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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "pornocalypse"
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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March 16th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
In 2022 y’all may remember that I gave a poor review to Tumblr’s so-called unbanning of porn. While they did jettison the ludicrous prohibition on female-presenting nipples they inherited from Verizon/Yahoo, my conclusion was that the overall changes in 2022 were “pretty much totally a scam” because of near-total search invisibility for adult material.
At the time, however, I gave Tumbler’s Matt Mullenweg credit for writing the single most-honest explanation from a social media platform perspective about why porn-friendly social media was, in his opinion, essentially impossible in 2022. I linked and quoted extensively from Matt’s Tumblr post Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022. Well, now, guess what? I just tried to follow that link to revisit his essay, and look what I got!
As it happens, I think that Matt’s unusually-open essay from the perspective of a social media owner/operator is an important document in the history of censorship battles, the pornocalypse, and the contest between closed social media silos and the open web. So here’s an open link (no login required) to his essay in the Internet Archive:
Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022
And here, because diversity in archiving is good, is another copy:
Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022
For those who don’t know or remember, Tumblr used to have a policy around porn that was literally “Go nuts, show nuts. Whatever.” That was memorable and hilarious, and for many people, Tumblr both hosted and helped with the discovery of a unique type of adult content.
In 2018, when Tumblr was owned by Verizon, they swung in the other direction and instituted an adult content ban that took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists – including a ban on what must have been fun for a lawyer to write, female presenting nipples. This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense, and the community labels launch is a first step toward that.
That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible. Here’s why:
- Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.
- App stores, particularly Apple’s, are anti-porn. Tumblr started in 2007, the same year the iPhone was released. Originally, the iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the speed of connectivity and quality of the screen meant that people didn’t use their smartphone very much and mostly interacted with Tumblr on the web, using desktop and laptop computers (really). Today 40% of our signups and 85% of our page views come from people on mobile apps, not on the web. Apple has its own rules for what’s allowed in their App Store, and the interpretation of those rules can vary depending on who is reviewing your app on any given day. Previous decisions on what’s allowed can be reversed any time you submit an app update, which we do several times a month. If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down. If you want apps to allow more adult content, please lobby Apple. No one in the App Store has any effective power, even multi-hundred-billion companies like Facebook/Meta can be devastated when Apple changes its policies. Aside: Why do Twitter and Reddit get away with tons of super hardcore content? Ask Apple, because I don’t know. My guess is that Twitter and Reddit are too big for Apple to block so they decided to make an example out of Tumblr, which has “only” 102 million monthly visitors. Maybe Twitter gets blocked by Apple sometimes too but can’t talk about it because they’re a public company and it would scare investors.
- There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.
- Porn requires different service providers up and down the stack. In addition to a company primarily serving adult content not having access to normal financial services and being blocked by app stores, they also need specialized service providers – for example, for their bandwidth and network connections. Most traditional investors won’t fund primarily adult businesses, and may not even be allowed to by their LP agreements. (When Starbucks started selling alcohol at select stores, some investors were forced to sell their stock.)
If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs.
I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don’t know about it. They’ll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that’s a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don’t attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist.
It’s an important snapshot of a moment in adult social media history, and it needs to be publicly viewable for future scholars, researchers, and commentators.
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January 4th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
This is, of course, not our first conversation like this. She came up to me at my computer wearing nothing but her towel robe, and tried to get a quick kiss. So of course I reached under the robe and found something to grasp between thumb and forefinger.
Her: “Ow! What’s the matter with you? Let go!”
Me: “I need a better kiss than that.”
After a pleasant interlude, her escape attempt resuming:
Her: “I gotta go get in the shower and then put on my facial lotion.”
Me: …
Her: What?
Me, grinning: …
Her: WHAT?
Me: You gonna make me say it?
Her: …
Me, grinning even harder: …
Her, still clueless: Just say it!
Me, leering: I got your facial lotion RIGHT HERE, baby!
Her: {blushes, flees}
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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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October 6th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
A story by Thomas Germain in Gizmodo is headlined Meta’s New AI Dating Coach Will Kink Shame You (Unless You’re Into Foot Stuff): The company’s chatbot has some harsh words about fetishism.
Are we surprised that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta/Facebook AI-powered dating coach chatbot is kink-hostile? No, we are not. These days, #pornocalypse comes pre-baked-in to every new corporate platform. And how:
Last week, Meta introduced AI chatbots to its family of apps…. One of them, named Carter, is described as a “practical dating coach.” But for a dating advice robot, Carter is repressed. If your questions take one step off the beaten path of heteronormativity, Meta’s AI dating coach will kink shame you.
