stamping the human face for what seems increasingly like it might be forever needs to be at your beck and call. (Of course me or anyone else saying this will accomplish nothing at least in the short term, but the decay of society cannot be reversed until these ideas are fully absorbed by modern men.)

People find you attractive, including those whose attraction you might not reciprocate, which you know because even if your content is "SFW" you've built your whole career on it (and you've never objected to it when they were giving you money, which is also part of the issue here, as this style of deepfakes has been around for years but now many of these creators have Fanslys etc. and are making money off of them), among other things (like at least 70% of the reasonably attractive ones not infrequently walking around in public half naked nowadays). Get over it.

Women's feelings are not god.

I can maybe accept most of what you're saying specifically in regards to how it answers to the question: 'should these images be illegal?' Perhaps it is a violation of the principle of free speech to have things like this be made illegal, or a slippery privacy slope, or a needless cession to emotional people, etc. That being said, whether or not it should be made illegal, I expect that it will be legally harder if not fully illegal to do this kind of thing in the near future. But I digress.

Many others in the thread are also focusing specifically on the legality dimension, which I regret and for which I bear responsibility. I was generally more interested in talking about what is moral/ethical, and less so in talking about what is and should be legal, even though I indeed asked as much in the body of my post. Even if these things are not illegal, the morality of them is still hugely important, as it determines who gets 'cancelled' etc.

And to that end, in figuring out what is ethical or moral, I think feelings do matter. For example, I think it would be immoral in many situations to do an action that I knew would make a person "feel bad" just because doing that action gave me sexual gratification, legality of the action notwithstanding. If I was trying to design the fairest US government, I might not make deepfake porn illegal. But if I was trying to be as morally/ethically upstanding of a person as I could be, there are plenty things I shouldn't do that are still legal.

I'm of the relatively firm belief that it isn't immoral to fantasize about having sex with someone, even if they haven't consented to you having such a fantasy. I'm not sure what I think when it comes to making highly realistic porn of them. If you were superman and had X-ray vision, would it be unethical or immoral to look into the women's locker room? If not, why does everyone seem to think it would be? If so, what's the difference between that and having a vivid, realistic imagination and using it for sexual purposes in the same way?

Another commenter prompted me to believe that a significant amount of how unethical it is lies in whether or not deepfaked person knows about the porn being made of them, because knowing that it exists is what inflicts psychological harm on them. I think I agree about this. However, the women in the shower into which you're peeping might not ever know that you've peeped at them, so is it not wrong to be a peeping tom (as long as you never get caught?) Teen coming-of-age movies from the 80s didn't seem to think so (the shift in attitudes between then and now might be pertinent to the discussion). Regardless, currently I do indeed think that i.e. spying on the womens locker room would be unethical, and I think most people today would agree that its probably wrong to do such a thing. This is the angle that I'm really trying to disentangle here, the moral and ethical angle, and less so the legal one.

And to that end, in figuring out what is ethical or moral, I think feelings do matter

OP didn't say "feelings don't matter". They said "women's feelings aren't God" i.e. are not the sole, overriding consideration in ethical disputes.

I'm of the relatively firm belief that it isn't immoral to fantasize about having sex with someone, even if they haven't consented to you having such a fantasy

Case in point: some women apparently dislike being "objectified". I don't really care tbh. What goes on in my skull is my business.

If not, why does everyone seem to think it would be?

Because it is a violation of actual privacy: the actual woman is in that room, with a reasonable expectation of privacy and you are peeking in. Even if it wasn't sexual there's all sorts of other concerns with such snooping (e.g. can they steal your stuff now that they saw your locker code)

With deepfakes I guess it depends on how much verisimilitude something can have before you think it violates your "actual" privacy. If I have a deepfake of Angelina Jolie that, for whatever reason, has serious flaws and inaccuracies have I violated her privacy in the same way? That isn't the real Jolie, it's a virtual image that isn't even perfectly accurate.

What if it was trained on topless images of Angelina and perfectly matched her in her physical prime? I think an argument could be made that she removed privacy here herself, in a way she can't expect to get back (we can't unsee her body either way)

I don't think we have an easy rule. I also don't know that this can/should be grounded in privacy. Maybe defamation concerns would be more viable?

