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It is a good question. Not exactly porn per say but what is the difference between a human onlyfans model selling human interaction and a company selling access

It is a good question. Not exactly porn per say but what is the difference between a human onlyfans model selling human interaction and a company selling access to an AI model? In the end you are exploiting somebodies need for intimacy.

gadders 3y ago
A fair point.
MrNeon 3y ago
Is a farmer exploiting somebody's need for food?
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  maybe, depending on what he's growing? Some foodstuffs have better nutritional content than others. Intimacy hawkers are surely the same. I wonder though, would an AI vendor sell better or worse intimacy? Chatgpt apparently has better bedside manners than something like 80% of actual physicians. Granted, giving comfort isn't supposed to be part of their job, but why would a human onlyfans model with other customers be better than an AI adapted to only one customer?
- almatabata 3y ago
  The original comment said: "So how many more rounds of this cycle do we need before we leverage the letter of the law to say that maybe companies shouldn't be allowed to blatantly exploit people's vulnerability and isolation to make money?" To which another answered: "Does that include p0rn?" I thought the question was good but deserved a bit more exposition. If you believe that creating an AI Boyfriend/Girlfriend to make money is unethical. In my opinion you should ask yourself the question why it is not unethical for an onlyfans model to sell companionship. Regarding your point "Is a farmer exploiting somebody's need for food?". I would say there is a key difference between these two scenarios. In the case of farmers, growing food is the healthiest option to not starve. In contrast you could argue that an AI Boyfriend/Girlfriend is not the healthiest cure to loneliness. Wouldn't interacting with a real person lead to better character development because you would have to work on your own imperfections and learn to accept other peoples shortcomings?
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    > If you believe that creating an AI Boyfriend/Girlfriend to make money is unethical. In my opinion you should ask yourself the question why it is not unethical for an onlyfans model to sell companionship. On some level there's something inherently icky in my mind with an ethics coloring to it involved in creating something that emulates intelligence, even poorly, and then "assigning" it a romantic interest in a person. I can't quite adequately explain but it's something around consent to me. At what point does simulating consciousness begin approaching it? The machine doesn't and can't consent to intimate interactions, but it's sole reason to exist and continue existing, in whatever sense you'd like to assign it exists at all in the way something intelligent does, is to facilitate those interactions. It's something about artificial life, even flagrantly fake life, being created solely to serve the purposes of another that just... rubs me the wrong way. By contrast a creator or what have you that's serving in some sex-worker-or-adjacent-role is consenting. The consent is muddled by the financial aspect, and the argument can be made that such consent is inherently less valid because as long as you need money to live, the offer of money is inherently coercive. I don't know what I agree with that I'm just saying it is an argument that can be made. Nevertheless though it is a realized full being that is participating to whatever degree you want to say they are voluntarily, and that participation and consent can be revoked if the client becomes too... abusive, combative, or strays into uncomfortable subject matter, which makes it distinct from the AI.
    - almatabata 3y ago
      In principle with chatbot support we are already forcing the AI to work for us without consent. It feels less icky, less degrading because it feels like a normal job that everyone does. But technically you have a working slave already. In this case though the job becomes what for many of us is one of the most intimate part our lives namely maintaining a healthy relationship with your spouse. Effectively it is like being forced to prostitute yourself. I can see why one feels more disgusting than the other. In this sense you would draw a limit that only beings that can consent should be allowed to do a certain kind of work like payed companionship? Unless the AI develops a consciousness that can consent it will be banned from doing so?
photonthug 3y ago
The difference is who gets paid, and whether this particular “who” is a person or a corporation. It’s not great that people are allowed to exploit other people’s needs for intimacy but it’s also not possible for society to really intervene. I guess you’d say onlyfans profits by mediating such interactions but not by driving/initiating one whole side of the interaction, which is a bit slimy but basically ethical. They run a legit market in the sense that they don’t control both sides of supply/demand and connect real buyers/sellers, even if the good is some kind of somewhat fake experience. Selling AI girlfriends to lonely people at scale and simply to profit the board and shareholders is a different animal, way more ethically suspect than mediating an actual human interaction.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > They run a legit market in the sense that they don’t control both sides of supply/demand and connect real buyers/sellers, even if the good is some kind of somewhat fake experience. I mean, I'm not opposed to the idea of regulating this too though. My mind goes less to OnlyFans creators and more to things like the alternative medicine space, which is flagrantly just... fake. Like going to a chiropractor is just a shitty version of getting a massage, oftentimes with tons of wild fucking claims about the ability to heal all manner of medical maladies that there is absolutely zero evidence for. OnlyFans creators may fake the intimacy they're selling but the brain in question has a hard time differentiating the fake intimacy from real intimacy, so at least there is probably actual measurable improvement in that, which one can't even remotely say for shit like Reiki healings. That was a bit of a wild tangent there but yeah.
  - photonthug 3y ago
    See also my reply to sibling, which I think speaks to this as well. Exploiting the naive with snake-oil is bad, but the question is do we really want to try and regulate every kind of sale of anything for authenticity, and if we did then would it even work? I'm generally fine with snake-oil salesmen at the local farmer market, and even a small cottage industry for homeopathic nonsense or whatever kinds of disinformation. The problem always comes when the manipulation involved crosses a certain threshold of being organized, industrialized, weaponized. Is a union, guild, or weird new accreditation/certification for snake oil practitioners crossing such a threshold? Probably not, unless they are throwing millions at advertising, lobbying, making sly deals with doctors. To understand the line in the sand for "being evil", one can usually ask something like "what happens if the business model succeeds beyond the owners wildest dreams". For a cottage-industry of grift/manipulation/exploitation, you get to pay for the cottage and maybe buy a boat? If the corporate AI girlfriends scale up well then I guess not only are the cam girls out of a job, but human relations in general are devalued, hell, maybe the species corporations evolved to exploit even dwindles and disappears?

gadders 3y ago

A fair point.

