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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

We need to figure out what exactly we want to ban. Banning AI generated porn just because we had, since deeply Christian days, banned anything sex related just doesn't make sense anymore as a sole justification.

I'm not for it or against it, I just see crusades on this topic based on... well pretty much nothing, just strong convictions.

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If you've read enough of these articles, you have heard every permutation of why this is bad based on the author's personal biases and convictions.

Subjects are all blonde and white? White supremacy. Subjects are all Asian and submissive? Fetishization of minorities. Fake models cater to male fantasies? Incel chauvinism sets unrealistic expectations for real women. Better than OnlyFans performers? Oppressing a vulnerable sex worker class already struggling with making fair wages.

Whatever your personal position, there's a brand-building opportunity for endless sanctimonious tweets.

Your post reminds me of a music forum I’m on where a lot of regulars seem to have got bored discussing music, and now are more keen on discussing how a certain band or genre is either harmful to whatever minority, or progressive and liberatory for whatever minority. Room for endless sanctimonious tweets indeed. How did contemporary anglophone society end up like this?

Being a victim, or a righteous defender of victims, is a guaranteed source of prestige and lift in status in the anglosphere's college-educated middle class.

Being kind to other people will make you more likeable, truly takes a place like HN to frame compassion and solidarity as something bad:D

It’s actually about unkindness. Kind people would give others the benefit of the doubt. This is the type of kindness you see from politicians, where individuals are aggressively attacked due to some microaggression to a group.

Compassion and solidarity should not be imposed without compassion, though. You don’t fight hate and oppression with more hate and oppression. When most people are annoyed with in-your-face militant attitudes it’s not because they don’t want to be nice. It’s because they don’t want to be bullied into following the dogma of the day. Of course you also have plain old racists, but putting them in the same bag as the big chunk of the population who just wants to get on with their day is bound to alienate quite a few people. Hence the blowback.

When someone explains that I cannot not be racist because I have pale skin (which does happen), well it just makes me want to punch them in the face. If we are supposed to all belong and accept each other regardless of our external appearance, then people making assumption about me based on it is just prejudice.

> When someone explains that I cannot not be racist because I have pale skin (which does happen)

this does not happen, nobody says that. It's a strawman argument.

There are examples in this very discussion, FFS.

Being holy is good, being "holier than thou" is bad.

Doing things to support minorities is good, having a row based on who is the biggest friend/foe of various minorities… it's not literally "Munchausen by proxy" but it seems to have similar vibes.

My experience is that the content of those arguments often doesn't matter. This sticks out to me particularly in music discussions because those discussions have always had room for endless sanctimonious opinions. One of the most valuable things I read when I was younger on the Internet was a SomethingAwful columnist explaining how to be a fake music snob and pointing out that "people involved in music discussions don’t actually care what other people think, they’re merely concerned about the politics of domination and submission." It's not just music discussions: human discussions in general are prone to this, and when the discussion is really about the politics of domination and submission (a topic that people, usually correctly, care a whole lot about), the "real" subject matter of the discussion will become the building blocks of the social dominance exercise and its connection to the underlying thing will quickly be severed. There is no political tendency or fandom or faith that is immune to this, it's an emergent feature of humans' monkey brain hardware.

Could you give us an example?

I personally feel like there's no reason to ban AI-made porn, but that we need some kind of copyright enforcement and enforcement of publicity rights around training data for AI content in general. We will always have porn, but I think it's perfectly cromulent to require that commercially available AI-made porn all ultimately derives from legally acquired sources.

Or, to put it another way, I would treat it as if the training data was legally the same as using a source (however minimally) in Photoshop to produce some final image.

Actually even before that we have to figure out how the logistics of any sort of ban involving porn models will even work when said models are made open-source and are smeared out across a million websites, discord servers, and torrents; with new varients coming out as fast as the various overpowered gaming and mining machines of the masses can shoot them out.

Like, I really don't understand someone can look at how well suppressing something like piracy has gone and then go and be like "Yeah an AI ban could work"

Why so quick to blame this on old Christian puritanism? Current opposition to AI-generated porn comes also from a school of feminists directly opposed to what you view as traditional Christian puritanism.

Bookmarking for when you provide the relevant statistics

Your call for “statistics” is snarky inasmuch as I made no claim in my post for which statistics would be relevant. Please don’t do this here. But as far as the existence of feminist opposition to these developments, did you miss the last major HN link about this topic?[0] Zero Christian basis to that woman’s concerns, nor are the women in her comments section agreeing with her out of professed Christian morality.

[0] https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/we-cant-compete-with-ai-girlf...

It's not a fringe thing. Even The New York Times has written about how "sex-positive" feminism is dying; and being replaced with an anti-porn feminism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/opinion/sex-positivity-fe...

Quote:

In her new book, “The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century,” the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, who is quickly becoming one of the most high-profile feminist thinkers in the English-speaking world, describes teaching Oxford students about second-wave anti-porn activism. She assumes her students, for whom porn is ubiquitous, will “find the anti-porn position prudish and passé.” They do not. Rather, they’re in complete agreement with assertions that could come straight from Andrea Dworkin.

“Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real? I asked. Yes, they said,” writes Srinivasan. She continues, “Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.”

True, some feminist movements became very anti-porn. It’s a fringe of the overall population, though, and they are very far from having the influence conservative and religious fundamentalists have.

It’s also a mistake in the long run if you ask me, because this can only lead to more oppression, injustice, and shame. People won’t stop fucking because someone told them to; witness the number of high-profile conservatives having (sometimes homosexual) affairs.

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