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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Porn is another example where the bottom's getting cut off: AI struggles with details and you have to use weaker models to generate any sort of adult stuff, but the bottom end is really bad, and you get to customize it as much as you want and churn out as many attempts as you want for free on a local model.

I have an online friend who briefly became 'the guy' for a fetish in the furry community since he started as just kinda doing very-vanilla art, then one time included something that wasn't the fetish he became known for but was like adjacent enough that his DMs started getting filled with people looking for that kinda content. Then, despite not particularly liking the fetish in question, he eventually folded after somebody offered him about 5x his going rate for something low-key in that space.

6 months later he's making like a good middle-class professional income for his developing country essentially being a fulltime fetish artist since it had kinda snowballed from there. And like his art skills are fine but we're not exactly talking a Renaissance Master. I haven't asked him, but I'd be shocked if the rise of AI hadn't absolutely nuked that line of art production even if some purists complain since you can knock together SOMETHING a lot quicker/cheaper, and AI has a lot more patience for infinite re-do requests than a human artist with limited time. Porn's also just uniquely suited to be hit by AI since it's either 'vanilla stuff tends to be super formulaic and there is an infinite sample basis' or 'more exotic stuff having an AI you can endlessly dictate your very particular desires to is more practical than having an artslave'