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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I'm confused. Enough people were showing NSFW material Twitch thought was inappropriate that they reversed course. This seems quite different from your description of humans trying to become "teenage-presenting (cat?)girls."

I'm confused too, I guess.

My comment about Fisherian runaway was related to the AI stuff... like, if lewds are permitted and lewds get clicks, then yeah you're gonna get camgirls but also (I assume) you're going to get camboys using AI filters to present as camgirls for the views. But if that's not what was raising the AI concerns at Twitch then I guess I misunderstood something.

if lewds are permitted and lewds get clicks, then yeah you're gonna get camgirls

I think what you're really going to get is bots. Most of those bots will be female presenting because most of the dummies clicking botspam are thirsty simps. Some of the bots will be male presenting because some of the dummies clicking botspam are thirsty gay simps. From my experience in lonely hearts subreddit moderation, women are 100x less likely to fall for obvious spam accounts, even when they're lesbians. But every time we let a botspam post stay up longer than 2-3 hours, at least 5 male idiots will engage with it.

Bots can't (yet?) do "watch me play" videos, so SFW content creators are going to be easier to distinguish as real humans. NSFW stuff is so easily commoditized that bots can do it pretty well, especially if they also scrape real onlyfans accounts. Like all spam, the NSFW bot accounts only have to convert a handful of suckers to be profitable so if lewds are permitted, lewds will be overwhelmed with scammers. At this point, it's the equivalent of establishing a dedicated Viagra sellers group channel/board. That's going to be 99.9% spam instantly.

Gotcha. I think the AI concerns with Twitch are more like people using AI to create fake nudes of actual people. They cite to issues with people being able to tell the difference between photo-realistic images and photography.

AI-gen fake nudes of actual (non-consenting) people are a problem and probably the first to bubble up to Twitch's lawyers, but they're just one particularly palatable problem of many:

  • What about consenting people, even consenting not-nude-in-original people? There's a hard rule against Img2Img using a real person as the base, especially of yourself in the Furry Diffusion Discord, and it exists for a reason.

  • Do we care how heavily the ML-gen dataset has been curated, even if the output doesn't look like anyone specific? Is there enough of the essence of any input training image to count for copyright/legal problem causes, even if the outputs look nothing like it?

  • Do we care about possible highly-realistic outputs, even if they clearly can't be real-world?

  • Do we need to treat the people under an underlay like porn actors (which has significant overhead!), even if not a single pixel of their original real-world body goes through? Does this concern limit itself to AI redraws, or does it include photogrammatry? Do VR actors count, where the in-stream body might not even correspond to the positions of their real-world? What about voice-alone? What about only people who do tech side work, or art-side?

  • How all of this interact with much of Twitch's ouvre (game and otherwise) having a multiplayer or social component? There's people with a kink for using certain classes of toys while trying to achieve certain challenging tasks -- I can name some good gay fictional examples! -- but the real-world can into awkward questions of consent when a game might match-make you with randos. Same for someone being highlighted, even with good intent, by a nude presenter (of any gender) or in-series with artistic nudes.

This, along with other comments explaining to me that Twitch does more than video game streaming, was very helpful. Thank you!