How AI Porn Isolates Us with Noelle Perdue

0:03Hey, welcome to another interview edition of the 4formedia podcast. 4-4 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 4-4media.co. Subscribers at the supporter level get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. And they get early access to this interview series, too. This week, we are joined by Noelle Perdue. And I'm so excited to talk to Noelle. Noel is a writer, producer, and internet porn historian who has been published in Wired, Washington Post, Slate, many more than that. And if you've been paying any attention to the plots of some of your favorite pornographic films, you're probably already familiar with her work.

0:49She's also writing on Substack. So look her up there, Noel Perdue. And I think that probably also serves as a content warning of sorts. we'll be talking about porn and sex and all that good stuff in this episode. So maybe don't listen if you have small children in the car, which is probably good to do if you're listening to the 4-4 podcast in general. Noelle, hello. Hi. How's it going? It's going really well. Nice to see you again. Good to see you. Yeah, we just did a really cool little speaking thing, I guess. Engagement. Engagement. Speaking engagement together on stage for Mindy Sue's amazing work, The Sexual History of the Internet.

1:36So that was really, really fun, and I'm so excited to keep talking here. Someday we'll talk not being recorded and not on the stage. But this is how we catch up. We've got like 10 minutes in the green room where we're like, oh my god. We're like, oh my god, everything is going on just like yeah yeah exactly no it was and yeah I mean that's unfortunately the way that I catch up with the coolest people I know these days is through talking to them for stories and podcasts so that is life um yeah so I guess um walk us through a little bit about like you and your background um you worked for and you wrote for browsers right yeah I've written for um a bunch of kind of more mainstream studios like browsers i've written for um babes trans angels etc twisties uh and then i've also written for some independent studios like afterglow so i have a pretty wide range but yeah i i got my start writing for very high volume mainstream studios sick yeah what a job it's one of those jobs where i think people don't even like think about the people behind the job people find the content people really don't I I had people like not believe me and I'm like well you can come to my cubicle yeah it's like come to my very normal workplace where it does not look like crazy yeah yeah a lot of it is just the thing is is that 90 of like many jobs is just being on your computer which is kind of disappointing um but But yeah, and then I ended up working for Pornhub and Model Hub, which was Pornhub's kind of attempt at a clip site before they lost their payment processing.

3:24And then about five years ago, I went freelance to do writing kind of for mainstream media, mostly. Very cool. And you are, like myself, a parody porn fan. You have an encyclopedia knowledge of this stuff. I do not. I did a story about Wood Rocket a couple years ago and consumed their entire library as a part of that. I love Wood Rocket. Do you have a favorite parody? Yes, I do. It's their parody of The Lion King called The Loin King. Did you watch The Loin King? Yes. Oh, The Loin King is amazing. Mostly because the costumes, like some of the costumes, they really went all in on. and then someone, I think that there was one scene where somebody's just wearing a shirt that says snake on it.

4:15Yes. It's so amazing. And it's like a full musical. It's genuinely an artistic masterpiece. I remember I would force people to watch it with me, like just like people that I would meet at parties. Like, you know what, like really annoying guy at the party that's like, I'm going to make you watch like Fight Club or something like that. That was me, but with The Loin King. Oh my God. I loved that one. It's so hard to pick a favorite because they're all so incredible. Yeah, and the names, I don't know. The process of picking the names is so, so good. I think my favorite of theirs is Strokemon. God, it's good.

4:55Amazing. Just like Rizzo Ford's face in that horrifying Pikachu makeup is so scary. something that i i really feel like we've lost um is the porn parody title because porn parody or sorry parody law kind of like changed to accept just like the title of something if you put a parody afterwards so now all the porn parodies are just like the title of the thing a porn parody a porn parody which is such a shame because i feel like that's like at least 30 % of the art of a porn parody is the title. That's so true. I did a parody of Cutthroat Kitchen that I called Cum Throat Kitchen. I did another one.

5:42I did Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dick. Nice. There is a real art to it because you want, it has to be recognizable. And it has to be as stupid as possible. Yes. Yeah. Dragon Boob Z. Dragon Boob Z. Classic. Red Dead Erection. this is poetry to me it's beautiful um and i just i love the idea of a group of very smart professionals sitting around and saying we need to think of we gotta we gotta penis hands yes edward penis hands this is the thing though it's like i think that a lot of people that are watching parody porn it's it's a genre of comedy like it's not even necessarily a genre of erotica. Right.

