Digital stimulation: AI and porn

0:02The Economist

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:25On Monday, we told you about Syria a year after its brutal civil war concluded. What we didn't mention was that tourism numbers are ticking back up. In Syria, and just about everywhere else that atrocities have happened, so-called dark tourists follow. And for all of America's visible divisions, there's one that runs incredibly deep. Sure, there are political alignments around it, but it's more basic, more fundamental, more about lawn care.

1:01First up, though.

1:32Transcription by CastingWords Porn and technology go together hand in, um, riding crop in glove. Now that generative AI is in the picture, I probably don't need to tell you what's going on. While the rest of us arm and arm about whether we want to use AI for work, the porn industry is getting to work very quickly deploying the technology. Avantika Chilkoti is our global business writer. Some of the analysts I've spoken to have said that they think AI-driven pornographic content will be worth$2.5 billion this year. That's great in some ways, but it's also creating really big questions for the sex workers behind this industry.

2:14And it is already an enormous industry. Yep. Until I started reporting on the industry, I had absolutely no idea just how huge. I guess you have to think first about how many people consume porn. So in Britain, three quarters of men and half of all women admit to watching porn or having watched porn. And that's probably much higher in reality. The industry makes$100 billion a year. Bear in mind that it's really hard to make money off porn. Lots of companies don't want to advertise on porn sites. But you have interesting new business models, things like OnlyFans, where people pay subscription fees.

2:49And there's lots and lots of new ways for this industry to generate revenues. Five of the 50 most visited websites in the world are porn sites. This is a huge industry. We just don't talk about it. The porn industry has always sort of hung itself on new technologies. Why is AI any different from what came before, from printing press to VHS? Yeah, I thought about this a lot. Previous communications technologies basically changed how porn was disseminated. So could I print this stuff really quickly? Could I give you audio porn? Could I give you video porn? How accessible is it? But AI is actually changing how porn is produced.

3:24Originally, you would have had massive porn studios who employed sex workers who would act out pornography and then somehow that would be paid for. Then you had the next step in the industry, which was sites like OnlyFans and the camera sites where a sex worker could themselves live stream pornographic content. And this is a whole new sort of generation of porn whereby you go to a generator, you type in what you're looking for, and it will spit out text, images, videos. I went on one porn generator where I could select everything from the skin tone, the style, the hobbies, the age, the interests of a porn star and it would generate images of these people in inverted commas and also chatbots where I could ask for basically lewd chat and fantasies to be enacted.

4:17This is really quite far from the days of a porn studio controlling what's actually produced. So as in so many other industries, question number one is, does the AI put people out of work? And it's the first thing that a lot of sex workers are worrying about. You see the industry changing in basically exactly the same ways that our work is changing from the deployment of AI. So sex workers perhaps using AI tools to automate chat. If I chat with my fans and they pay me for the ability to chat to me, to have tailored content, well, actually, you could maybe use an AI tool to generate photos or I could get an AI chat bot to reply to my fans for me.

4:58So at the moment, a lot of it is human sex workers deploying AI to make their work more efficient. But what you're starting to see is the real, I guess, risk for sex workers that they get replaced by bots. And some of them are basically leaning into this. They are licensing AI firms to use their images, creating digital doubles of themselves, hoping to make some money off that. But my sense is they're never going to get fully replaced. You see this already with art and music, that if you tell someone something is machine made, they enjoy the art and the music less. And there's already studies with AI generated porn.

5:38So in one of these studies, they showed straight people images of scantily clad people of the opposite sex. And they asked them, how likely do you think this is real? And how much do you find this arousing? The more likely someone thought an image was real, the more they found it arousing. And how sex workers and porn sites deal with that is really important. So this doesn't sound inherently bad either for the performers, for the industry necessarily. And if it reduces how much of an industry that's notorious for exploitation actually needs people, then that's no bad thing. On the face of it, I would completely agree, right?

6:14If someone doesn't need to act out a scene that they don't really want to act out, it's fantastic if a bot can create it instead. But at the same time, there are studies that show that, let's say there's a trend for more violent pornography, particularly more recently, things like choking and pornography. There is data that shows that people then act out what they see in porn. It's called setting the sexual script. If you watch lots and lots of porn that is violent, it's not unlikely that that will make you want to have more violent sex or to be violent towards someone you're having sex with without their consent.

