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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "generative art"
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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April 17th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
Twenty years ago I blogged about a site that had faked-up celebrity women with photoshopped jizz all over their faces. I ended the post with this prognostication disguised as a query:
How long until you can beam a mugshot of your cutest co-worker from your phone cam to your DVD player, which will cheerfully paste her facial features onto the lithe body of Vivid’s latest superstar porn model?
Futurism is always a curious mix of oh-my-god-nailed-it and hilarious failure. In 2024 we still have phone cams, but DVD players are getting rare. Vivid Entertainment hasn’t released a new movie since about 2018, and superstar porn models are also a vanishing breed. But technology to give us porn that features our latest crush object, with or without their consent? That, twenty years later, we most definitely have. Whether we (socially, culturally, individually) want it, or not.
Here’s my existence proof. On the left, we have a 1957 photograph of cabaret dancer (high class stripper) Jenny Lee, aka “The Bazoom Girl”. Three clicks later, on the right, we have a very convincing image of Jenny without her dance costume, courtesy of an AI filter offered by the for-pay (if you have cryptocurrency) service DeepNoods:
I’ll have more — much more — to say about DeepNoods in a moment. But first let’s look more closely at what the service has done. (Click on the above image for the full resolution side-by-side.) What was my user experience, and what do we think of the modified image?
User experience first: After setting up an email-verified login, it’s literally just three clicks to process a photo. Hit the upload button, select a photo, hit the “reveal” button, wait two minutes, done. No parameters, no controls, no settings, no muss, no fuss. Just upload and go.
As for the image: I’ve studied it closely, and I only have three minor complaints. Look at the areas I’ve indicated with yellow arrows:
- The biggest flaw, by far, is that the AI got confused by her right foot where it was partially obscured by her left thigh. The bit of half-shod toes visible in shadows in the original image was removed entirely, and something subtly important has gone wrong with her ankle in the altered image, leaving the impression that she’s trying but failing to hide a club foot from the photographer.
- In the original image, Jenny artfully turned out her left foot in that subtle way that dancers and pinup models have. The AI did its “revert to the mean” magic and turned her digitally-unshod foot back to the right, into a more natural pose that’s presumably better-represented in its training database of nudes.
- That same reversion to the mean was cruelly unkind to Jenny’s generous bosom. Not to put too fine a point on it: the “bazoom girl” got robbed by the AI, which provisioned her with digital tits that fall sadly short of the 42Ds she advertised in her performing heyday. Indeed, her digital curves in general are smaller and more muscular than her actual ones were. This may be in line with 21st-century tastes, but for a nostalgic curmudgeon like me, it’s not ideal.
All of my nitpicks aside, the effectiveness and ease of use of this software/service is astonishing. These are the fraudulent x-ray spectacles of comic book fame, made real (or at least less fraudulent) through the magic of software. I’ve known for twenty years that this day was coming, and I’ve known for a year that this particular photomanipulation was possible with the image generation and manipulation tools we’ve come to call by terms such as “AI” and “generative art”. But I’ve been thinking of it as a technology with substantial barriers to entry, such as technical skill and access to software and the creative cleverness to avoid the pornocalypse filters that are baked into all commercially-respectable AI tools. DeepNoods has rubbed my nose in an unsettling fact: the barriers are gone. Any fool can do all this now.
So let’s talk about the ethics of it all. Make no mistake: this is software that can hurt people. As the name advertises, it is a deepfake generator. Deepfakes, in the succinct language of Wikipedia, “have garnered widespread attention for their potential use in creating child sexual abuse material, celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, bullying, and financial fraud.” The pornocalypse filters I’ve bitched about already exist for a reason, and the reason is that publicly traded companies and financiers with public reputations have to grapple with the pernicious deepfake projects listed on Wikipedia and somehow prevent the worst abuses of these capable image manipulation tools. It’s arguably among the biggest business problems that these so-called AI companies have.
The proprietors of DeepNoods have gone another way. They have chosen to remain carefully anonymous vis-a-vis their customers, and their web page makes no claims or representations about who they are or where you could find them. After processing your first image (which is free) at DeepNoods, the next one costs a dollar (presented as a 50% discount off a $2.00 list price). The “buy credits” button dumps you without explanation onto a sparse third-party page that demands a telephone number “for verification” in order to “complete your crypto purchase”. (That’s as far as I explored, since I don’t have a telephone number I’m willing to provide to an untrusted site presenting itself as a crypto exchange.) We are left to assume that DeepNoods proprietors have chosen to avoid the potentially-messy reputational, legal, moral, and financial consequences of any misuse of their tool by being, if not beyond reproach, at least beyond being found or forced to endure remonstrance.