6:30You know? Like, it's much closer aligned to comedy than it is to traditional eroticism. And I think that kind of just making it, like, blank, a porn parody, loses that understanding or that reference to that. Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. Yeah, the first and foremost, like, purpose of the parody is, like, entertainment and funny and, like, to make people go, oh, my God, of course. Yeah, it's so silly. I think something that I think we're kind of losing collectively as we're talking about pornography more in terms of legislation, in terms of kind of social value and influence is I feel like people are forgetting that porn is supposed to be fun and that porn is fun.

7:14People forget. It's not, it shouldn't be that serious. And sex is supposed to be fun. Sex is supposed to be fun. Isn't that crazy to say a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. it's become so fraught like with just like the conversation in the culture right now it's it does feel like it's something that we've lost majorly it's like i feel like the last time sex and sex scenes and and porn and these things like the conversation around it was really fun was probably like the 80s and 90s maybe yeah like maybe 2007 i would say i would i would pinpoint 2007. I even feel like when people ask me why I like porn, it's hilarious to me because I'm like, what do you mean why do I like porn?

8:02Porn rocks. Porn is awesome. Porn is so fun. Why would I not like porn? But that's the thing is people have really, I think, gotten bogged down with kind of like the implications of pornography on kind of like a cultural revolution sense. And it's really hard to kind of bring people back to the point of like, what do you mean, what do I like about watching really hot people have sex and make, you know, sex-related puns at each other? That's awesome. It's not that complicated. Do the math. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It shouldn't be that controversial. And yet it is. And that definitely, I mean, that's something that we've been writing about quite a bit at 404 is just the, especially in this administration and also just in the last 10 years, I guess, this very intensive and extreme, and it's been this way for more than 10 years, but this extreme push in the Trump administration, especially to make the conversation fraught and make it not fun and create all of these kind of weird, Christophascist parallels to like porn, but also to marginalized experience, queer experience, sexual identity, sexual speech, all this stuff is now wrapped up in politics and the conversation around it.

9:28And it's always been political, but now it's, it's become this kind of taboo thing to talk about even, even as it is like the only thing that conservatives want to talk about. So you were just on Adam Comner's podcast factually, which was incredible. I think people should go watch that immediately to get the hour-long breakdown very thoroughly of the way that obscenity laws have affected the way that we think about porn today and how the laws in the 80s really started drawing that line between pornographers and marginalized communities and lumped in together as this like straw man to push marginalized people more into the margins.

10:06And I think it's such an interesting point that you guys made. You and Siri Doll and Adam handled it like a champ. I think he learned a lot. And I think his audience probably learned a lot. I would love to kind of break that down a little bit because it's something I think people aren't talking about enough in this whole anti-porn conversation that we've been covering quite a bit at 4.4. and that you've been writing about for a very long time and experiencing directly for a very long time, that people like the architects of Project 2025 are calling trans and queer experiences and identities pornographic.

10:40And if everything that is pornographic is harmful to children, then those experiences and those identities are therefore harmful to children and adults. So, yeah, I would love to kind of break that down a little bit more where you see these parallels drawing and where you see this going, I guess. Like, what is the situation right now for pornographers and for these marginalized communities? And then where are we headed with all of this, do you think? Great question. I think that things can feel pretty bleak for pornographers right now. There's a lot of heat coming on to pornography from a number of different directions.

11:20I think that kind of this propaganda around morality and media and the morality police has been really effective, not only for Republican conservative people, but also liberals. and that's kind of been disturbing to see where there are a lot of people whose politics I generally agree with that are suddenly out of nowhere extremely anti-porn that are very kind of sexually open that are very open-minded sex positive but specifically anti-porn I think that really shows how effective that propaganda has been over the past particularly I would say 10 years. And yeah, I think that it's important to read the way that these bills are written, to read it in completion, because what has been popping up a lot is this link between transgender individuals and transgender experience and pornography.

12:19So in Project 2025, that was directly correlated. It's saying that, you know, pornography encourages that transgenderism, that transgenderism is inherently pornographic in some way. And that is right now being applied to transness, but that has been used as kind of an anti-queer movement or strategy since, I would say, the 80s. And even before that, it was used as an anti-interracial relationship strategy. So I would say in the very early days of obscenity law, so the 1950s, 1960s, a lot of how obscenity law was directly applied in practice, particularly, I would say, in Memphis, this was very common, where it was applied not necessarily to pornography, not necessarily to extreme gore or violence or any of these things that obscenity law was supposed to be applied for, but it was actually applied exclusively to, in Memphis, mainstream films with interracial relationships between a white person and a black person.

