Pornography Is the Obvious Telos of AI-Based Image Generation

Many computer-years ago, the internet was rocked by leaked photos revealing the inhuman practices in top secret Chinese state-run semen-milking facilities.

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Many computer years ago, the internet was rocked by leaked photos revealing the inhuman practices in top secret Chinese state-run semen-milking facilities.

While idly scrolling on the bus yesterday, I wheezed a cry of disbelief at why I was staring at two green pallored peens getting hoovered in the Emerald City Hospital’s parking garage overflow ward.

Anyone already subscribed to this Substack would probably recognize a still-frame from weird fetish porn at 50 yards. At the same time, the idea that there are a great many people who might, at least for a minute or two, look at this image and earnestly believe it to be some actual human-rights violation being inflicted by a totalitarian government gave me pause.

As if there are still people in this fallen media world of endless debauchery who can’t recognize a sex dungeon when they see one?

Pausing for more reflection, I found myself feeling actual sympathy for the good doctor’s apparently honest mistake.

Isn’t there something believable, even perhaps insightful, about the idea of incessant onanism as a tool of mass social control? Is it completely unrealistic to imagine this as an actual, consciously-wielded telos for our tools of mass entertainment?

Hell, it’s been a while, but I can recall nearly this exact scene in the film THX 1138. And that came out in the ‘70s!

It’s hard to know what to think or feel about large-scale social trends, in general. Even the most mundane of situations, like investment in NFTs or the social effects of the gig-economy, are extremely worrisome when scaled up to include people you know and see every day. So how the hell are we supposed to talk about what A.I. porn and total surrender to auto-dildonic hedonism are going to do to lonely motherfuckers in the broken “sexual marketplaces” of our technological society?

Understanding the history might be a good start.

That other Digital Divide

For my whole life, people have been talking about “the digital divide.” It’s supposedly some massive development and opportunity “gap” between people who have internet and those who do not. Getting the internet into as many people’s hands as quickly as possible, and raising the bandwidth of that connection, has been an overriding concern for society for as long as the net has been commercialized.

Seeing as I was laughing with schoolmates at the weird-ass fetishes of chronically-online people twenty years ago, back in the days of dial-up and T9 texting, I’ve always figured that the real digital divide was merely the ability to orient one’s self in a world where people’s online identities were comprised overwhelmingly out of the things they couldn’t talk about to anybody in “the real world.”

Some people understand the internet, and then the many, many people who only just use it every day.

Just consider the state of the internet in its last golden age.

That is, that glorious near-decade after the burst of the DotCom bubble in 1999/2000 when the world once again came to believe that “you can’t make money on the internet.” Everything consolidating on social networking today was present back then, with all the fullness and richness of any vibrant subculture.

Consider hentai image boards, or Rule 34 cartoon porn boards, both lovingly screen-caped by SomethingAwful forum goons in that web forums heyday.

The internet was, then, an absolute freak show. One you couldn’t talk about because everyone there seemed to be underage, and we were too, and it all felt quite illegal.

“Why, that sounds just like today!” you might exclaim.

No.

Today’s internet has the internet of twenty years ago as its content, just as how the earnest environmentalism and anti-industrialism of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and even ‘90s is now a cynical party mask worn by profiteering bureaucrats and social engineers operating on behalf of the elite, the free-wheeling, reckless and shameless imaginations of fandoms, kinksters, and chronic masturbators has become captured by the machine.

We are entering the world of VR fantasy, and, uh.... this is where it’s headed, to be honest.

People who write intelligent blogs like this one love to play off of contentious questions such as whether “Freud was right” about this or that. Well, I get the feeling that the long arc of fantasy and idle dreaming always eventually turns toward sex.

I didn’t want to write this piece, but my own discomfort is probably a small price, in the grand scheme, to explore exactly what sort of “internet” it is that our souped-up neural networks are going to be slurping up and regurgitating into the mouths of us baby-chicks from here on out. I look at it as just one more installment in the long, long story of the automation of all our handicrafts.

As everybody knows, since the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy, the printing press was the first total automation of a complex handicraft at large—a machine to churn out endless identical copies of a single commodity. After that, industrialism exploded. And with Xerography (as photocopying used to be called), the natural arc of automation completed its movement from linearity and identicalness of process to fluid and customizable output.

This approach—to consider the tangible and practical nature of the medium itself, rather than project theories or concepts, or judgments onto the situation—should help us to get a handle on just what it is we’re getting in to. There is nothing new about our Brave New World (which has every conceivable sort of people in‘t, forsooth!) except for the automation of what we’ve already been doing manually.

Hence, “we” are “extended” into the environment.

I’d like to take some time to demonstrate that, just as 18^th century dioramas preceded cinematography, everything A.I. is going to do—including the endless stream of porn which will feed chronic masturbators (or gooners) like those trussed up at the start of this piece—we’ve already been doing manually for a long time.

If you can train yourself to see the content of today’s media as the human reality of the recent past, it’ll go a long way to helping train your perception in an otherwise overwhelming world of illusions, spectacles, and hedonistic debaucheries.