6:50A much clearer concern is the rise of deepfake technology. You see now you can upload a picture of someone fully dressed and there's something called a nudify app that will generate an image of them naked. That is not unrealistic. There's been lots of celebrities whose faces and bodies have been plastered into porn videos and really horribly are now seeing schoolyard bullies using this technology as well. There's one group that is definitely using that and that is online scammers. Sexuality and sex is such a vulnerable space for people. I think it's a really horrible place for scam artists to be.

7:28Reid Amber is a sex worker. She's the host of a podcast called Come Curious. And when I interviewed her, she said to me that she gets messages from fans who suggest to her that people are imitating her online, perhaps using deep thick technology and then taking their money. Insofar as there are these dangers you described, that is where regulators already are and belong, right? Yeah, around the world, lots of different jurisdictions are experimenting with different ways of regulating this. So in the EU, the AI Act basically requires labeling for synthetic content. Denmark's been very interesting because they have given people copyright over their own likeness, though it's not exactly clear what that means.

8:09Time and again, as we've seen from previous technologies, porn in the porn industry is very good at wriggling its way through regulatory safety nets. In particular with AI, testing these tools, knowing exactly what I'm going to type in to make this bot spit out illegal content, say child sexual abuse material, it's very hard for regulators to guess that in advance of misuse. And I think what a lot of academics say is that for the vast majority of people, the hope is that everybody just keeps their own bad instincts in check. If you know that OpenAI is going to have data on what you type into ChatGPT and you're the CEO of a big company, after you do your uses of ChatGPT for your everyday work, are you really going to start using it for, I don't know, dominatrix porn?

8:57I think this idea that people, A, can keep their own instincts in check and B, just like real world sex better is what a lot of regulators are relying on. Avantika, thanks very much for your time. Thanks for having me.

9:25Palmyra is this city which is built on an ancient trading route, and it was one of Syria's most popular tourist sites before the civil war broke out in 2011. Meghna Nanu is the editor of our Foreign Department newsletters. International tourism completely stopped. Syria became a pariah state. And in the last year since Bashar al-Assad's regime has fallen, lots of tourists have started to return. And they're not just going to see the temples and the theatres, but there's a group of them who have started to visit the war sites where all the atrocities took place. And these people are known as dark tourists.

10:10So tell me more about these dark tourists and what makes them different from the people who were just there for the temples and the theatres. So what makes someone a dark tourist, as opposed to just someone who's curious about travelling somewhere a bit unusual, is they specifically want to go to sites where atrocities have taken place. And often there's an element of unsavouriness about when they're visiting. For example, with Syria, it's obviously all very recent since the fall of the regime. And the idea that people are going to perhaps take selfies at what's known as the human slaughterhouse, which is Sednaya, a prison which is famous as being the toughest prison in Syria, is a bit odd.

10:55My colleague Heidi actually went on one of these tours in Syria and her guide was a woman called Rita Badran. And she advertises her services on Instagram. So she's got more than 25 ,000 followers. You like?

11:14You like? Yeah, you like it? Here we have some, like a very abundant tag of Assad regime. You can see how it is completely abundant. It's not used. It's just good to see how Assad is just, was surrendered. She offers private tours, which cost$130 per person. And there's an extra$100 permit fee specifically to get into Sednaya, the prison. Now, I did hear about some of this when I was near, not at Chernobyl, last year in Ukraine, that this idea that people are coming to sites where terrible things happened, I gather, then it's actually quite widespread. Yeah, so it's not just limited to Syria. People go to Iran, people go to Afghanistan, North Korea.

12:03And in Israel, dark tourists are going to the sites where 1 ,200 people were killed in Hamas's attack on October the 7th. There are specific companies whose entire ethos is based on doing this sort of tourism. One company I spoke to is called Young Pioneers and their tagline is places your mother would rather you stay away from. This is a massive business around the world as well. Global Industry Analysts, which is a market research firm, estimates that the market is worth$35 billion, and it's only going to continue growing. So having looked into this, this sort of revealing something quite unpleasant about people wanting to go to these places, where do you think the obsession starts?

12:50The term dark tourism was first coined in the late 90s. These academics came up with the phrase and it stemmed from the public becoming really interested in going to the site where JFK was assassinated. But I think this has been going on for centuries. If you go back to the Romans, people used to go and watch gladiators fight in amphitheaters. So that in itself isn't new. But I suppose the rise of social media and influences posting unseen destinations, that's made it a lot more accessible and a lot more widely known. So cheap travel and that combined has led to a surge. And you've been hinting sort of throughout here that there is a question as to whether this is appropriate, whether it is savoury or unsavoury, whether it's right and just.

