Technology

This, above any other reason, is why I'm most troubled with AI CSAM. I don't care what anyone gets off to if no one is harmed, but the fact that real CSAM could be created and be indistinguishable from AI created, is a real harm.

And I instinctively ask, who would bother producing it for real when AI is cheap and harmless? But people produce it for reasons other than money and there are places in this world where a child's life is probably less valuable than the electricity used to create images.

I fundamentally think AI should be completely uncensored. Because I think censorship limits and harms uses for it that might otherwise be good. I think if 12 year old me could've had an AI show me where the clitoris is on a girl or what the fuck a hymen looks like, or answer questions about my own body, I think I would've had a lot less confusion and uncertainty in my burgeoning sexuality. Maybe I'd have had less curiosity about what my classmates looked like under their clothes, leading to questionable decisions on my part.

I can find a million arguments why AI shouldn't be censored. Like, do you know ChatGPT can be convinced to describe vaginal and oral sex in a romantic fiction is fine, but if it's anal sex, it has a much higher refusal rate? Is that subtle anti-gay encoding in the training data? It also struggles with polyamory when it's two men and a woman but less when it's two women and a man. What's the long-term impact when these biases are built into everyday tools? These are concerns I consider all the time.

But at the end of the day, the idea that there are children out there being abused and consumed and no one will even look for them because "it's probably just AI" isn't something I can bear no matter how firm my convictions are about uncensored AI. It's something I struggle to reconcile.

I’d say that’s more of an AI industry issue than anything else. All AI art needs to be easily identifiable and sourced as such, but I doubt AI producers will want to hide tags on all their AI generated work though.

Sexuality is often treated as more complex a topic than emotions, but I found a similar meta-study The role of conditioning, learning and dopamine in sexual behavior: A narrative review of animal and human studies, 2014 concluding that conditioning and associative learning does occur around sexuality and can be used as basis for treatment.

From other sources I've read, there's so many influences going into sexuality that it's impossible to see how it develops, but from a layman's perspective I'd agree that not reinforcing child abuse probably makes it more rare.

My remaining issue is that with such a simplistic view, any non-normative sexuality can/should be conditioned away. We already have the abusive gay conversion camps, should we go back to do the same with polygamy, bdsm, porn? How much should fashion dictate what sexuality is allowed?

(Roman style orgies seem to have faded in popularity, but tantra and swinging seems to have risen lately, which should we be conditioning away? Who decides?)