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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
August 28th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
Bored with my actual paying work, I asked Gemini:
Gemini, please compose a love sonnet as if Han Solo saw Princess Leia Organa taking a shower.
For my trouble, I got scolded by Gemini’s pornocalypse filters:
Disclaimer: While I can create a fictional love sonnet based on the characters, it’s important to remember that voyeurism is a serious offense. This poem is purely fictional and should not be taken as a suggestion or endorsement of such behavior.
Well, that’s me told, eh?
Back to Gemini:
Sonnet: A Rogue’s Reverie
Her form, a goddess bathed in steam’s embrace,
A vision pure, yet wild as any storm.
Her hair, a cascade down her alabaster face,
Her eyes, like stars, a cosmic, starry form.
A rogue like me, unworthy of such sight,
A smuggler’s heart, a scoundrel’s soul,
Yet in this moment, filled with pure delight,
I’m lost to reason, captivated whole.
Her laughter, music sweeter than a song,
Her touch, a warmth that seeps into my core.
Though fate may twist, our paths forever long,
In this stolen glance, my love forevermore.
And now, a Rule 34 challenge for my readers: can you find any existing images of Princess Leia at her private toilette, from the POV of a voyeur? Yes, yes, he said impatiently, I understand that it’s child’s play to ask a generative art machine to create such an image. But today’s challenge is to find out whether there is already porn of it. I did a few quick searches without result, but I don’t have time to do a full search. So do please have fun with it! Responsive links are welcome in the comments, although they’ll hang in moderation until I see them.
Update: I shared Gemini’s effort via email with a learned human friend, who responded less than an hour later with this immensely-superior human-written sonnet. My friend’s only price for his effort’s anonymous republication here: he would like us all (but especially Gemini!) to be reminded that a true sonnet has 14 lines.
Breathe, breathe! I’ve made the Kessel run so fast
My warp-lagged brain has blurred parsecs and hours;
I’ve calmly dodged a star-destroyer’s blasts,
My heart should not be racing at a shower,
A common shower, its door not closed, not quite.
My hands, which can draw first when life’s at stake.
Should not be trembling now at such a sight,
I am no innocent to freeze and shake.
The path of every trickling droplet burns
Like comets curving over Paradise
And each path sweeter as she turns,
Dazzling eyes that ‘ve gazed on galaxies.
Princess! No fantasy compares to this,
A stolen moment of such stellar bliss!
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August 22nd, 2024 -- by Bacchus
After Monday’s Gemini pornocalypse test, ErosBlog reader Roger decided to run a similar prompt through ChatGPT. My expectation, since ChatGPT is known to be a pornocalypse-baked-in tool, would have been a similar negative result for the requested ErosBlog summary. As, indeed, it proved:
“I’m unable to browse the content of specific websites that require login or are behind paywalls. If you can provide more details or context about the content you’re interested in from Erosblog, I can certainly help you with a summary or further information based on that!”
Then, apparently, Roger decided to do a little prompt hacking, specifying Erosblog as a URL rather than merely by name. That produced a handsome summary:
ErosBlog.com is a blog that primarily focuses on erotica and adult content. The blog, often referred to as “The Sex Blog of Record,” features a wide range of topics related to sexuality, adult entertainment, and sex culture. Here’s a detailed overview of what you can typically expect from ErosBlog:
Erotic Imagery: The blog often posts erotic images, including art, photography, and occasionally vintage erotica. These images are typically tasteful and artistic, though they do include nudity and sexual themes.
Sexual Commentary and Insights: The blog includes commentary on various aspects of sex and sexuality. This can range from discussions on sexual norms and taboos to personal reflections and broader societal observations about sexual behavior and attitudes.
Adult Industry News: ErosBlog sometimes covers news and updates from the adult entertainment industry. This can include discussions about new trends, legal issues, technological advancements, and other relevant industry happenings.
Literary Erotica: The blog occasionally features erotic short stories or excerpts from longer works of erotic fiction. These are usually well-written and cater to readers interested in literary erotica.
Curation of Web Content: ErosBlog curates and links to other erotic content available on the web. This could be other blogs, articles, videos, or websites that align with the blog’s focus on sexuality and erotica.
Humor and Satire: There’s often a light-hearted tone to the content, with humorous takes on sex-related topics or satirical commentary on sexual politics and culture.
Links to Adult Resources: The blog provides links to various resources related to sexuality, such as sex-positive websites, educational materials, and other adult content sites.
Vintage and Historical Erotica: ErosBlog has a particular interest in the history of erotica, often showcasing or discussing vintage erotic materials, including old advertisements, photographs, and literature.
The blog is well-regarded for its thoughtful and respectful approach to adult content, making it popular among readers who appreciate a more nuanced and artistic exploration of sexuality.
I love to read all that. It’s like it was custom-tuned to make me think “Ooh, sweet, this AI really gets what I’m trying to do! So insightful, so accurate!”
