Sorry I’ve been silent for so long–Work has been overwhelmingly busy and has been killing my enthusiasm for writing. Hopefully that will change. But a minor issue this morning sparked my urge to write a quick post.
I ran across a bit of AI porn on my twitter feed today. It was typical AI slop–a guy walking his naked muscle-sub in public. The sub’s hands were bound behind his back, master and slave were walking side by side, and for some odd reason known only to AI, the master’s wrist was connected to the slave’s wrist by a short cord.
I commented that this was actually pretty dangerous for the sub. With his wrists tied behind his back, if he trips, he can’t break his fall and will probably smash his face into the pavement. And because he’s tethered to his master, he will pull his master down on top of him. And because the tether cord was quite short, his master wouldn’t be able to steady him when he started to fall. There is a basic rule in BDSM that when you are moving someone whose wrists are tied, you always keep a hand on their shoulder so you can steady them if they lose their balance.
One of the problems with BDSM erotica is that it’s typically written by people who have relatively knowledge of BDSM, and filmed porn typically presents sexy but somewhat unrealistic scenarios in which most of the safety precautions are edited out. This makes it easy for people to get all sorts of unrealistic ideas about BDSM and do things that can be pretty dangerous under the assumption that because they saw something like it in a porn video, it must be ok.
And this problem is magnified by AI slop porn. In a professional BDSM video, like the sort produced by Kink.com, filming is done with safety standards–the rigger who does the bondage is technically proficient, they establish safe words and negotiate consent and limits before filming starts, and they know what to do if an accident happens; I don’t for certain but I’m pretty confident that someone on set has first aid certification. So even if they edit out any safe-wording or minor accidents, the porn is safely and ethnically made.
But AI knows nothing about BDSM. AI doesn’t actually know anything about anything–it just parrots what it finds when it responds to a prompt; it mixes and matches stuff until what it spits out satisfies the user. So AI porn has no awareness of things like safety or practicality or even physical possibility. Ask it for a picture where a sub hangs suspended by one toe? No problem–it can make that, even though that would almost certainly dislocate the sub’s toe. Ask it for a video of a sub mounting a dildo a foot in diameter? You’ll get it even though no sub could ever actually accomplish that and trying to do that would certainly injure the sub.
And the more AI slop porn circulates, the more people it’s going to teach unrealistic ideas about BDSM. Sure, the viewer may recognize that something is impractical or dangerous, but after they consume enough of that slop, they will start to imagine it’s realistic somehow. Repeated exposure to unrealistic images tends to erode one’s sense of reality.
So don’t consume AI slop porn. It’s unrealistic and encourages the people making it to continue spreading their slop. AI slop is bad in a variety of other ways too–it steals the labor of producers of high-quality porn and erotica, which deprives them of revenue and makes it less possible for them to produce their work. It’s inherently unethical and probably breaks copyright laws. Most of it is also just bad art–poorly written or drawn. And it erodes one’s erotic imagination as well, making it harder to think about one’s own erotic possibilities.
Leather-Bound Press 