Buzzy

Artificial Intelligence is any number of things. Two of them are 1) a technology and 2) a buzzword. This is common; it happens over and over and over again; this isn't a new phenomenon. When a technical term becomes a buzzword, it's spoken of as if the things one does with it are somehow fundamentally different than they were previous. Take e-commerce. Placing an order with a vendor in another location is certainly easier and faster via the World Wide Web than ordering from, say, a physical mail-order catalog. But the fundamental processes on the back end are more or less the same. And the goods and services aren't any different. Ordering a book on Amazon has any number of similarities to me going over to Barnes and Noble and requesting a book.

I mention this because I found a brief article in The Week about "AI"-generated pornography. It quoted Parrots Lab founder Naja Faysal, and I decided to look up the Medium post that the article referenced, to read it for myself. One of the points that Mr. Faysal makes is that recent advances in generative AI raise "critical ethical questions about the representation of consent, the portrayal of healthy sexual relationships, and the potential impact on human empathy and connection." Fair enough. But doesn't pornography created by other methods raise those same "critical ethical questions?" I'm not seeing what this one specific technology is doing that changes the ethical landscape around depictions of human sexuality for the viewer's pleasure. The invocation of AI here seems to be more a means of getting people's attention than a genuinely salient factor.