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Deepfake porn and the ethics of being able to watch whatever you desire
- grenoire 7y agoBeyond ethics, I'm worried more about societal collapse. Going further we might have entirely generated ultra-realistic and ultra-specific pornography that will ultimately lead to people just not having sex... This concern has already been raised with sexbots, but machine pornography (for the lack of a better term) seems that it'll arrive first.
- Tharkun 7y agoSex with more than one person is a lot more fun than even the most pleasurable wank to even the most ultra specific porn. In fact, you could do the naughty with someone while watching your ultimate kink. There is zero risk of societal collapse due to a lack of sex.
- jrl5432 7y agoFor now
- chadmeister 7y agoThat's really rather dramatic. It will certainly lead to a lot of changes and society will function very differently, but pornography leading to the end of the world...really?
- commandlinefan 7y agoWould that honestly be so terrible? Aren’t we running the risk of overpopulating ourselves out of existence anyway? If a quarter of society just sort of “drops out” into a fantasy world, and they’re happy there, not hurting anybody, what’s the problem?
- iamatworknow 7y agoOne could argue that a problem would the type of people who would have access/interest in such a thing. Seems like it would largely be restricted to the (relatively) rich and tech savvy at first, and could precipitate a trend in these people no longer reproducing and passing down the genetics which may have played a role in the success that engendered their ability to acquire or use, not to mention develop, these products in the first place.
- mdorazio 7y agoDid you really just claim that success is genetic?
- deogeo 7y agoDid you really just pretend you think it's not? Given the ample data demonstrating the link between genes and IQ and health (both of which affect 'success', however defined), I'd like to see you back up your implied claim.
- commandlinefan 7y agoWell, it sure seems to be hereditary...
- epicide 7y ago> Seems like it would largely be restricted to the (relatively) rich and tech savvy Yep, that's a problem. > these people no longer reproducing and passing down the genetics which may have played a role in the success Nope, that's not it. Having money has very very little to do with genetics. Sure, you might have some genetic predisposition to being more ambitious, but how many people are ambitious, smart, and driven... but are still incredibly poor because they grew up in the wrong neighborhood or with the "wrong" color skin? Even if you don't take it that far, the best way to get money is to inherit it. Having money is very cyclical: if you have it, it's easy to get more of it, and if you don't have it, it's easy to get less of it.
- IX-103 7y agoI'm not concerned about that. Humans are social creatures and can get sick if they don't have sufficient social contact to get their needs met. One of those needs is intimacy (and with intimacy, sex often follows). We are very far away from building a machine that can satisfy that better than a human (since it is harder problem to solve than the Turing test). And if we do develop such a machine and people stop having sex, that's not the end of children. Children can be produced without sex (and eventually may not need a human uterus), so society would likely continue. I'd be a bit more concerned about people just deciding not to have children (because raising children is a pain), but right now there's too many people, so I'll worry when there are less than 100 million.
- mLuby 7y agoWhat makes you think simulating intimacy is harder than impersonating a human during conversation? I remember reading about researchers constructing a fake monkey mother out of blankets, a heat lamp, and a milk bottle. The babies seemed to get what they needed in terms of intimacy. Likewise Paro the Seal seems able to help elders cope with loneliness.
- keldaris 7y agoBecause intimacy for adults (as opposed to your example, which is a much simpler problem) includes conversation along with a host of other behaviors. Impersonating a human during conversation is therefore a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.
- devonkim 7y agoI’m more concerned with the economic realities and the political changes that happen (see: Andrew Yang’s thesis for why our current POTUS was elected) prior to coming up with solutions and that our global power structure is not necessarily good for human progress long term. None of our predictions about technology matters if we hurtle ourselves into another world war that wipes out major areas that concentrate the vast majority of technologists and a second Dark Age occurs as religion and bigotry triumph over reason and tolerance - all because we create technology that must benefit the already-wealthy by design. Much like the really facile conflict in the movie 2012, will all those 100 million be white and Asian winners of capitalism? Lastly, human sexuality is super complicated and even with mass-produced customizable porn I’d expect a trend back to imperfect, flawed relationships like we have now eventually. I still see zero answers to what the female equivalent of porn is, so I don’t think every developed country will turn into a mirror of Japan (women may choose to emigrate to find love / purpose similar to how most single men tend to emigrate for economic reasons from developing countries). Most of the West is so culturally obsessed with sex and most Judeochristian religions dogmatically encouraging population growth I don’t see it being possible without a Dark Age of the world happening... which global war could indeed cause.
