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Sora is dead
It turns out that spending hundreds of millions for users to make useless slop videos was having a meaningfully negative financial impact. The bizarre thing is that Disney signed a $1b deal with OpenAI just a few months ago - who fucked up here? Of course, there are many more video AI tools out there, with fewer considerations for copyright law. But for now, Hollywood doesn't have much to worry about, at least on this front.
I tried using Sora for about a month at the end of last year, but I had to stop due to getting banned. Grok Imagine wouldn't ban me, so I've been using that instead. My wild guess is that a social media platform based entirely around AI generated videos like Sora can only exist in a sustainable way if it's explicitly for erotic/pornographic material - there's simply not enough demand for creating or viewing AI generated videos that aren't in that category to get enough users and views to pay for the generations.
I've mixed feelings, since Sora was clearly much better and more flexible than Grok imagine, and so I would've loved to see that develop further, but, at the same time, the lower censorship in Grok and XAI's general attitude towards censorship versus OpenAI's makes me think improvements in Grok is more likely to bear fruit. Of course, without Sora around, XAI has less reason to improve Grok... And Grok Imagine is also still censored, which isn't great, but it's the least worst, at least. In the long run, I'd hope that local video generation will be "good enough," but that'll probably require a world where dual 5090s with 64gb VRAM is considered a quaint little living room computer for sending emails and running old games at a tolerable 25fps, which I'm guessing is within 2 decades.
For a while I assumed that the big AI companies would permit porn generation eventually. They might want to act high and mighty now, but a time would come when they needed to show revenue, public perception be damned. Unfortunately, I'm naive enough that my conception of pornography did not extend to the type that could be legally problematic. Back in January, a bipartisan group of 35 attorneys general published a letter to Elon Musk asking for assurances that the company was taking steps to protect against NCII and CSAM, though it's unclear if he ever responded. Last week, a class action suit was filed in the Northern District of California, alleging that xAI is responsible for producing nonconsensual nude images of three underage named plaintiffs. Yesterday, the Baltimore city attorney filed a lawsuit alleging violation of various city ordinances involving consumer protection.
It appears to me that these issues could probably be solvable. Disallowing generative editing of user-uploaded images seems like a no-brainer. The CSAM issue is a tougher nut to crack, but it seems like the NCII issue is what was getting everyone's attention, so if that goes away then I doubt that the existing safeguards against the latter would be found deficient. But the cat's out of the bag at this point; Elon fucked up and now he's under the scrutiny of people who have the power to make life miserable for him. I imagine the class action suit will settle, but it will take years, and Elon is hard-headed enough that he might decide to make a statement out of it. The plaintiff's attorney seems to have selected the worst possible place to file, as I don't imagine you're going to find a more tech industry-friendly jury pool anywhere outside of Northern California. The Baltimore case is on less solid ground, and the potential exposure is likely lower (I can't imagine it being more than a few thousand dollars per proven victim), so it may make more sense to fight that one, although all that will accomplish is proving that he didn't violate a specific Baltimore consumer protection ordinance.
I haven't seen that abbreviation before, so I'll explain it for lurkers: nonconsensual intimate images—a category that originally was just revenge pornography (public posting of privately-shared explicit content), but now has been expanded to include explicit and suggestive edits of publicly-posted nonsuggestive content, and sometimes even mere spotlighting of unedited publicly-posted suggestive content.
Fascinating how "consent" came to be a universal moral solvent, and by extension, a lack of consent can extend much further than any sane person might think.
That's because "consent" actually means "waives Female Privilege to profit from sex after the fact", not "accedes to".
Women cannot legally consent to sex (or any sex-adjacent activity, actually- 'revenge porn' is yet more salami-slicing away of that ability) today in any Western nation (the US is, perhaps ironically, the least far down that path- but it is still criminal). South Park made fun of this with the consent forms, but the fact that wouldn't hold up in court is actually the main issue here.
Sex with them is thus as potentially legally dangerous as it would be with a 7 year old- the group "consent" was made up to initially protect. We can see this by how laws tend to get changed so the man can't protect himself by demonstrating in court the women intended to discharge this and lied after the fact (i.e. the Jian Ghomeshi case). It's also why Western/feminist anti-prostitution laws only criminalize buying sex, not selling it.
In other words, invoking "consent" is the one-word fig leaf to cover up the fact women are blatantly abusing privileges meant for the people they claim are the most vulnerable, and to claim that if you're opposed to this abuse it's because you want 7 year olds to be raped. It's quite effective, as you can see.
Okay, let me put this question to everybody here.
Suppose women lose all sense of shame. They've sent intimate photos and videos to their boyfriend because that's how modern relationships work. Then they break up. Maybe it was a bad breakup. Former boyfriend is now pissed-off and is threatening them that unless they get back together, all their intimate photos and videos will be shared with everyone. Or maybe former boyfriend skips the threats and goes straight to uploading this on porn websites etc.
And the woman goes "Go right ahead, I don't care. Sure, send that full-frontal all-angles nothing concealed nude photo of me to my employer and my work colleagues. That video you wanted of me fucking myself with a vibrator? Yeah, send it to my granny. Hey, if you make any money off all that, remember to split it with me!"
That takes revenge porn off the table, because how can there be revenge if the blackmail element is removed? If women behave like men and are "I don't care if he's using my nudes to AI deepfake videos of me fucking dogs"? EDIT: I'm asking that in the context of the comments on here about "but what harm is really done if photos of women and children are used to create fake porn? why is this a concern? why are people worried about their images being used as masturbation material, if a guy wants to jerk off imagining a particular woman he knows, he can do that in his imagination so you can't stop it, and if you don't know why would you feel hurt about it?"
But would you like women to be like that? Or would it just be more "women are sluts who need their sexual autonomy removed and to be controlled by fathers and husbands" fuel for the fire?
EDIT: Oh, and gentlemen, if you find success with the ladies eludes you, could it be because you are neglecting your intimate hygiene? Luckily Lysol will solve that for you! Regular douching with something that makes you smell like coal tar down there will surely be irresistible!
And this is different than the general blackmail case... how, exactly (especially in the AI context)?
We already have laws to deal with this case (and in the cases where we've chosen not to have them/are prohibited from doing so, we've already made the tradeoff). You don't need another law like that, or at least, you wouldn't if this was actually about protecting people from harm and not just a case of
which is perhaps why you did exactly that in the first edit.
Given my assertion is "that's exactly what women themselves are agitating for here"? Of course, it's not really "controlled"- it's always legal for women to have sex for reasons that have a bunch to do with an echo of '70s sexual liberalism- it's just permanently illegal for men to participate in any way
First it was just sex itself, then it was sex-adjacent activities, now it's pictures (real or otherwise) of it. Salami-slicing.
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