13:27And that is a really great example of how that kind of association between obscenity and marginalized identity and particularly, quote-unquote a non-normative sexuality was made and then that went into the 70s and 80s and even sometimes 90s where it was applied to uh homosexual relationships and depictions of homosexuality and that was deemed as obscene in different ways and then now we are seeing it applied to transgender individuals as we are seeing this huge wave of anti-trans hatred and bigotry and legislation kind of sweep the United States. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, it feels very conspiratorial and like conspiracy theory brand to be like, no, this is actually like part of a plan.

14:14This is part of a big pattern throughout history that is now kind of crystallized into an actual plan that the people who are in the highest positions of leadership in the United States are enacting. It feels like people look at you like, what? Like, what are you talking about? You're insane. But it very much is just something that's been building, like you said, for the last, since, you know, the 70s and then 60s and 70s and now is kind of gaining so much traction and movement in the past 10 years. Yeah. And the thing with obscenity, which obviously you know so well, is that it is so difficult to define and it's purposefully difficult to define so that obscenity law can be applied to anything that is deemed obscene, which makes it very difficult because obscenity is ultimately kind of like a respectability politics question.

15:07So anything that is seen as not respectable can be argued to be obscene. And a great example of how this has been put in practice recently was with the Texas drag ban. So originally when Texas tried to ban drag, it was deemed unconstitutional. And then they kind of brought it back, retooled the bill to be an anti-obscenity bill, brought it back, and it went through. So that's a direct example of obscenity law being used to apply to queerness in very recent years. And we're going to see, I think, more and more of that come up. And I'm using obscenity and pornography lightly interchangeably, even though they're not the same thing.

15:51Obscenity is not protected by the Constitution. And pornography so far is, as long as it's not deemed unconstitutional. However, pornography tends to be the vehicle that obscenity law gets kind of moved forward through and with because it's very easy for people to not defend pornography or, you know, be anti-porn in some ways in order for these obscenity rulings to go through. Yeah. Yeah. And then you have like Mike Lee classically is trying to reintroduce the interstate obscenity definition act IOTA, which would basically rewrite the Miller test, which is the test that we have right now on what qualifies as obscenity.

16:40and it would effectively make all of porn a federal crime in the U.S. And then you have Michigan lawmakers are pushing for the Anti-Corruption of Public Morals Act, which is so fantastic. Wow. That's just, they really said morality. They said morality police are back, baby. Yeah, they're like, we don't even give a fuck anymore. We're just going to say it, which is so, so, so wild. To not even try to hide it anymore, I think is really bold. Obviously, I think that the immediate response to this kind of thing is like, these are just right wing nutsoes who are trying to like push their own morals onto like legislation.

17:18But the fact that they're even saying it out loud in public office, these are elected officials, is really telling, I think. They made a list and I'm not going to read it because we will spare the ears of our listeners, I guess. But it's categories from Pornhub. That's all it is. It's ejaculation, penetration, group sex, bondage, animated, virtual, sexually generated artificial intelligence. It's just it's everything you can imagine being porn or sex or anything related to it is part of what they would like to outlaw as part of this bill. It's so wild. It's also so interesting because I feel like I get it.

17:58I have a lot of conversations with people that are openly anti-pornography. And I think that they don't realize how much qualifies as porn. If we let anything be outlawed as pornography, we are opening the doors for so much because ultimately what is pornography? Even if we are using the most traditional mainstream definition of what pornography is, which is like penetrative sex filmed distributed, at what point are you going to draw that line? Are you saying that couples are not allowed to film themselves? Are you saying that a woman is not allowed to film herself and send it to her boyfriend?

18:37Are you saying that, like, at what point, what if a couple films themselves, sends it to a friend? What if they're voyeurs? What if they're, like, at what point are we drawing the line of, like, that is illegal? You know what I mean? And then, even beyond that, if you're saying that it's material produced with the intention of stimulating an erotic response, which is the dictionary definition for many dictionaries, human sexuality is vast and very confusing. so a lot of things would would could be defined as such like almost everything could be defined as something that could be made with the intention to inspire arousal right yeah this is something that i think a lot about when i'm scrolling social media because that is the name of the game is to arouse in some way, some excitement.

19:35That's what it is all designed for these days. And Mike Lee's iota that he's trying to get through is written as such where the material that he's defining as obscene would be anything that had the objective intent to arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person. Which the example that I used when I was talking about this a couple months ago was, you know, those videos where like someone like pops an egg yolk and it's like way too slow and sexy about it. And all the comments are like, what, what's going on with the egg zone? Like, why are you like getting this egg off? Obviously that's, that is fetish content in some way.

