Tag: F

Final AI Thought

This is a third and final post (for now) on the AI topic. I’m bullish on the possibilities – more so than some commenters – because it seems to be entering one of those positive spirals that happens occasionally with tech. A tipping point is reached and what was only interesting to specialists becomes usable and consumable in the mainstream. That triggers interest, publicity and funding. That drives rapid improvement, which opens up more markets, which triggers more revenue streams, etc. etc.

The same kind of thing happened with 3D graphics in the 90s. Until then it had been kind of a niche technology. Readers of my generation may remember playing things like Battlezone or Elite. They seemed amazing at the time, but were never going to be a mainstream consumer product. Then in the mid 90’s the tech reached a quality tipping point and consumer interest in it exploded. The resulting positive spiral took it mainstream, made billions of dollars for the companies involved and ultimately led to the powerful computing clusters that are now driving AI.

Of course, there are also plenty of cases where we hit a tipping point, but that positive spiral never quite takes off. VR is another spin off from the graphical revolution, but despite a lot of money and hype from the likes of Meta and Apple, it never seems to quite get the feedback loop going. Hard to know which pattern AI will follow right now. The only thing that is predictable is that people will be making porn with it.

Above is an AI image created with midjourney by Helena Manzanita. It’s part of a series using the same seed through different points in time. You can see the complete series in this twitter thread.

More on AI

There’s one type of AI image that seems particular common – older women with enormous flawless breasts. I’d guess it’s a single person with a very specific kink churning them out, but maybe there’s a whole art collective involved. I would say it’s one for Dr. Freud, but even he might think it’s a little too on the nose.

The image below – with a caption added by Tom Allen – is an example of what I mean. You can find other examples on his twitter here and here.

Tom left a comment on my previous post that made an excellent point: AI imagery is likely to be a great source for caption creators. It avoids the issues of copyright and unwanted repurposing while giving a lot more control to the caption writer. Right now the image prompt writers and caption writers are likely different people. But once the tools get mature and widespread I can image a lot of new content from people writing image prompts for the particular scene they want to then caption.

You can see more captions from Tom on his tumblr and twitter.

A Kinky Advantage

AI generated images are showing up with increasing frequency in my media feeds. They still have a slightly fake soulless feel to them, as if they were created by ad agencies for marketing campaigns, but the quality has undeniably taken a big jump forward. For example, this thread has some interesting examples of how it can simulate different camera lenses.

This inevitably means people are going to try to create pornography with it. Which, equally inevitably, is going to lead to an evolving battle with the tech companies and government over what’s allowed and what gets censored. It’s a cycle that has played out with every technical evolution since the dawn of time.

Fortunately, kink might actually have an advantage here, because our take on what constitutes erotic material tends to be a lot wider than most peoples. For example, consider the image below. I doubt an image classifier would ever tag it as pornography but I’m betting a significant fraction of my readers will find it very erotic. I predict that a lot of kinky creative types are going to have fun creating non-explicit imagery that pushes their own personal buttons. The results might not be great art, but AI will probably do a better job than amateurs with basic photoshop tools.

Unfortunately I don’t have a source for this. Guessing it’s a mainstream fashion shot that I stumbled on via a femdom tumblr.

Summertime

My last couple of posts have been a little grouchy, so here’s a happy one full of color and summertime sun, courtesy of a tweet by Lady Lola. I’m always a fan of the classic black leather look (which Lady Lola also wears magnificently), but it makes a nice change to see a domme leave those outfits in the wardrobe and dress in something so colorful and beautiful.

Lady Lola is a London based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

No Basis for a System of Government

I have little love for the British royal family or the current Conservative government. However, I have to give a shout out to its member Penny Mordaunt for pulling off this look during the recent coronation. She’s not exactly the Lady of the Lake, but as sword wielding maidens go, she’s doing a fine job.

Apparently she sported the sword for 51 minutes which turns out to be quite a feat.  I’d never vote for her, but if any dragons show up and need slaying she might be just the woman for the job.

Life’s Rich Tapestry

Warning: A sad blog post ahead. Not this specific on. I mean this one from Mistress Simone. It’s on her experiences with her submissives that have passed away. A thought provoking and moving post.

I was going to follow it up by commenting on how complex the pro-domme and client relationship is. But that’s not entirely true. I’d hate to put off nervous potential clients by over over-emphasizing that aspect of the dynamic.

They can be very simple. A mutually beneficial but limited interaction where someone scratches a kinky itch and someone else earnings a living. They can be delightful but ephemeral. The stars align, it’s magical, and then you never manage to meet again. They can be boring and unfulfilling. I’ve had a sessions – admittedly just a few out of many hundreds – that I thought were just meh. The chemistry isn’t there and you have to move on. And occasionally, as Mistress Simone describes, they can be deep, long lasting and complex. Like most relationships, you never know what you’ll find until you try.

This is Mistress Simone as featured on her professional site. She’s a Chicago and Saint Loius based pro-domme. You can find more of her thoughts via her twitter,  blog and prodcast.

The Goons

If you’ve hung out on Femdom social media, particularly around online or clips only dommes, you’ve probably heard the term gooning. I’d always assumed it was just another phrase for edging and something exclusively kink / femdom related. Either that or a 1950’s British comedy show. It’s easy to get the two mixed up.

However, according to this Vice article, it’s much broader than that, encompassing mainstream porn as well. Men – and it always seems to be men – setup Goon caves complete with multiple screens and endless streaming porn. The article quotes a clips4sale representative calling it the first major new fetish of the 2020’s.

I definitely understand the appeal of the edge. Denial can be delicious, even if it’s self-denial. Not so sure about the idea of a goon cave, although I guess it’s no sillier than a space called a dungeon filled with equipment modelled after ancient torture devices.

Of course, some people lean more heavily into the denial than others. Take this lady for example.

All I could think of when I saw this was ‘Deserves got nothing to do with it.’ Captioning courtesy of the always entertaining Servitor.

Scamtastic

One additional thought on the rise of AI text and image generators like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion: They’re going to be amazing tools for scammers.

There’s already a lot of fake domme’s floating around online. Mostly trying to catfish subs for money. They’re typically fairly easy to spot as they steal photographs (detectable via an image search) and run fast unsubtle shakedowns. That might change as better versions of these AI tools become freely available.

The image tools will allow them to easily generate unique content in specific settings. The text generators can handle DMs, emails and social media posts. With voice/face morphing the scammers could even take calls online. It’ll be possible to create fake personas that can interact fairly independently with their targets. With the right training they could even target particular kinks and fetishes. Will we need a ‘Pick every square that contains a naked submissive’ test for online dommes?

I’m a strong believer that anyone can be scammed if you can find the right script. Check out this fascinating article on the industrialization of internet scams if you doubt the kind of effort some people put into this stuff. It’s scary to imagine what’ll happen once these tools get into their hands.

This image is from the Stable Diffusion forum on Reddit.

Kinky Models

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.