There’s something deeply, bizarrely, and recursively ironic about this. While I was playing with the 3D SexVilla BrainImageInstantiator (mock trademark hereby claimed), an exceedingly primitive AI (aka weblog spamming script) landed in Faustus’s post about the future of such tools, and successfully (albeit briefly) hacked a nascent argument about the potential capabilities of AIs by taking three sentence fragments from the previous comment and rearranging them into something that looked superficially plausible to my own primitive high-speed “is this comment human?” Turing-testing algorithms.

Ladies and gentlemen and assorted avatars, please fasten your seatbelts, this is gonna be a long and bumpy ride. And there’s no telling where we might end up.

Meanwhile, back at the dance club, it’s after hours and one of the t-girls (that’s the term the 3D SexVilla software uses, not mine) has gotten bored and perhaps a little lonely:

Much like Bacchus I have no shortage of images in my head which I’d like to have out in the world, and also like him I have neither any real skill, nor any talent that I can discern, for doing my own drawing. So needless to say I’ve been following Bacchus’s recent posts on 3D SexVilla with considerable interest. Now, there have been software engines for creating high-quality graphics around for quite a while, but my own sense is that you have to be pretty damn good to get results like this:

(“The Seventh Time I Died,” by Scandinavian artist Johan Flood, gallery of his work here.)

And naturally, as a committed Linux user, I hold out high hopes for the development of MakeHuman, which can also produce impressive Poser-like results:

Still, I suspect that this engine won’t be all that simple to use.

But simpler things are surely coming, and that will mean significant changes. The point of this post will be to speculate about them a bit. There’s reason for optimism here.

The hope is that whatever interfaces we have will be easier and cheaper to use. That seems almost sure to happen, and when it does, it will mean that the sort of publicly available kink out there will be stranger, and better, and kinkier than before, because you’ll have not just thousands but millions of weird imaginations at work. That means a lot of fetishes and a lot more strange little communities of sexual interest. It was Voltaire, I think, who once remarked that if you have two religions in land they will cut each other’s throats, but if you have thirty there will be peace. As in religion, so in sex, maybe. It will be hard to have oppression of sexual minorities when pretty much everyone is part of some sexual minority or another.

A possible further social implication might be an escalation of interest in transhumanism. Once people can see vividly all the strange and wonderful things that might happen, the more they might be interested in enhancing themselves in ways such that these things could happen.

And there may be deeper technological implications as well. I’ve mulled over a suggestion made by Bacchus that perhaps in a decade or so we will have artificial intelligence (AI) engines capable of turning natural language scripts or instructions into illustrations.

That’s a tricky thought to get my brain around. Although it’s not really my thing, I sat down and composed a little bit of script in honor of the latest little weird community of interest to catch my eye out there on the internet: the so-called “shrinking woman” (SW) enthusiasts. (There really is something for everyone out there.)

(The HTML tables above reproduce a script layout by Celtx, which is a very cool (and free) tool for writing screenplays, comic book scripts, etc.)

Now the above script probably isn’t your thing either, but bear with me. There would be a lot of detail to fill in here. Is Professor Strange a Mephistophelean figure or a Jerry Lewis-like nutty professor? Is his laboratory a Bond-villain lair? An antiseptic academic space? A steampunk setting? Is Stacey an anatomically-implausible comic book cover babe? Or perhaps short and zaftig? Blond, red-headed, brunette, raven-haired? European? Asian? African? I imagine you were filling in all the details as you read the script, probably in the way that you found the most gratifying.

Now in my experience (admittedly limited) in working with professional artists, I’ve prepared written descriptions to which they’ve responded with multiple pencil sketches and a query: which among these best captures what you’re looking for? It’s a process that often reveals pleasant surprises, bits of self-knowledge that I didn’t have before. (Though, to be sure, it’s also expensive, at least when I’m paying the commission.)

Now a really good AI engine would probably not just stop at turning out drafts based on your scripts. A really good AI engine will learn about you, improving its searches over time to read what you give it and turn out things that are better and better, more and more like what your mind is searching for, things you find more and more appealing. A really good AI engine — and this might be a few decades further down the road from what Bacchus first suggested to me — would be a partner, something (perhaps we might even call “it” a someone) that serves as a partner, something that builds up within itself an image of your own erotic consciousness and imagination.

(I realize now there must be artists out there beginning to gnash their teeth. Sorry guys. Feel free to imagine a future in which AI engines manage to replace the annoying writer. Maybe I deserve it.)

And that’s significant, because it’s a step forward for both you and the machines. Nietzsche wrote an aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: Grad und Art der Geschlechtlichkeit eines Menschen reicht bis in den letzten Gipfel seines Geistes hinauf. Someone’s sexuality reaches to the very top of his or her spirit. Most likely he was right. You create a record of yourself, not just in pictures, but in intelligent software. If there’s ever to be any hope of overcoming death through indirect mind uploading, as Paul Almond has proposed, this could be an unparalleled record of yourself, the recording that reaches right to the top of your spirit.