Yesterday, when I processed the Jenny Lee image for this post, using the single free promotional credit found in my account at first login, the DeepNoods site had neither a privacy policy nor any terms of service. Today it has links to both; and the TOS do contains words of prohibition with regard to “offensive, harmful, or illegal content.” But terms of service have no binding force outside the law of contract, and you can’t contract with an anonymous party. Which is to say: the terms of service are empty words, and thus I shan’t bother analyzing them further.
It’s probably also worth noting that the altered demonstration image DeepNoods chose to display on their homepage began as a widely circulated image of celebrity musician Billie Eilish.
So much for the service-provider side of the ethics problem. What of the users?
First of all, let’s talk about me, here at ErosBlog. I was not paid to write this post; it is not promotional in any way. I am not endorsing DeepNoods nor any other deepfake tool or service; I am not making any general claims about the ethics of using such tools. The ethics of using this kind of software are not different in kind than we have been grappling with since the invention of Photoshop, or the airbrush, or the sharp knife in the darkroom wielded by Stalin’s propagandists. The only thing that’s different about AI-enabled generative deep-fakery is the lower barriers to entry. It’s fuckin’ easy now.
It’s true that I have said a lot in the past about the ethics of altering images. I’ve posted about photoshopped cum on celebrity faces, the asshole who puts fake digital “whore” tattoos on beach nudes, the infamous Jesus buttsexed by Roman soldiers ‘shop, the construction of a naked quadriplegic, and even my own fumbling use of generative art tools to create topless depictions of Sophia Loren, albeit ones that inhabit the uncanny valley. That last generated some mild backlash, as well as some thoughtful questions; and prompted me to dig in to the ethics (as I see them) in some — but far from sufficient — detail.
The shortest summary of my views is that the technology used to create an image — any image — has no particular ethical relevance. The ethical inquiry is always a balance: what potential for harm does this image have, and what are the benefits of creating and publishing it? Who suffers the harms, and who reaps the benefits? Are the harms big enough to worry about? Do they outweigh the benefits?
To one degree or another, I’ve had to grapple with these questions every time I’ve published an image on this blog. I’m 100% certain that some of my choices — some of my attempts to balance the harms and benefits — have been wrongly made. To test today’s deepfake service, I deliberately chose the image of an adult entertainer who has been dead for thirty years, knowing that she’s far beyond the reach of my ability to harm her. I’m comfortable with that choice. Some of you may not be. If you want to tell me how you feel, the comment section is open for any civil remarks. The ethics of erotic imagery in general, and of AI image manipulation in specific, are endlessly interesting to me. Let me know what you think!
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January 2nd, 2024 -- by Bacchus
A few days ago on New Year’s Eve, Girl on the Net posted a question on Mastodon, asking sex bloggers to reply to her with a link to the post/story we’re most proud of from 2023. It reminded me that I hadn’t done any sort of retrospective, and I didn’t have time to do one before 2023 gasped its last. Instead I gave her a quick answer, along with this disclaimer:
Not a great year for my blog writing. I’ve been demoralized by the degraded state of the open adult web and the usual #pornocalypse difficulties around linkage and search and traffic and attention and money. For me it was a year of modest image posts with light commentary.
Every word is true, but upon reflection, it’s not hard to come up with a double handful of posts I’m proud of. So here’s my 2023 “ErosBlog in Review” notable posts list, a couple of days late.
- Let’s start with the post I chose to respond to GotN’s Mastodon question. I told her “my true blogging joy these days is surfacing vintage pop culture that illuminates the ties between historical and modern sexual culture.” Daddy Doms And Sugar Daddies features a 1950 magazine article I found about sugar daddies and their sugar babies. There were so many more age play tropes in two short pages than I ever would have expected to see 75 years ago. Plus, the post includes a bonus meme!
- My post The Free Love Bus Hasn’t Stopped Here In Years is a short post, but personally notable for me because I finally managed to capture in two sentences something I’ve been thinking about since the 1980s. Specifically, the complex and highly specific grief that people my age felt when the promised benefits of the sexual revolution were snatched away by the AIDS crisis during the few years while we were old enough to anticipate them but not yet old enough to have enjoyed them.
- If 2023 was, for me, mostly a year of “modest image posts with light commentary”, I still managed to find some delicious images. He Chose Ass is the post with the modern commercial porn photo I most enjoyed sharing in 2023.
- By far the most personal post I wrote in 2023 was She Balked At The Zipping. It’s about an unusual moment of clarity during the beginning of the end of my first serious relationship, back in the 20th century.
- My first post in 2023 turned out to be thematically important to a big story for erotic art this year, which of course is the rise of generative art made with AIs trained (controversially) on large databases. On January 2 I posted Sticky Jessica Alba, in which post I revisited a link from twenty years previous when ErosBlog was young, and celebrity fakes were made the old-fashioned way, in Photoshop. In January I speculated a little bit about the new AI tools, but by mid-summer, I finally got my hands on some that were simple enough for me to play with them, leading to a short series of posts like Generative Art: Alien Sex Toy Shop 2 with a few of my own primitive efforts using these tools.
