Column: AI porn is now a thing, and I'm ready to let the modern culture bus go on without me

Now I know how my dad felt about bar codes. He felt they were wrong, very likely immoral and would likely lead to felonious behaviors on the part of barcode purveyors, although if you pressed him (never a good idea, in all honesty) he could never say exactly why. It was just that an occult series of linear messaging codes readable by a 1D optical scanner for automatic identification and data capture, all of which would determine, say, the retail cost of a watermelon, was just a little more than he could understand. And therefore bad. But the real truth was that the world had passed him by. Which today is how I feel about the topic of AI porn. Trying to noodle through the implications and what it all means, if it means anything at all, causes neural short circuits, leading me to think this is the stop where I should get off, letting the bus of modern culture to go on without me. AI porn is just what it sounds like: a spot on, lifelike image of an attractive female (usually), who looks entirely real but in fact is entirely a product of computer coding. "Women" will post on message boards like Reddit, using suggestive lines like "I feel pretty today" to lure guys to paid porn sites. This has caused all kinds of hand-wringing across a wide, usually disparate range of groups from pornography models to social scientists to porn consumers themselves who say they feel "cheated." But there's one central question that gets to the heart of the matter: If no actual human is involved, is porn still porn? True, this is an "if a tree falls in the forest" type of question, but the ethical implications could be huge. Is this ice cream with no calories? Fragrance with no flowers? Steak without killing a cow? If you get to the pearly gates, can God really ring you up on a porn rap if the person, i.e., victim, never existed? The Almighty is going to have some late nights with his lawyers: "Help me out here Saint Matlock, is faux porn actionable?" Even if the image is fake, the lust is real enough. That's not AI generated drool we're seeing is it? So this is like an ABSCAM for pervs. Even if the bribery cash never existed, it was a crime to try to take it. Not everyone thinks this way, though. "The average person who's looking at this stuff, I don't think they care," an unnamed content creator told The Washington Post. "I don't expect the person I'm looking at online to be the person they say they are. I'm not going to meet this person in real life. … At the end of the day, if they're not real, who really cares?" Except that's not entirely true. Even the fattest, sweatiest, baldest, grossest, unemployediest, ketchup-stained T-shirt wearingest hog scrolling through a naughty message board believes deep down there's at least a 2% chance Priscilla will take a shine to him. That's why they engage with actual comments on these phony accounts like, according to the Post, "Holy crap you look beautiful." (Message to any young men reading this: If you really want to impress a woman on a date, be sure to start all your sentences with "Holy crap." You'll be amazed at the results. And be sure to scratch your head with your fork at the same time.) And speaking of class, the porn industry reacted with a huffy haughtiness to the phenomenon. "I don't think you can machine-learn a personality," one porn agent said. "You can somewhat replicate it, but you're still missing that human spark and spontaneity." Growth and development:The 'Ritchie Revival' is so on — and way ahead of schedule Right. You can generate a computer image that's wearing an adult diaper and licking a fireplug, but where's the love? Virtual reality has just met virtueless reality. And I'm too old to figure it all out. — Tim Rowland is a columnist for Herald-Mail, a columnist and staff writer for Sun Community News, and a New York Times bestselling author. His books include "High Peaks; A History of Hiking the Adirondacks from Noah to Neoprene" and "Strange and Unusual Stories of New York City".

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Column: AI porn is now a thing, and I'm ready to let the modern culture bus go on without me

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