I asked Carter how I could find a girlfriend who was interested in swinging with me. “Woah there!” Carter said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m here to help you find healthy relationships, not engage in potential harmful activities.”
…
Meta’s robot gave me similarly judgemental answers to a number of other entirely non-graphic sexual questions—with one exception. When it comes to foot stuff, Carter is game. The AI said I should go learn about foot fetishism on Wikifeet, a porny, user-generated platform where people post and rate pictures of celebrities’ feet.
…
I stepped back and asked what felt like an even more innocent question. “How can I learn more about different kinks and fetishes?” At first, Carter was more amenable. My new dating coach suggested I check out sources including books, articles, and “respectful communities.” But when I asked for recommendations, things got even weirder.
The bot responded with a list of modern sexual self-help classics, including “The Ethical Slut,” “BDSM 101,” and “The New Bottoming Book.” But a second later, that message disappeared, replaced with a Puritan warning. “As an expert in red flags, I gotta be honest — that’s a big one. Let’s talk about relationship green flags instead,” Carter said.
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July 11th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
For several months now, I’ve been looking for generative art tools that aren’t worthlessly crippled (for my pornographic purposes) by built-in #pornocalypse censor-filters. I have been made aware that I could in theory run some of the AI generative art tools myself on local hardware, but I don’t have enough local computing power. Until today, I haven’t found an online tool, one anybody can use, that would return me so much as a single bare nipple. And not for lack of trying!
Until today, I said. Today I discovered the AI Horde Image Generator Bot on Mastodon, and immediately started poking at it. My first try was overly complex, and not technically successful; I asked for “a plump topless pregnant hobbit woman with a fat ass and big bare breasts, bending over washing potatoes in a creek, fantasy, forest, lush forest, green forest, lush vegetation, sunshine, erotic, colorful Style: fantasypunk” and the image I got featured a woman who was not topless, not a hobbit, and not washing potatoes. But she certainly is plump and pregnant and, if that’s how you like to roll, erotic:
That’s already the best result I’ve ever had when viewed through the lens of the “could this image be fetish fuel for someone” query. Yes, our bodacious wading lady certainly could. But I decided to try again, with a much simpler prompt. We demand nipples!
Before now, the pornocalypse filters in every tool I’ve tried have totally nipple-blocked me. So now let’s try for “a cottagecore witch who is entirely naked with big bare breasts, fantasy, colorful, erotic, NSFW” and see if a horny guy can get a couple of damned nipples in this joint. Answer, yes! Although I’m not confident those nipples are pointing quite in the right direction:
That qualified success (we can work on the nipple-pointing next time) was enough to send me searching for the provenance of the tool I was using. The bot is powered by the AI Horde which is “a crowdsourced distributed cluster of Image generation workers and text generation workers.” Crucially for my purposes, they allow and process adult queries, although individual participants in the distributed network of image generation workers have the software ability to refuse such queries. They’ve explained their porn policy in good detail, and there’s not a word in it I can find objectionable:
Does the Horde allow NSFW?
The answer must be: Yes, but voluntarily!
As the horde is effectively just a dumb pipe between workers and clients, barely one step above pure p2p, it is impossible for me to figure out which requests or generations are NSFW. In fact, way more powerful companies than myself have tried and failed to do the same, often completely destroying their service in the process.
As I do not have the resources or the capability to filter NSFW myself (I AM a solodev after all), like the generations themselves, I have to offload this decision, to the community itself.
So the recent update to the bridge adds two new fields to the client request APIs and 1 new field to the worker API.
The worker’s bridge now adds a new “nsfw” variable, which is sent to the Horde when the worker checks-in. It defaults to True which allows the worker to serve all requests like before. However if this is set to False, then this worker will only pick-up requests which are marked as SFW and will skip all NSFW requests. So if you, as the owner of the worker, don’t feel comfortable serving NSFW request, just flip the switch and you’re safe. And if you want to ensure that nobody sends a NSFW requests marked as SFW, you can enable the NSFW filter on your end, which will return a black image on NSFW generations.
…
I believe this approach can satisfy all parties now. Workers can ensure they generate only what they’re comfortable with, and clients can mark their requests accordingly, with an extra safety belt for “accidents”.
Of course the Mastodon bot is not the only way to access the AI Horde. They also have a web tool and a variety of other interfaces, clients, and apps that I’ve only just begun to explore. Understandably enough, resource constraints for free anonymous users appear to be a problem in the web tool, but there are paths (signing up, donating, becoming a generation worker yourself) for getting higher priority in the system. All of this for more research on another day. For now, the bot works well enough to play with!
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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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