However, the women in the shower into which you're peeping might not ever know that you've peeped at them, so is it not wrong to be a peeping tom (as long as you never get caught?)

Besides the reason already given above? It's more reasonable to imagine you will never be caught for private files on your computer vs. peeking into someone's bedroom. Simply not being physically there reduces the risk of detection and thus harm to the person.

With deepfakes I guess it depends on how much verisimilitude something can have before you think it violates your "actual" privacy. If I have a deepfake of Angelina Jolie that, for whatever reason, has serious flaws and inaccuracies have I violated her privacy in the same way?

This is the main thing I am trying to get at with the locker room/fantasizing examples. The current AI can inpaint nudity onto clothed pictures of people without necessarily having serious flaws or inaccuracies. (Not to say, it always succeeds at doing this. Just that it can reasonably often.) And training the AI on the actual person's breasts isn't required for the result to be highly similar to what they actually look like topless, at least for some women, considering at least some people's breasts are visually similar to other people's breasts. Thus a person who has not already consented to having topless photos of themselves present anywhere on the internet can have topless images of them created to what is indeed a very high degree of verisimilitude to their actual naked form, using i.e. pornstar's breasts as training data.

Technically, I suppose, it can't be known by the person operating the AI algorithm if the person has i.e. a mole on the chest, etc. So maybe, because technically uncertainty might remain, i.e. without actually being able to look at a real topless image of the subject, and thus verifying that the nudity-ai-inpainting is highly similar, there is still some sense of privacy maintained? Because even if the inpainted-nudity actually is extremely similar to their topless form, this isn't known to the person creating or viewing the deepfake?

Regardless, overall, the pertinent fact is that the current level of technology is at a level where it is indeed possible to get outputs, at least somewhat often, that the depicted person themselves could or would mistake for real nude photos of themselves. This seems to me to be functionally very similar if not the same as looking at someone changing/naked without their consent or knowledge. You're right in the sense that it doesn't imply other security concerns in the same way as an intruder present in a changing room would, but I'm not sure that's whats actually wrong/disliked about peeping toms; I feel like a significant amount of the dislike of the idea of someone seeing you changing is the actual fact that they know what you look like naked (and maybe also the knowledge or likelihood that they are fantasizing about you sexually). I.e. most people would be as mostly as opposed to a person using X-ray glasses, or more realistically a hole in the wall, to look inside their locker room while they changed, as they would be opposed to someone i.e. hanging from the rafters. I can't know for certain, though, at least personally I guess, because to my knowledge I've never been the victim of any such situations.

I don't think we have an easy rule. I also don't know that this can/should be grounded in privacy. Maybe defamation concerns would be more viable?

Well, as far as legality goes, it seems like copyright is the main way people take down unwanted deepfake porn of themselves. Regardless, though, I'm less so interested in the legality and moreso in what should or shouldn't be generally considered acceptable ethically or morally speaking, for which perhaps privacy or violations thereof, and perhaps other things, do seem like a relevant concern.

And training the AI on the actual person's breasts isn't required for the result to be highly similar to what they actually look like topless, at least for some women, considering at least some people's breasts are visually similar to other people's breasts. Thus a person who has not already consented to having topless photos of themselves present anywhere on the internet can have topless images of them created to what is indeed a very high degree of verisimilitude to their actual naked form, using i.e. pornstar's breasts as training data.

Porn stars not only self-select based on their agility in smoothly changing positions in front of cameras--incidentally, a skill shared with politicians--but also for how good they look naked. If an AI image generator is trained on naked bodies of porn starts, its AI-completed naked version of me will look amazingly better than I actually do.

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.

The distribution of body fat also varies significantly for overweight women, and this is also mostly hidden or distorted by clothes.

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.

Making a deepfake porn of someone for noncommercial purposes should be fair use. It's clearly transformative, and it doesn't have any effect on the potential market for the work unless you think the copyright owner will sell their own picture for use in porn and this makes it harder to do so.

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