Interesting thoughts. My problem with AI generated content like this is that it’s going to be using available pictures of kids as training data, so it’s going to be depicting real children whether we like it or not. AI just uses what it already has, it can’t create anything new per se.
This is a really interesting and original thought, it’s not something I have ever heard discussed but at the same time, of course this is happening and something that in no doubt impacting many fathers out there and thus demands a discussion.
I think for someone who engages in prostitution (or “escorting”, to make it more palatable) and does not have children like Aella, this topic won’t be thought out to the same extent it is here with your own thoughts. Like you said, she simply sees sex as a transactional experience that is on a marketplace model. The intimacy element gets looked past in favor of statistics, assumptions, and theories based on her own very skewed experiences and those of her audience.
The deep versus shallow fetish thing seemingly is just a hunch she has, and I don’t think it has any merit. There are people who get super into BDSM or swinging or whatever else you want to think of later in life as a result of porn and influence of others—why wouldn’t this be any different? And those people are actively engaging in those practices, not just fantasizing about them. Her position is this very strangely naive and optimistic to me…and for no reason.
Like you said here and in your note you wrote about this, her position seems a bit disingenuous and a way to drum up engagement and perhaps that is part of why her position seems weird.
I’m of the opinion that society should not be tasked with, nor interested in, pandering to the fantasies of people who actively enjoy what amounts to child torture. And if those people happen to also be fathers, that is all the more reason to not give them fuel for their fetishistic fires.
Because to answer the questions at the end of your essay, the answer is maybe they can do those things, but they really shouldn’t be if they have AI CSAM fantasies swirling around in their heads whilst doing so, even if they don’t act on it. That is a death strike against the purity and true protective quality that should be the basis of a father’s love for his children.
"The deep versus shallow fetish thing seemingly is just a hunch she has, and I don’t think it has any merit. There are people who get super into BDSM or swinging or whatever else you want to think of later in life as a result of porn and influence of others—why wouldn’t this be any different? And those people are actively engaging in those practices, not just fantasizing about them. Her position is this very strangely naive and optimistic to me…and for no reason." My thoughts exactly. It's somewhat ironic because I think part of Aella's whole shtick is to be upfront about how regular people can get into some pretty wild sexual stuff. And yet, on this topic, she seems to *underestimating* the human capacity to be swayed into something seriously depraved. Just seems like the wishful thinking of someone who wants to, on the one hand, absolve everyone of their kinks and porn habits while at the same time reassuring everyone else that nothing truly bad could ever come of them.
Or, put another way: "All dangerous sexual impulses are hardwired/innate and there is nothing society can do to prevent them" is a pretty convenient belief for someone committed to maximal sexual liberation!
You make an excellent point. The trouble with things that are obviously moral abominations like child porn is that our disgust often overwhelms our ability to think rationally about the topic. Which puts us at a disadvantage when faced with rational arguments that conflict with our intuitions.
I have to admit that I recently fell into the trap(though I do think Aella actually is arguing in good faith) of adopting her framework and reducing everything to a question of what will decrease the prevalence of child sexual assault. logically, it just made a lot of sense to me. Child abuse is just about the worst thing one can imagine, and any other considerations seem pretty irrelevant in comparison.
But unfortunately, you're right, and there are other considerations we have to take into account. It's personally revolting to me that we're even weighing questions like whether it's better for one child to be assaulted, or 1,000 children to grow up with emotionally distant and sexually perverted fathers(or whatever proportion it may be) But reality is sometimes revolting, and we owe it to kids, and to society, to figure out what to do about this.
For me, I would think that it would depend on the numbers. I find it difficult to believe that there are more than a handful of people who would develop the kinds of shallow fantasies Aella talks about. As a kind of proxy, is there any evidence of straight men developing shallow same-sex fantasies due to exposure to porn? Or men developing shallow foot fetishes due to exposure to porn? Is it a myth that what men are attracted to is largely unconditioned? That is definitely my subjective experience of finding women attractive. So I find it hard to believe that exposure is going to change what people find attractive.
