AI Porn and Its Effects
Worth Your Time!
Resource Recommendations to Help You Parent and Mentor Most Effectively
This Week's Recommendation:
"AI and the Future of Porn"
The August 13th Episode of the Think Biblically Podcast
Listen to It Here and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Etc.
"The AI movement is bigger than electricity and the internet, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that these industries [adult film industry and adult entertainment] would be heavily invested in it.”
Why It Matters
As I mentioned in three previous Worth Your Time emails on this topic (available here, here, and here), porn is one of the biggest battles kids, preteens, and teens face. They say in the podcast that the combination of porn and AI is like “pouring gasoline on a bonfire.” Parents and other adults must be aware of what’s coming next.
Last week I shared briefly about deepnudes/nudify/undressing apps, the current technology that is already here that enables youth to edit images of real people. They note in the podcast, “The fact middle schoolers are doing it just tells you how ubiquitous the technology is.”
Fake porn images, videos, and audio can be generated by AI or by using existing images of real people. While the undressing apps are already common, expect this new technology to explode as it advances even further.
Kids and young people already watch all kinds of porn, but there are still sexual activities that even porn stars and other producers of porn won’t create. Now, those sexual activities can be created by AI without using real people, which will normalize behaviors and activities (including child sexual abuse materials) that are currently considered out-of-bounds and socially unacceptable.
Choking is an example of an aberrant sexual behavior that porn and social media have already normalized among teens. An article in The Atlantic, titled “The Startling Rise of Choking During Sex,” cites the research of a midwestern professor and researcher: “Many sexual-assault cases among students at her university now center around nonconsensual choking. According to her research, 13 percent of sexually active girls ages 14 to 17 have already been choked.” In April, the New York Times published a guest essay titled, “The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex,” also dealing with choking. What additional aberrant sexual behaviors will AI porn normalize among today’s teens?
Today’s preteens and teens are quickly entering a world where they’ll be able to use text or voice to describe exactly what kind of porn they want to see – the technology already exists for this. They will no longer need to search for existing porn because AI will make the porn in seconds or minutes just for them.
Immersive technology (virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality), where users become part of the scene and “direct” it, is also already available (teens often use it for video games) and will be used to enhance porn experiences.
Teens will be able to have an AI girlfriend/boyfriend to either replace or supplement an actual one, meeting some of their “needs” that an actual partner can’t or won’t. In their minds, an AI partner will be easier and less risky by eliminating rejection, while still providing some of what they want. It’ll seem like “the best of both worlds.”
Can we ignore all this and the implications for the young people we care about?
How to Use it
Please, listen to the podcast and get somewhat ahead of what's coming. We can't help teens navigate something if we don't understand what they're navigating.
To get an idea of how AI can already easily edit images of real people, have some fun and test Meta’s “Imagine me as…” technology. Go on Instagram (in the messages search bar, not the regular search bar), Messenger, or Facebook, and type in, “Imagine me as [insert whatever you want it to imagine you as].” It will walk you through the steps of taking 3 pictures of your face, and after 3 pictures the possibilities will be endless! I'll include a few images of myself at the bottom of this email. You can also ask it to create other images, like, “Imagine a zebra walking through New York City with a red MAGA hat on.” Then, after testing it for yourself, imagine being 14 years old and having the ability to use this technology to create porn images and videos of anything sexual you want. That's what's coming.
Many teens (and adults) wonder if AI porn is ok because it’s not a real person. Ask them, "Do you think AI porn is ok since it's not real people?" Listen well and find out what they think. Then talk with them and include these two points in addition to the other moral and religious ones:
AI “trains” (learns) from real content involving real people. Most teens and adults don’t consider that much of the porn they watch is either shared without consent or uses girls, boys, women, and some men who are sex-trafficking victims who are forced to act for the camera. When AI produces porn, people are still hurt in the process because it “trains” on that real porn. As they ask in the podcast, “How many real human beings will actually be involved in creating training data that train the models?” We are morally accountable for our participation in sex trafficking, even if it’s as a consumer of porn.
AI porn will not replace “real porn.” Instead, the demand for its production will likely increase because people will crave seeing real, conscious beings doing what they’ve seen in AI porn - including the behaviors that were previously considered out-of-bounds but that get normalized by AI. This will create even more victims.
For many adults, much of this topic seems strange and far-fetched, but that’s often because we don’t understand how rapidly AI technology is advancing. Things that seem weird today may soon become normalized. Morally, things that many people thought would never be accepted 5, 10, or 20 years ago are common now. Expect that to happen here at an even faster pace.
