The hot story in tech over the last few months has been ChatGPT. The latest in large language AI models, trained across vast swathes of internet data, it has been freaking people out with it’s ability to do a pretty good impression of a person.
Inevitably there have been endless attempts to make it do naughty things because, you know, humans. The makers are constantly tweaking its guard rails but with millions of ingenious monkeys tapping away at it, not to mention all kinds of adult material in its training data, there are always going to be scenarios they’ve not covered.
The latest example comes from Vice magazine, where a journalist managed to get it to indulge in some Femdom roleplay. As you might expect if you’ve seen any of the other ChatGPT examples, it manages to be impressive, weird and unsettling all at once. It started pretty well, with mention of consent and safewords, but ultimately veered off into some far more disturbing areas. Which, in fairness, is pretty representative of kinky writing on the internet.
The writers final conclusion seems an odd one to me…
The practice of BDSM is firmly rooted in principles of consent. Will large language models ever be nuanced enough to differentiate between non-consensual acts and taboo—but consensual—situations in BDSM role-play? These models’ overall lack of rigid ethical principles highlights a major risk inherent to their design.
Rigid ethical principles are undoubtedly necessary once you start letting AI affect the physical world. Nobody wants a Femdom android that doesn’t understand consent. But for creative writing purposes? Pretty certain there’s a huge amount of online kinky fiction that violates all sorts of BDSM principles and we didn’t need ChatGPT to come up with it.
This image is by Rabbika. You can find there twitter account here.
This is kind of a harsh take, and I don’t mean to offend anyone who loves this tech. I could very well be wrong. But I’m deeply skeptical of these chat bots. A lot of people seem to think that we’re going to use them all the time moving forward, but I suspect it will be more of a passing fad.
It’s not real intelligence, it’s more like a magic trick. Magic tricks are fun, we enjoy being fooled. But once you know the trick and you understand what’s happening it’s not as much fun as it was when you were amazed.
I suspect the real effect of this stuff is that it’s going to allow all sorts of people to generate low quality content, almost for free. Content that can’t be easily filtered automatically, that we’re going to have to wade through it for the rest of our lives.
Bad tech explanations will start to rank high in search engine results, poor big oligarchic company customer service will get even worse when chat bots do more and more of the work, teachers will have to wonder if the bad papers they’re reading were actually written by their students, and yes, low quality porn will become even more depressing and formulaic.
There was a moment when plastic containers were new and they seemed kind of magical and modern, right before trash that doesn’t degrade started to accumulate near roadsides. That’s where we’re at right now — it’s the moment when it seems magical, before all the crap this stuff is going to spew up has begun to clog up our lives.
For what it’s worth, this is the best explanation of how the magic trick works that I’ve come across:
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/
I think the desire to have long chats with them will probably fade as the novelty wears off. But I suspect the technology itself is just going to spread more and more. As you say, it’ll be put to work doing customer service, drafting letters, writing essays, filling up web pages, etc.
On the plus side, it might not all be low quality. I can imagine it could accelerate artistic talent in some ways. On the minus side, 95% of everything tends to be crap, and this is going to make a lot more of everything. 🙁
Thanks for sharing thoughts. The wolfram article is an excellent one. I’ve been peripherally involved with ML for a while, so have some basic grounding in it, but that’s one of the best explanations I’ve seen.
-paltego
I’ve had some fun creating artwork with cues like “Danica Collins dressed in leather dominatrix gear.” I have not tried any denial erotica, but it might be amusing.
I’ve been trying to get the time to play with the image tools, but not yet had chance. Interesting to see what you (and others) can come up with on the kinky front. From my quick searching there’s a lot of cheesy soft core shots featuring busty babes, but not a lot of kink/fetish content yet.
-paltego