- Funes- 7y agoYounger generations, at least in the US, are already having much less sex than the ones that precede them[0]. Sexbots and on-demand creation of digital pornography will most definitely come--no pun intended--and fill a need that's being neglected more and more: having intimate relationships with actual people. It's bound to happen, I would say; especially if isolation, depression and anxiety rates keep their upward tendency. [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex....
- enriquto 7y ago> (...) we might have entirely generated ultra-realistic and ultra-specific pornography that will ultimately lead to people just not having sex... This is really funny... the church has spent centuries trying to convince people to not fuck around, and now we are achieving this goal through porn.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y agoI see the humor in your post, but I think it misses a little about mainstream Christian theology: IIUC, the idea is that people should fully enjoy sex for the purposes that God intended, but should limit themselves to that. (There are some secular arguments for/against adhering those those behaviors, but other reasons will depend on premises only meaningful to Christians.) So Christian theology, in general, isn't to keep your pants on. It's to screw to your heart's desire with your spouse, but nobody else.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoPeople don’t have children because they want to have sex, they have children when they want to have children. Even if something better than sex came into being, people’s wish to have children would be unaffected, and I doubt they would have any problem engaging in old-school sex for that purpose.
- wool_gather 7y agoThis is true only where reliable birth control is readily available -- and used. Accidental pregnancy is pretty darn common.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago> People don’t have children because they want to have sex, they have children when they want to have children. That's not completely true even in the so-called developed parts of the world.
- LastZactionHero 7y agoOrdinarily, Billy would work hard to make money with his paper route, then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning a slim chance to perform the reproductive act... But in a world where teens can date robots, why should he bother? Why should anyone bother?! - Futurama, I Dated a Robot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrrADTN-dvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrrADTN-dvg
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- donatj 7y agoPersonally I think the whole reaction to deepfakes is overblown, and makes luddites out of otherwise reasonable people. If it were to become common, society would quickly learn to take all video with a grain of salt. We already question suspicious images. If the exact line of how a photo got to you from the camera is unknown people quickly exclaim things to be Photoshopped. I don’t think expanding our questioning to video is that far of a societal jump.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoWasn't there an issue recently of the POTUS tweeting an obviously fake and doctored photo to his followers? I don't think that group responded with skepticism. Making a more convincing fake would be even more psychologically satisfying for people. As it gets better it's harder and harder to disprove it as being fake and people will be more willing to take the easy path and accept it. After all, people still accept incriminating photos as evidence.
- Bakary 7y agoIt doesn't really matter at this point since the underlying problem is absolute loyalty to a particular cause or person.
- Retra 7y agoThat loyalty is built on the back of misinformation, and is strengthened by presenting your opponents in compromising positions. Deepfakes would reinforce this, so they are not an orthogonal issue.
- Bakary 7y agoThere's a two way feedback at hand. Disinformation does affect people greatly but those it affects were already receptive to its message and looking for more. The neo-liberal, "humanist", The Economist-style view assumes it's just temporary/fixable insanity and that they would come back to the "rational" view of the world if they were better educated. In reality, the people who follow populist movements are both firmly in the grasp of illusory ideas and hold a very lucid understanding of their place in the world. They are riled up by fiery rhetoric but they are also well aware, whether consciously or not, that they have little to gain from a return to the neo-liberal order in which they have no useful economic role, no community (whether real or imaginary) to come back to, no access to the wonders of a globalization, and no real cause or culture to believe in other than competing against their neighbors for a slightly better place in the rat race. In San Francisco you can see the end logic of this trajectory. An elite with highly paid and satisfying jobs served by a pauperized underclass of Uber drivers and mini-job holders who only have a crumbling public infrastructure to support them and no prospect of being a socially engaged citizenry.
- no1youknowz 7y agoI think deepfakes is absolutely AWESOME! You know what I want to do, I want to actually create sci-fi films with my favourite actors. But sadly, I don't have the money, time or network of highly paid actors to do so. Sucks doesn't it? But what if I could get the time, a little bit of money and actors who are just starting out and relatively cheap? Can you hear that? Just maybe the democratization of film, may just be happening? Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXHsgucZuJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXHsgucZuJk Now imagine, building out very cheap scenes, overlaying them with something like Unreal3d engine and using deepfakes instead of having someone sit in a chair for 5 hours because they need makeup, as they are acting as some alien? Or how about having permission from "Schwarzenegger as a service" (TM pending) to use his likeness as a deepfake in the film? I know, I know. People will use this for porn first and if you look at technology like VHS, internet streaming, VR it's all being used for porn. But as the tech gets better, gets cheaper. It'll be put into the hands of the creatives and we'll be a lot better for it. I'm really bullish about this tech.