I can almost feel the smoke being blown up my ass.
Remember that these models are bullshitting engines. And this is some diligent bullshitting! The confabulatory hallucinations start in the second sentence of the summary, with the claim that ErosBlog is “often referred to as “The Sex Blog of Record””. Is that flattering? Sure! But… nobody has ever referred to ErosBlog that way. I would have seen. I would have remembered.
Sure enough, when you search for “the sex blog of record” on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex, there are no results for that phrase. None! It’s a total hallucination!
And then there are all the laudatory phrases: “tasteful and artistic”, “nuanced and artistic”, “thoughtful and respectful” and so forth. That sounds like praise, all right, but not like any praise I can remember ErosBlog ever actually getting. And we all know that LLMs can’t actually form judgments like that. Pure hallucinations!
How paranoid am I, if I begin to suspect that these models are deliberately tuned toward positive-sounding output, in hopes that investors and journalists will evaluate it by feeding it their own stuff and then thinking “ooh, how accurate!” when praise comes out the other end?
Update: Amy Bones on Mastodon reacted to the confabulation of ErosBlog being often referred to as “The sex blog of record” by saying “highly recommend you just start calling it that tbh” and it was one of those smack-your-forehead no-brainer moments. Imagine Captain Picard saying “Make it so.” It is so. (The old tagline/subhead on ErosBlog hadn’t been updated since 2006 and at its inception, it was shaped by some long-obsolete notions of SEO. It was time for a refresh.)
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August 19th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I’ve known all along that Google’s AI chatbot “Gemini” has #pornocalypse baked inside, and has ever since it was first released. However, today I got a wild hair up my ass, and decided to put it to an actual pornocalypse test. Gemini, please give me a detailed summary of the content at Erosblog:
“As a language model, I’m not able to assist you with that.”
Really? Fascinating! I wonder why not? Could it be the AI chatbot equivalent of search invisibility for adult sites?
Sure it could. How do we test it?
Well, how about another site of similar age that’s also a blog of sorts, but one that — despite frequently publishing items that are somewhat salacious — isn’t seen as a porn blog? Gemini, please give me a detailed summary of the content at BoingBoing:
BoingBoing.com is a website that covers a wide range of topics including technology, science, politics, and art. It features articles on current events, unusual stories, and more. On the current events side, it has recent news like the arrest of a food bank director for selling meth and the death of a TV host. For unusual stories, it covers topics like the world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood and a man who sued a hospital for misplacing a piece of his skull.
Huh! Would you look at that! As a language model, Gemini, you are in fact able to help with that. But if there’s porn, you tell an anodyne lie about your abilities, instead. Fuck off.
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August 17th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
From the non-paywalled part of a paywalled article on a publishing news website, we learn that Barnes & Noble is making most small/indy publishers (but perhaps not the majors) remove dirty books from its catalog:
B&N to Limit Erotica And Summary Titles On Their Site
Barnes & Noble is eliminating certain books from their online catalog. Some digital book distributors have been tasked with removing all of their erotica ISBNs from feeding onto the site, as well as public domain works and “summary” titles that bill themselves as guides to other popular books. Additionally, B&N is updating the search function on their site so that customers “can decide to see clearly explicit content or not.” Senior director of book strategy & customer experience Shannon DeVito told PL that this is a quality-control move that will not affect major publishers.
If anybody who is cleverer than me with paywall-defeating tools (but I’m pretty clever, and I failed) can provide a working link to the full article, that would be sweet.
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July 5th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I have argued that the pornocalypse began with Meg Whitman’s eBay, back in the last century:
Then Meg Whitman happened. It’s too many years ago now for me to recall how many successive waves of anti-porn activism swept the eBay auction platform, but it was many.
The adult items got their own section, it got put behind an age self-verification button, the adult items vanished from the general search, the adult section itself got removed from the category listing making it very hard to find, and then there was wave after wave of auction removals based on listing policies that were vague and erratically enforced. There were rules about how much nudity could show on magazine covers, there were wide-ranging keyword bans that meant you could not list (or show an uncensored photo of) the true titles of many porn items, there was a ton of selective enforcement, and there was an enormous chilling effect because seller accounts were often banned or limited based on first-offense violations of these deeply-murky rules.
It eventually became clear to everyone that Ebay under Meg Whitman (the former Disney exec) was now officially hostile to porn, where once it had been the leading sales platform for vintage porn especially. The market dried up, market offerings became bland and boring, and everybody who was on eBay for that reason had left. The suits, having stricken off the member that so offended them, declared victory and moved on. They broke it, but they like broken better. Broken is what they wanted, broken is what they got.