Now that would make possible one amazing future.

Ever since last week’s post on 3D SexVilla I’ve been trying to decide whether the whole thing is just a transient gimmick, or whether it’s a tool sufficient to allow non-artists to create and share visual instantiations of their fantasies. If it’s the latter, and if it catches on, it could prove to be quite a phenomenon — one I think is potentially important. (I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that I can visualize things I’d like to see, but there’s no way to instantiate them in visual form short of hiring an artist or spending a few years in art school. Sufficiently good computer software will be an important step in solving this.)

One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how open the product is. If the design work that users do can be readily saved and shared, there’s likely to be a fan community that grows up around the product, as there long has been around the quite-a-bit-harder-to-use and (IMO) not-for-the-non-artist 3d-modeling tool Poser.

Thus I was heartened to see the following in the summary of recent changes to the latest release of the 3D SexVilla software:

All New Pose Editor

Our software engineers have spent countless hours fine-tuning this ‘Pose Editor’ release. It’s an exclusive powerful new in-game motion control tool featuring a collapsible user interface with tons of sliders and controls that enables you to create your own poses, however and whatever you want. It’s an updated mannequin model rigged to allow precise and exacting control of body positions, joint positioning and rotation editing as well as new 3D face shaping, mouth and tongue morphing animations and hand gestures.

Poser Editor allows you to also import poses from the Gamerotica community or from Daz3D/Poser based BVH exports. Using standards based BVH allows you to quickly import existing animations and convert them to 3D Kink and create and watch some of the most advanced sex animations possible.

Still no word on whether the local save formats are usefully exportable/shareable, but the standards-based imports is, at least, good news.

I’ve been interested in computer erotica since nineteen eighty-something when I first saw a Mac “game” that featured a black-and-white line drawing of a naked woman, and some on-screen dildos that could be manipulated with a mouse to make her demonstrate an orgasm. (Some happy screaming audio and some screen-shaking in the best traditions of the early Star Trek, if I recall rightly.)

For almost as long, people have been using 3D drawing software titles like Poser to draw dirty pictures. Some of that artwork is incredibly good, although as with any other genre, there’s a crap-ton of crap also.

Since my EverQuest days (many of which were spent as a Cleric on autofollow behind an insufficiently-dressed wood-elf Ranger as she bounced up and down over the hilly plains of East Karana) I’ve figured that the killer app for massively multiplayer online gaming would be an adult/erotic application that allowed you dispense with clothes and take cybering into the visual realm. So far, nobody’s put together a good engine for doing that; but I remain as confident as ever that this, too, will come.

Although it’s apparently not social or multiplayer, I’ve recently become aware of a game engine marketed by Hustler that seems to be working on a lot of the sort of tools such a sex MMORPG would require. Hustler 3D has graphics that remind me a lot of EverQuest (late 1990s tech) in quality, but I suspect it’s the interactivity that will make it sell. Letting the customers control the action and the poses, and giving them a range of sex toys and bondage gear to play with, is going to appeal to a lot of people:

The marketing copy describes Hustler 3d as:

a stunning interactive world where consumers can play out their wildest hardcore fantasies. HUSTLER3D.COM is a stunning interactive world where users can enjoy incredibly realistic erotic experiences. Members can construct their perfect sexual partner by selecting a model or their favorite pornstar and modifying over 100 physical features. They can then explore unlimited sexual fantasies incorporating a wide selection of environments, novelties and sexual positions. HUSTLER3D.COM also gives users the ability to create their own HD picture galleries of their sexual adventures!

Although I suspect this project falls far short of the interactivity and (especially) sociability I’ve been imagining since my EverQuest days, it’s clear that there are an enormous array of tools provided. Among the advertised features are:

• Very specific accessories (“New Ball Free Gag Ring: Tired of that gag ball blocking a perfectly good hole to drop a load into? Well now you can have the perfect setup for target practice and endlessly squirt cum to your little heart’s desire! Can you say ahhh, and excuse me if I’m not mistaken isn’t that cum all over your tonsils?”)
• Support for furries (“Furverted furdom fans can now play with anthropomorphic furry personas to create erotic fandom art”)
• Elf and Vulcan ears (“Dial in fantastical ears in either ‘Elf’ or ‘Vulcan’ style”)
• Tongue control (“Mouth & Tongue Animation Sliders: Now you can have your models lick and flick a dick with the best of them!”
• Dildo customization (“Custom Dildos While-U-Wait! Let your wicked imagination go wild with this fun new tool to customize size, shape, and style of your own range of dildos! Create sleek tools or insane scary big brutal ones to satisfy your insertion fantasies.”)

Technology marches on!

Update: Hustler no longer offers this product, so the links in the post have been removed. However, it seems to have been a branded version of the 3D SexVilla product.