There do seem to be a not-insignificant number of straight men developing interest in transgender women at least in part due to pornography. I guess you could argue that the interest already exists and that's what leads them to seek out that type of porn? But in any case it does seem to be stoked by porn.
I am not qualified to answer that but Lyman Stone just published a pretty lengthy piece that gets into some of the numbers. I think, if history is any indication, it is unfortunately not that hard to sway a decent amount of men into sexual attraction to children.
This makes me think of the central Asian fetish of Baka Bazi. It’s ingrained in their society that men of power deserve little boys as sex objects. It’s not that a statically high number of pedos are leaders. It’s the cultural norm and celebration of pedophilia that makes it so pervasive and makes it a status symbol. The human mind is more inclined toward evil than we like to think.
i am reminded of the pedophile character from family guy who begs god “please, just let me smell his hat!” then, after a breeze blows the boy’s hat off and into the pedophile’s hand, he smells it and instantly discovers “now i want more.”
the man who wrote that joke probably understands male sexuality far better than aella does. it is like a fire: when you feed it, it grows. the sexual rewards reinforce the behavior. the man always wants more.
Certainly men who are fathers and not pedophiles are going to be seeking out porn in general and there is a nonzero chance that they will be exposed to AI child stuff along the way, and that exposure will lead some percentage of them to desire it more (whether simply because desire is so malleable or because they had a latent thing for kids all along.)
Not sure. But sort of immaterial. Seems very plausible that people could wind up consuming child porn without explicitly seeking it out in a world in which it is legal and easily accessible. And to the extent that access to child porn might wind up stoking sexual interest in children in men in such a way that it stunts their capacity to maintain an appropriately intimate relationship with children, the concern is not only one for men who already are fathers, but for men who otherwise *would be* fathers. I imagine a lot of men who developed such a fetish would opt not to become fathers at all, which would be a wise decision I think, but also a tragic and preventable loss, both at the individual level and at the population level.
Yeah I think that's a good point that is relevant to, like, every aspect of her argument, whether you are talking about people who are hardwired or conditioned to like CSAM. Does access to child porn dampen or actually inflame someone's compulsion and what does that look like is a major open question that I think she doesn't really consider thoughtfully.
I also think she makes a major leap in drawing a comparison between "heterosexual men consuming porn rather than going to an escort" and "pedophiles consuming AI child porn rather than assaulting a child." Even if she's right that access to porn reduces demand for prostitution in the first case, it's not clear to me that it would have the same effect in the second case.
I think Lyman Stone (you referenced in a different comment) succeeds is undermining her assumption that porn reduces rape which makes me also wonder by extension if it really reduces the demand for prostitution as she claims. From my understanding of the psychology of sexuality, the more porn is consumed the more novel and exciting porn is needed to continue to maintain interests and arousal. And that the porn industry knows this so it feeds more and more escalating and perverse porn to keep people coming back. So the path more likely is the move from AI child porn to real child porn and real child molestation. It may not be realized with every person due to the limitations in place physically and socially (good!) but left as an unchecked addiction this seems more likely than the alternative. And the normal heterosexual non-pedophilic track wouldn’t necessarily go this direction because having sex with a real adult woman isn’t necessarily more exciting (especially with the fantasy standards of porn) nor is it necessarily as perverse. This is based on my understanding of sexual arousal from the book "Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain" by William Struthers. In college I attended an intensive by the author, though it has been a few years since so I hope I am accurately portraying his research and of course this is my extrapolation he does not answer this question! I have seen a reluctance to engage the psychological factors at play, as I am sure they aren’t completely conclusive but they should at least be part of the conversation.
oh yeah that's a really interesting point... that the novelty seeking/escalation path would lead at once away from more vanilla sex with a real woman but also *toward* actual child porn/CSA. Maybe Aella's claim that "fake stuff seems to kill demand for real stuff" only applies when the "real stuff" can't scratch the novelty seeking itch... Yikes.
Yes! And Lyman Stone’s analysis at the end of his article that AI CSAM and real CSAM will be increasingly hard to distinguish (a very chilling and compelling argument) could potentially make real child molestation even more attractive.