13:38Did you land on an answer to that? Well, it's quite complicated, I think. There are definitely morbid elements to it. One example where this was particularly controversial was with Logan Paul, who's an American YouTuber back in 2017. He posted a photo from the Okagera Forest, which is known as the Suicide Forest, back in 2017. And YouTube actually cut ties with him at the time. But he now has 23 million followers. So he's actually increased the number of followers he's got from posting this sort of content. But not all dark tourists are of that ilk. So I spoke to Peter Hohenhaus, who founded the dark tourism website, and he says that we kind of conflate the idea of dark tourists with voyeurs.

14:30Lots of the people who visited Auschwitz last year would have done so to pay their respects. But then there are people who would take selfies outside the concentration camp. And Hohenhaus put it quite well in that he said, there are selfish idiots and then there are dark tourists, but they aren't the same thing. Meghna, thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Jason.

15:03There will be a three-minute limit. At the end of three minutes, that beeper will go off, the township secretary has. Lower Merion Township is a small suburb of Philadelphia. And in November, they had a very controversial city council meeting. You should also be aware that we have already heard something like five and a half hours of public comment on this topic. We're pretty well briefed in the issues. This debate has been going on for months. The issue that brought out all these people? Illegal immigration? Abortion? Something to do with transgender rights? No, it's leaf blowers. I spend thousands of dollars getting these leaves cleaned.

15:42My gardener will have to raise his prices. I can't do that, and I don't know who's going to do that. My classmates and I have collected 141 signatures supporting this ordinance. We're just going to go around and force it. What happens on the weekends? We're going to pay them time and a half for four hours. If we can't get nobody, we're going to call the police department. The police department has enough to worry about. This issue might not seem like a big deal, but it exposes some big divisions in communities. Let's get into the meat of these divisions. The haters, the people who hate leaf blowers, why?

16:16So that one's easy. They're incredibly noisy. They are incredibly polluting. And people say that the people using them don't even collect up the leaves. They just blow them into the street, into somebody else's property. The pollution aspect is the thing that perhaps surprised me most. Using a single leaf blower for an hour creates as much local air pollution as driving 1 ,100 miles. Okay, so maybe the stickier question, who loves them and why? Well, the people who like them most are landscapers and people who employ landscapers. Landscaping firms say that the electric leaf blowers are not as good and that they're more expensive.

17:00And so switching to them will push them out of business. And the kind of people who employ landscapers using leaf blowers, so golf clubs, country clubs, people with big gardens, they are worried that their costs will go up with these kind of restrictions on petrol-powered leaf blowers. And the rumble between the lovers and the haters is really serious, you're saying? Yeah, it comes to blows. In Portland, Oregon, they passed a restriction on petrol-powered leaf blowers last year, and 800 people left some sort of public comment. In Evanston, which is a suburb of Chicago, there were a bunch of landscapers organized to protest last year after an ordinance came into effect.

17:42Some of this rage has gone on for a while. In Los Angeles, they tried to ban leaf blowers in 1998. In fact, a lot of Californian cities did because of the worst air pollution. And there was a hunger strike by a lot of landscapers. So yet another thing dividing Americans. Yeah, it's very political and it's increasingly partisan. Places that want to ban leaf blowers tend to be left-leaning. In Lower Merion, three quarters of people voted for Kamala Harris last year. And some more conservative places take a more libertarian view. You know, they say it is the right of property owners to suck and blow.

18:21So the state governments of Texas and Georgia, both Republican places, had passed laws banning municipalities from treating petrol-powered leaf blowers any differently from electric ones, which basically means you can't ban them. But the hate is real and the law is coming for the lovers. Do you see bans like this spreading? Oh, I think they're going to spread very quickly. this kind of surge in banning of leaf blowers began with the pandemic when obviously an awful lot of people were at home trying to work and realized how much noise their neighbors create but there is a kind of growing awareness a lot of lobbying from organizations that are pointing out how polluting these things are and that the alternatives to petrol-powered leaf blowers the electric ones are only getting more common so it's a lot easier for places I think to say no, we're going to ban these very loud, noxious machines.

19:14So I think the bans are going to grow, but, you know, inevitably, politics being the way it is, there's likely to be pushback. Daniel, thanks very much for joining us. Jason, it's always the delight. Thank you for having me.

19:42That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.