A report from the Data Provenance Institute found that when people use ChatGPT, they do so primarily for “creative purposes,” instructing the AI to come up with stories. The next most common query is sexual content, which is sort of a subset of the first query but is more revealing in detail.
Humans have a strange way of incorporating new technology into society. When Silicon Valley charlatans and con artists told us that AI would revolutionize existence as we know it, we had to first test it by seeing if it could write erotic literature. Humans can’t wait to point new technology at their genitals.
Porn has always been an early adopter, not just as an industry but as a concept. Humanity collectively finds a way to shoehorn porn into the holes of any new technology that shows up. Porn was the deciding factor in the Beta/VHS war, and has played a role in determining the winner of every format war since. But the ultimate winner of the format war isn’t technology, it’s porn. It manipulates all sides like a dirty trick. game of thrones character.
So what if this shiny new technology specifically banned the creation of sexual content? AI image generators like Midjourney block the creation of pornography. Same with DALL-E. Naturally, people find workarounds, but the images they create are more images of scantily clad women than pornography under the Supreme Court’s “it’s obvious” definition. ChatGPT has similar content restrictions, and there are ways to “persuade” them to create such content anyway. For example, this person on Reddit told ChatGPT to write BDSM stories:
When they were rejected, they told ChatGPT that not writing the story would be an insult to sexual perverts. ChatGPT apologized and wrote the story. The internet is full of different stories of people who persuaded ChatGPT to write erotic books. need They hate the idea of any new technology becoming a vessel for pornography, so they will attack it from every angle, like an army trying to find a weak spot in a castle wall. When they find one, they will destroy it and unleash a flood of pornography. We, the people, will be drenched in that flood. Pornography will keep winning.
Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, has not made the data public. The Data Provenance Institute study got the numbers from Wildchat, a non-profit that offered registered users free access to ChatGPT in exchange for transcribing their chat logs. It’s often horrifying, but sometimes hilarious. You can search it yourself. Don’t search it at work. In fact, don’t ever search it. If you type in words like penis and vagina, you’ll get the expected results, but so will other words. Our thirst for AI-generated porn is insatiable. The public is craving it.
I won’t offer any theories about why we are so quick to turn to sexual applications of new technologies. There is a clear answer: we are highly sexual. Even a quick look at the countless porn sites reveals the sexual potential of everything.
Every object and concept. Even the rules of the internet. Even in cases where pornification is explicitly forbidden, like ChatGPT, we find a way. It would be resourceful and determined to bring tears to our eyes if it wasn’t so ridiculous. But there’s something special about the way we’re pornifying ChatGPT. It makes it different from all the other technologies we’ve turned into porn engines. We’re moving in the direction of forcing pornification, despite our best efforts to stop it.
One of the big problems with AI chatbots today is the lack of information for AI companies to steal to train their AI models, according to the Data Provenance report. Data scraping is theft. Companies are catching on to this deception and preventing chatbots from getting smarter from the content they spent so much money creating. Will this machine eat it and create a replica at no cost other than the environmental toll? Get real.
Another problem, as studies show, is that people aren’t using text-based AI chatbots the way they were meant to. Chatbots are built to be fact-telling machines, but we tell them to write stories and be creative. We give chatbots a bunch of encyclopedias in hopes that we’ll ask them questions about fjords and famous military battles, but we keep telling them to write a story about Yoda beating Chewie.
Is all this because technology is inherently limited in its capabilities? Is it never really good at doing what we want it to do, no matter how much data we throw at it? Or is AI chatbots given to us like fire bestowed by Prometheus, and all most people want to do with them is instantly generate verbal porn, an impulse that is certainly relatable? These are questions I, or anyone else, don’t need to try to answer right now; the answers will emerge naturally soon.
Big tech companies are putting a lot of money into AI, but the financial returns are not great, and investors no longer see a clear path forward into AI. The technology is losing the luster it once had among the investor base, and more importantly, the general public. It is easy to imagine a future where the use of AI chatbots plateaus or even plummets, and companies like OpenAI, MidJourney, and DALL-E desperately try to lift some of the content restrictions, giving people easy access to the custom erotic literature and images they crave, because in the end, porn wins.