Interesting thoughts. My problem with AI generated content like this is that it’s going to be using available pictures of kids as training data, so it’s going to be depicting real children whether we like it or not. AI just uses what it already has, it can’t create anything new per se.
This is a really interesting and original thought, it’s not something I have ever heard discussed but at the same time, of course this is happening and something that in no doubt impacting many fathers out there and thus demands a discussion.
I think for someone who engages in prostitution (or “escorting”, to make it more palatable) and does not have children like Aella, this topic won’t be thought out to the same extent it is here with your own thoughts. Like you said, she simply sees sex as a transactional experience that is on a marketplace model. The intimacy element gets looked past in favor of statistics, assumptions, and theories based on her own very skewed experiences and those of her audience.
The deep versus shallow fetish thing seemingly is just a hunch she has, and I don’t think it has any merit. There are people who get super into BDSM or swinging or whatever else you want to think of later in life as a result of porn and influence of others—why wouldn’t this be any different? And those people are actively engaging in those practices, not just fantasizing about them. Her position is this very strangely naive and optimistic to me…and for no reason.
Like you said here and in your note you wrote about this, her position seems a bit disingenuous and a way to drum up engagement and perhaps that is part of why her position seems weird.
I’m of the opinion that society should not be tasked with, nor interested in, pandering to the fantasies of people who actively enjoy what amounts to child torture. And if those people happen to also be fathers, that is all the more reason to not give them fuel for their fetishistic fires.
Because to answer the questions at the end of your essay, the answer is maybe they can do those things, but they really shouldn’t be if they have AI CSAM fantasies swirling around in their heads whilst doing so, even if they don’t act on it. That is a death strike against the purity and true protective quality that should be the basis of a father’s love for his children.
"The deep versus shallow fetish thing seemingly is just a hunch she has, and I don’t think it has any merit. There are people who get super into BDSM or swinging or whatever else you want to think of later in life as a result of porn and influence of others—why wouldn’t this be any different? And those people are actively engaging in those practices, not just fantasizing about them. Her position is this very strangely naive and optimistic to me…and for no reason." My thoughts exactly. It's somewhat ironic because I think part of Aella's whole shtick is to be upfront about how regular people can get into some pretty wild sexual stuff. And yet, on this topic, she seems to *underestimating* the human capacity to be swayed into something seriously depraved. Just seems like the wishful thinking of someone who wants to, on the one hand, absolve everyone of their kinks and porn habits while at the same time reassuring everyone else that nothing truly bad could ever come of them.
Or, put another way: "All dangerous sexual impulses are hardwired/innate and there is nothing society can do to prevent them" is a pretty convenient belief for someone committed to maximal sexual liberation!
You make an excellent point. The trouble with things that are obviously moral abominations like child porn is that our disgust often overwhelms our ability to think rationally about the topic. Which puts us at a disadvantage when faced with rational arguments that conflict with our intuitions.
I have to admit that I recently fell into the trap(though I do think Aella actually is arguing in good faith) of adopting her framework and reducing everything to a question of what will decrease the prevalence of child sexual assault. logically, it just made a lot of sense to me. Child abuse is just about the worst thing one can imagine, and any other considerations seem pretty irrelevant in comparison.
But unfortunately, you're right, and there are other considerations we have to take into account. It's personally revolting to me that we're even weighing questions like whether it's better for one child to be assaulted, or 1,000 children to grow up with emotionally distant and sexually perverted fathers(or whatever proportion it may be) But reality is sometimes revolting, and we owe it to kids, and to society, to figure out what to do about this.
For me, I would think that it would depend on the numbers. I find it difficult to believe that there are more than a handful of people who would develop the kinds of shallow fantasies Aella talks about. As a kind of proxy, is there any evidence of straight men developing shallow same-sex fantasies due to exposure to porn? Or men developing shallow foot fetishes due to exposure to porn? Is it a myth that what men are attracted to is largely unconditioned? That is definitely my subjective experience of finding women attractive. So I find it hard to believe that exposure is going to change what people find attractive.
There do seem to be a not-insignificant number of straight men developing interest in transgender women at least in part due to pornography. I guess you could argue that the interest already exists and that's what leads them to seek out that type of porn? But in any case it does seem to be stoked by porn.