- In July, I realized that an awful lot of artists have played with the erotic implications of Snow White and her seven horny dwarven roommates, so I did a Snow White And Lusty Dwarves Roundup post of examples that had previously appeared on ErosBlog.
- One of the simple but time consuming post types that I once hoped to do very much more of here on ErosBlog is curation of vintage gems from 20th-century pulps and men’s magazines. These are fun to do but when I give them the full treatment, cropping and cleaning the imagery for blog presentation and converting machine OCR results into clean text for searchability and ease of reading, one of these posts is often most of a day’s work. If I had more Patreon support I could and would do a lot more of these and less random gig work. Instead I’ve only been doing these when the subject matter particularly delights me, such as this failed 1970s effort to boot up a floating sex club aboard a Dutch cruise ship: All Aboard The Sex Boat: Atlantis.
- Another curation post that I couldn’t resist doing involved a presumed-fictional “feature” in True Men Stories magazine about a notional WII-era sea-going bordello in the Pacific. The 1970s headline was The WW II Cruise Of The Ship Of Sex and the post is Tramp Steamer And Floating Bordello.
And now, onward further into 2024!
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March 12th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
When I coined my now-infamous maxim that the pornocalypse comes for us all, it was a decade ago, and if prompted-AI generative art was a thing in some deep research lab, I certainly didn’t know of it. But now, today, it most certainly is a thing, and its masters and owners emphatically do not want you making porn with it. This menacing message is said to be from the Midjourney generative art tool:
For as long as I’ve been on the pornocalypse beat, I’ve noticed a trend away from the classic pornocalypse (welcome porn users during early stages of a service, then dump them in a bid for respectability at a financial inflection point) towards baked-in pornocalypse: the service has porn-hostile terms of service from its inception.
Meanwhile, I extend a standing invitation: if you, my beloved readers, learn of any publicly-accessible generative-art tools that aren’t crippled by anti-porn “features” and filters, please make sure to let me know of them. That would be ErosBlog fodder for sure.
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January 2nd, 2023 -- by Bacchus
In this era of handwringing over deep fakes and generative art, it’s sometimes worth pausing to reflect that people were already deeply engaged in taking unseemly liberty with celebrity images more than twenty years ago. For example, consider this heavily-edited image dating to 2003. It’s Jessica Alba, only stickier:
The source photograph appears to be this one, from Jessica’s Dark Angel period:
The self-described “splatter” artist who dirtied up Jessica Alba’s face created dozens or hundreds of such images at the Project Barkley Celebrity Fantasies website, which featured an artist’s statement including this explanation:
When I started faking, I wanted to create something that stood out from the crowd. I found that of non-faked porn, some of the stuff I found most erotic were simple facial aftermath shots. In fact, in review of the jpegs I’d been collecting, one of the best and most memorable images didn’t even have any nude parts showing. I love the formality of this particular image — it looks like a fashion magazine plate, less like a gonzo close-up cumshot as you see in a lot of porn. The eyes in particular say a lot — there’s the light of starry innocence; at the same time, there’s the sated, hypnotized look because just a minute ago, the girl was deepthroating your cock for her life until you couldn’t stand it any more and had to jizz all over her cute little face. Appreciate this photo by staring into the eyes a while, then take a lingering look over the cum…follow the path of wanton pleasure left streaked and dripping on her face…then stare back into the eyes. It’s enough to make most hetero men to pause, take a breath and utter, “Fuck!”
Let’s return for a moment to the new technologies that are thought to be automating and simplifying these sorts of visual remixes. At present none of the best public-facing AI art tools will output erotic imagery; their creators have opted to build #pornocalypse into the products. This will change; in its broadest outlines the technology is open-source. So it shouldn’t be long now before we start seeing unrestricted versions of these tools that can run on consumer hardware. Thus I don’t feel too bad about how I described today’s situation in prospect, the first time I grappled with Project Barkley back in 2004, even though I obviously whiffed the tech specifics:
We now live in a world where your face and mine and Britney’s are all equally fair game: raw material for whatever digital mix might amuse a fickle public. How long until you can beam a mugshot of your cutest co-worker from your phone cam to your DVD player, which will cheerfully paste her facial features onto the lithe body of Vivid’s latest superstar porn model?
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July 21st, 2023 -- by Bacchus
One of my readers has beseeched me (well, rather, offered the polite suggestion) that I not utterly neglect my gleanings from the lurid men’s magazines of the mid-20th century. And thus, from the cover of the December 1971 issue of True Men magazine, I bring you this hopeful headline:
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November 24th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
As quoted by Luis Bunuel here:
Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative powers of the Holy Ghost pierced the virgin’s hymen “like a ray of sunlight through a window—-leaving it unbroken.”
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