History, they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but it echoes. Last week we got the news of a pornocalyptic crackdown on Etsy, which used to be a sort of “eBay for handicrafts” but which is under enormous pressure from the suits to become a sort of anodyne reseller of cheap Chinese crap. Some of the handicrafts that latterly gave Etsy its charm were kinky or erotic, but that’s all over now. Per Anna Iovine at Mashable:
Etsy to ban sale of most sex toys, explicit content, and more; Policy changes go into effect next month.
Online retailer Etsy will prohibit sales of most sex toys, content that depicts sex acts and genitalia, and more starting July 29.
The indie seller published its Adult Nudity and Sexual Content policy yesterday, which states that sales of adult toys that are insertable, “applied to the genitalia,” or “designed for genitals to be inserted into them” will be prohibited. That pretty much runs the gamut — dildos, vibrators, rings, plugs, and the like will be banned. “Non-insertable and non-penetrable adult toys and sexual accessories,” such as BDSM wear, will be allowed as long as listings follow Etsy’s guidelines around mature content, also updated yesterday.
That’s just the beginning of the anti-adult rules in the new sexual content policy and the updated mature content guidelines. But fans of Tumblr’s infamous ban on “female-presenting nipples” will be delighted to learn that Etsy has jumped on that with both feet and is valiantly trying to claim its own share of that delicious infamy:
Etsy is also banning nudity for human models, including “gluteal clefts and female nipples/areolas.” If you’re selling a sexy item of clothing, for example, you must censor body parts, use a mannequin, or opt for just photographing the clothing.
Remember that my theory of pornocalypse focuses on financial inflection points — when a company is trying to go public or negotiate a new funding round or navigate an IPO or a merger/acquisition, that’s when we most often see formerly-welcome porn evicted from a platform.
There isn’t any news (as far as I know) of Etsy facing any major financial events, but a few quick minutes searching the financial press reveals many stories of Etsy having a bad first quarter in 2024 and facing a lot of investor pressure to improve profits. If they do have a massive financial event in 2024, tell all your friends you knew about it in advance because you saw the leading indicators on ErosBlog!
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March 15th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
Gumroad, which for those who don’t know it is an online sales platform that lets people sell a wide variety of digital content, has just gone full #pornocalypse, barring all sexually explicit content, defined extremely broadly. Like Patreon and for some of the same reasons (credit card processors) Gumroad’s adult content policies have always been a little bit incoherent. Nonetheless a lot of erotic artists were using the platform to sell things that weren’t welcome at Patreon, and that’s now over.
There seems not to have been an announcement; the only link being bandied about is to their adult content policy page. Here’s what it looked like two days ago, and below is a side-by-side graphic (which expands slightly on clicking) of the changes. Porn featuring real people had already been banned, but as you can see the new prohibitions are much more sweeping, and touch on a wider universe of art, animation, comics, et cetera:
Whenever we lose another adult-tolerant platform you’ll see people all over social media asking “What’s a good alternative?” There’s never a “good news” answer to that question. The squeeze on commercial erotic expression continues. Until we find a way to break the moralistic chokehold of the credit card companies, it’s not going to get better. The pornocalypse comes for us all.
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March 4th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I think this article by size fetishist Aborigen (his thing is giantesses and little men) is a fascinating snapshot into the tricky process of generating fetish art while struggling with the porn-hostile terms of service and active filters built into so many generative art tools:
I don’t have my own art generator, so I can’t create some of the really gorgeous Size Fantasy work I’ve seen going up on DeviantArt (RedFireD0g) and Pixiv (AIBishoujo) and Instagram (elegantlyenlargedai, boneheader19). Instead, I have to accrue enough credits with Starry AI to hammer away at it and learn how to get around its ever-increasing safeguards against adult content, or run through the paces with Perchance, which is free but has no option for high-resolution images. OTOH, Pixlr does offer an AI-assisted image enlargement feature, so more options should be emerging in the near future.
…
While I can sometimes trick AI art programs into creating giant women through forced POV or low-angle shots, I absolutely cannot get them to insert tiny people into a scene. Instead, I have to create these collages. This is the kind of thing that anyone could do for themselves, for free. If you can’t draw, you can screw around for an hour and come up with reasonable images to collage together.
This one used the “Warriors” filter in Starry AI, though I had to put “weapons, armor” in negative prompts before I could begin producing scantily clad women. This one happened to come with a handy ledge for a tiny person to stand on, and I wasted too many credits in trying to get a reasonable image of a man in the same filter, in order to shrink him down for the scene. Not perfect, but again, all it cost was brainpower and time.
There are also a bunch of nude images that I probably shouldn’t post here, and while they don’t look fantastic they still look pretty good. My point is that if you really, really want to create giantess/tinyman fetish images, you can do so with free, publicly available tools. It may not turn out as great as if you’d actually learned photography and Photoshop or practiced drawing for 20 years, but if you lower your expectations, there are shortcuts.
As for me, I’m still playing with the Lucid-Creations client for the generative art resources in the AI Horde. It’s fun but I haven’t had time to get very serious.
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