- syllogism 7y ago> You know what I want to do, I want to actually create sci-fi films with my favourite actors. But sadly, I don't have the money, time or network of highly paid actors to do so. But the reason these people are your favourite actors is that they're...good at acting, right? The deepfake won't improve the performance of your budget actor (actually it'll probably make it much worse). So your movie will be like seeing your favourite actors putting in absurdly terrible performances. Are you sure you want this?
- Retra 7y agoAre they though? It's hard to say someone is good at acting if they are put into roles where they basically play themselves. And moreover, what better way to act like someone else literally being someone else? Film studios are already keen to paste virtual masks on their actors. In any case, somebody wants this.
- syllogism 7y ago
- xgulfie 7y agoReally you can already look at basically any illustrated porn you want, just pay a bit of money to an artist. This is a huge portion of the furry community. $50 will easily get you some impressive furry smut. Deepfakes can only put different faces on people, it can't create some of the more niche fetishes the illustrated porn market does. Call me back when it can generate a 800 foot tall bird-man stomping on a pixie.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoHmm, I don’t see why it couldn’t do that? That’s a good idea. *it being some similar type of GANN
- xgulfie 7y agoSomeone made a "fursona generator" GAN that kinda worked (but still had lots of artifacts), generating scenes is a massive leap from that, let alone parameterized scenes, fringe or custom species, narrow kinks etc. But yeah I would be super fascinated if anyone was working toward that.
- turingbike 7y agoThis is not a bad pitch
- inawarminister 7y agoAs ever, the weeb community is progressing faster in this regard: https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/index.html https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/index.html There's already an algorithm for decensoring hentai pages [0, even reaches HN's front page last year], I'm not surprised if there are a few efforts trying to generate a whole comic from zero already lol. The future will probably be automated scripts running in VR-MMD and bespoke engines, and it'd be probably a very good future for a while. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328213 Edit: nevermind, seems furries also have their own generators, though I suspect anime girls (and boys), being more... standardised, have better outcome already. And the second link is about a different regulatory regime, but eh.
- jdefr89 7y agoWhenever people hear about these issues (and now pretty much any issue sadly) they always jump to the worst conclusions and stop considering balance, which is ultimately what we need to preserve. This is a complex issue, oversimplifying it only serves to make things worse. Like any entity in this entire universe, deep-fakes can be used for good and bad. I am willing to bet there is a middle ground that makes sense and allows us to ultimately mostly benefit from whatever good this technology brings. Its about thinking within reason. Saying things like "This will be the best thing every" or the opposite extreme, "This will collapse society!" only speaks to the radical mindset it seems everyone has been poisoned with. It is becoming difficult to discuss these kinds of issues at all with the way everyone seems to so easily move to the extremities..
- twic 7y agoOn which subject, 'Face Swap', an entertaining (but somewhat NSFW!) short science fiction film i saw recently: https://vimeo.com/306304445 https://vimeo.com/306304445
- yboris 7y agoThank you for sharing! This was great :)
- Proven 7y agoIt is perfectly ethical to be able to watch what you want. If the supposed problem is that what you watch may be unethical to some other person, that also does not compute. Why should I care what some religious zealot thinks about the ethics of me watching self-created deep fake porn in the privacy of my home?
- tribune 7y agoOnce I overheard a guy ranting about how iPods were bad because if you carried your music with you everywhere, you could feel whatever you wanted at any time, which was unnatural and bad for your psyche. I think he was crazy. But it gave me pause
- Bakary 7y agoIt's a good point. One of the problems with media is that it can shield you from realizing that your life is not going so well.
- zupreme 7y agoThe real danger I see is if/when deepfake-like tech becomes so ubiquitous that we no longer believe anything we see on video. What will that mean for surveillance evidence? What will that mean for police brutality videos? What will it mean for rape/harassment/assault/stalking/etc videos? By spreading this tech, which seems inevitable now, we roll back the protective aspects of video/film by decades, if not more.
- mhandley 7y agoPresumably there will be a legal requirement that video used as evidence is digitally signed by the camera, using tamper-proof hardware and a certificate chain back to a certified manufacturer. Anything less will just be contested in court, and thrown out.
- zupreme 7y agoI like the digital signature aspect. But would a phone camera be considered “tamper proof”? What camera would, that a civilian could readily buy?
- spookybones 7y agoI've been using this other unethical tech called Imagination. It's much cheaper and faster to render and has better privacy protection.
- keiru 7y agoYeah, but the resolution is shit
- zzo38computer 7y agoI think these deepfakes should require a disclaimer to indicate what it is. (It should not be prohibited to produce or view them, however.)