20:18And you can't, you can't tell someone what is and isn't designed to arouse if they are sexually aroused by it. It's just, you would, I think Mike Lee's mind would fucking explode if he tried to figure out all the things that would sexually arouse everyone on the planet. And that's what he's trying to outlaw. Absolutely. And it's this hilarious thing where the surest way to get people to develop really, really weird kinks and fetishes is to ban the normal stuff. I'm like, Mike Lee, you're gonna get everybody jerking it to the egg pot congrats it's gonna be whack-a-mole with insane new fetishes if you guarantee like if you ban ejaculation yeah people are gonna find ways it's something that's so and the egg is a very um wholesome example of what i would say people people's minds go to when they aren't allowed to watch normal porn um normal like quote-unquote like the mainstream stuff that's getting censored and banned off of like Instagram, like actual sex workers doing sex work.

21:28Something else that's in my algorithm constantly is AI porn and just it's AI girls, AI babes, like doing all kinds of stuff all over my algorithm. It's 85 % soft core stuff, but it's definitely intended to arouse. And based on the comments, a lot of people's dads are very aroused. And I think that probably would make Mike Lee's head fucking explode. So I know you have thoughts on AI porn in general, and probably also just like this influx that we've seen very recently on with generative AI and with the ability to generate whatever you want, whatever fetish you come up with. So yeah, what is your kind of...

22:10Where are you at right now with the AI porn sort of debate, I guess, if it even is a debate. Yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting journey for me with AI porn. I actually, I would say I'm probably one of the first people that made AI porn. I made quote-unquote AI porn in 2021, early 2021, and it looked nothing like how it does now. I took a very early generative adversarial network and I trained it. You had to train it for over 70 hours. You input your own content for it to be trained on. It took forever. It looked nothing like pornography whatsoever. It was just blobs. It was weird blobs, but it was really good at triggering nudity detectors online.

23:00So I used it to kind of illustrate the difficulty of binarizing obscenity and kind of programming these systems that are trying to identify something that, again, is a deeply emotional and personal response to something. It's ultimately about respectability and your own understanding of that. And it's really hard to write an algorithm based on that. So that's what I was using it for. But again, the point was that it looked nothing like pornography. And now, obviously, generative adversarial networks, generative AIs have come a long, long way. And now it's very mainstream and it's everywhere. And now we're kind of reckoning with how to manage the fact that it's everywhere and what it's kind of doing to people and what's happening and what it means for IP law, all these sorts of things that classically legislation around technology has not been set up for.

24:00Yeah, it's been such an interesting evolution, like you said, where it didn't use to... It seemed like it was its own genre and it still is. AI porn is still something totally different than human-made content in general. But the way that it is now so realistic and so everywhere. And it's interesting that that doesn't get caught in the censors on Instagram reels anymore as much. It's like, I'm seeing it everywhere, but I'm not seeing any of the sex workers that I follow. And they're getting shadow banned. And yet I'm seeing these guys advertising their AI models as a pyramid scheme constantly.

24:44Yeah, it's so unavoidable. And it's been interesting because there's also an element, obviously, of the chatbot that we're seeing. So there's generative adversarial networks, and then there's large language learning models. And they're both kind of creating these systems of pornography that didn't exist prior, or at least, you know, the chatbots have existed for a long time, but not nearly how they do currently. And I used to be really pro-AI. Like, when I was using that in—when I was messing around within 2021, I found it really interesting. I found it really fun. I loved the idea of, like, a chatbot.

25:23And to me, in my understanding, it seemed like a really interesting way for people to kind of explore fantasy and role play in a way that might not have consequence or would feel a little less real world. And now I have done a complete 180. And I really disagree with that opinion that I used to hold. And now I'm very much anti using these AI chatbots, these AI networks for eroticism. Yeah, let's get into that a little bit.

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31:05I think the AI girlfriend and boyfriend conversation, and I always try to make a point when I'm talking to people who don't have a deep knowledge of this stuff or aren't as familiar with it, which is not you and probably not our audience, but just in general, AI boyfriends are very popular. I think AI girlfriends are like the thing that people talk about. Women, straight women are very into AI boyfriends. So I think something that I hear pretty often is, and that people ask quite a bit is, and I have yet to find a concise answer for this. I'd love to hear what you think of it, is whether this rise of like AI companions has something to do with the so-called male loneliness epidemic.