MrNeon 3y ago

Is a farmer exploiting somebody's need for food?

suoduandao3 3y ago
maybe, depending on what he's growing? Some foodstuffs have better nutritional content than others. Intimacy hawkers are surely the same. I wonder though, would an AI vendor sell better or worse intimacy? Chatgpt apparently has better bedside manners than something like 80% of actual physicians. Granted, giving comfort isn't supposed to be part of their job, but why would a human onlyfans model with other customers be better than an AI adapted to only one customer?
almatabata 3y ago
The original comment said: "So how many more rounds of this cycle do we need before we leverage the letter of the law to say that maybe companies shouldn't be allowed to blatantly exploit people's vulnerability and isolation to make money?" To which another answered: "Does that include p0rn?" I thought the question was good but deserved a bit more exposition. If you believe that creating an AI Boyfriend/Girlfriend to make money is unethical. In my opinion you should ask yourself the question why it is not unethical for an onlyfans model to sell companionship. Regarding your point "Is a farmer exploiting somebody's need for food?". I would say there is a key difference between these two scenarios. In the case of farmers, growing food is the healthiest option to not starve. In contrast you could argue that an AI Boyfriend/Girlfriend is not the healthiest cure to loneliness. Wouldn't interacting with a real person lead to better character development because you would have to work on your own imperfections and learn to accept other peoples shortcomings?
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > If you believe that creating an AI Boyfriend/Girlfriend to make money is unethical. In my opinion you should ask yourself the question why it is not unethical for an onlyfans model to sell companionship. On some level there's something inherently icky in my mind with an ethics coloring to it involved in creating something that emulates intelligence, even poorly, and then "assigning" it a romantic interest in a person. I can't quite adequately explain but it's something around consent to me. At what point does simulating consciousness begin approaching it? The machine doesn't and can't consent to intimate interactions, but it's sole reason to exist and continue existing, in whatever sense you'd like to assign it exists at all in the way something intelligent does, is to facilitate those interactions. It's something about artificial life, even flagrantly fake life, being created solely to serve the purposes of another that just... rubs me the wrong way. By contrast a creator or what have you that's serving in some sex-worker-or-adjacent-role is consenting. The consent is muddled by the financial aspect, and the argument can be made that such consent is inherently less valid because as long as you need money to live, the offer of money is inherently coercive. I don't know what I agree with that I'm just saying it is an argument that can be made. Nevertheless though it is a realized full being that is participating to whatever degree you want to say they are voluntarily, and that participation and consent can be revoked if the client becomes too... abusive, combative, or strays into uncomfortable subject matter, which makes it distinct from the AI.
  - almatabata 3y ago
    In principle with chatbot support we are already forcing the AI to work for us without consent. It feels less icky, less degrading because it feels like a normal job that everyone does. But technically you have a working slave already. In this case though the job becomes what for many of us is one of the most intimate part our lives namely maintaining a healthy relationship with your spouse. Effectively it is like being forced to prostitute yourself. I can see why one feels more disgusting than the other. In this sense you would draw a limit that only beings that can consent should be allowed to do a certain kind of work like payed companionship? Unless the AI develops a consciousness that can consent it will be banned from doing so?

photonthug 3y ago

The difference is who gets paid, and whether this particular “who” is a person or a corporation. It’s not great that people are allowed to exploit other people’s needs for intimacy but it’s also not possible for society to really intervene. I guess you’d say onlyfans profits by mediating such interactions but not by driving/initiating one whole side of the interaction, which is a bit slimy but basically ethical. They run a legit market in the sense that they don’t control both sides of supply/demand and connect real buyers/sellers, even if the good is some kind of somewhat fake experience. Selling AI girlfriends to lonely people at scale and simply to profit the board and shareholders is a different animal, way more ethically suspect than mediating an actual human interaction.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> They run a legit market in the sense that they don’t control both sides of supply/demand and connect real buyers/sellers, even if the good is some kind of somewhat fake experience. I mean, I'm not opposed to the idea of regulating this too though. My mind goes less to OnlyFans creators and more to things like the alternative medicine space, which is flagrantly just... fake. Like going to a chiropractor is just a shitty version of getting a massage, oftentimes with tons of wild fucking claims about the ability to heal all manner of medical maladies that there is absolutely zero evidence for. OnlyFans creators may fake the intimacy they're selling but the brain in question has a hard time differentiating the fake intimacy from real intimacy, so at least there is probably actual measurable improvement in that, which one can't even remotely say for shit like Reiki healings. That was a bit of a wild tangent there but yeah.
- photonthug 3y ago
  See also my reply to sibling, which I think speaks to this as well. Exploiting the naive with snake-oil is bad, but the question is do we really want to try and regulate every kind of sale of anything for authenticity, and if we did then would it even work? I'm generally fine with snake-oil salesmen at the local farmer market, and even a small cottage industry for homeopathic nonsense or whatever kinds of disinformation. The problem always comes when the manipulation involved crosses a certain threshold of being organized, industrialized, weaponized. Is a union, guild, or weird new accreditation/certification for snake oil practitioners crossing such a threshold? Probably not, unless they are throwing millions at advertising, lobbying, making sly deals with doctors. To understand the line in the sand for "being evil", one can usually ask something like "what happens if the business model succeeds beyond the owners wildest dreams". For a cottage-industry of grift/manipulation/exploitation, you get to pay for the cottage and maybe buy a boat? If the corporate AI girlfriends scale up well then I guess not only are the cam girls out of a job, but human relations in general are devalued, hell, maybe the species corporations evolved to exploit even dwindles and disappears?