I am not qualified to answer that but Lyman Stone just published a pretty lengthy piece that gets into some of the numbers. I think, if history is any indication, it is unfortunately not that hard to sway a decent amount of men into sexual attraction to children.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lymanstone/p/ai-child-porn-will-not-protect-children?r=44vgn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Thank you for this.
This makes me think of the central Asian fetish of Baka Bazi. It’s ingrained in their society that men of power deserve little boys as sex objects. It’s not that a statically high number of pedos are leaders. It’s the cultural norm and celebration of pedophilia that makes it so pervasive and makes it a status symbol. The human mind is more inclined toward evil than we like to think.
i am reminded of the pedophile character from family guy who begs god “please, just let me smell his hat!” then, after a breeze blows the boy’s hat off and into the pedophile’s hand, he smells it and instantly discovers “now i want more.”
the man who wrote that joke probably understands male sexuality far better than aella does. it is like a fire: when you feed it, it grows. the sexual rewards reinforce the behavior. the man always wants more.
Do you think men, who are not pedophiles and are fathers, are going to seek out the AI generated child porn ?
Certainly men who are fathers and not pedophiles are going to be seeking out porn in general and there is a nonzero chance that they will be exposed to AI child stuff along the way, and that exposure will lead some percentage of them to desire it more (whether simply because desire is so malleable or because they had a latent thing for kids all along.)
Not sure. But sort of immaterial. Seems very plausible that people could wind up consuming child porn without explicitly seeking it out in a world in which it is legal and easily accessible. And to the extent that access to child porn might wind up stoking sexual interest in children in men in such a way that it stunts their capacity to maintain an appropriately intimate relationship with children, the concern is not only one for men who already are fathers, but for men who otherwise *would be* fathers. I imagine a lot of men who developed such a fetish would opt not to become fathers at all, which would be a wise decision I think, but also a tragic and preventable loss, both at the individual level and at the population level.
Yeah I think that's a good point that is relevant to, like, every aspect of her argument, whether you are talking about people who are hardwired or conditioned to like CSAM. Does access to child porn dampen or actually inflame someone's compulsion and what does that look like is a major open question that I think she doesn't really consider thoughtfully.
I also think she makes a major leap in drawing a comparison between "heterosexual men consuming porn rather than going to an escort" and "pedophiles consuming AI child porn rather than assaulting a child." Even if she's right that access to porn reduces demand for prostitution in the first case, it's not clear to me that it would have the same effect in the second case.
I think Lyman Stone (you referenced in a different comment) succeeds is undermining her assumption that porn reduces rape which makes me also wonder by extension if it really reduces the demand for prostitution as she claims. From my understanding of the psychology of sexuality, the more porn is consumed the more novel and exciting porn is needed to continue to maintain interests and arousal. And that the porn industry knows this so it feeds more and more escalating and perverse porn to keep people coming back. So the path more likely is the move from AI child porn to real child porn and real child molestation. It may not be realized with every person due to the limitations in place physically and socially (good!) but left as an unchecked addiction this seems more likely than the alternative. And the normal heterosexual non-pedophilic track wouldn’t necessarily go this direction because having sex with a real adult woman isn’t necessarily more exciting (especially with the fantasy standards of porn) nor is it necessarily as perverse. This is based on my understanding of sexual arousal from the book "Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain" by William Struthers. In college I attended an intensive by the author, though it has been a few years since so I hope I am accurately portraying his research and of course this is my extrapolation he does not answer this question! I have seen a reluctance to engage the psychological factors at play, as I am sure they aren’t completely conclusive but they should at least be part of the conversation.
oh yeah that's a really interesting point... that the novelty seeking/escalation path would lead at once away from more vanilla sex with a real woman but also *toward* actual child porn/CSA. Maybe Aella's claim that "fake stuff seems to kill demand for real stuff" only applies when the "real stuff" can't scratch the novelty seeking itch... Yikes.
Yes! And Lyman Stone’s analysis at the end of his article that AI CSAM and real CSAM will be increasingly hard to distinguish (a very chilling and compelling argument) could potentially make real child molestation even more attractive.