ChatGPT Pornocalypse Test

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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A Gender-Nuanced View Of AI

As a white dude who enjoys playing with tech, it will shock no one to discover that throughout the growing debate over large language models and AI toys/tools like ChatGPT, it entirely eluded me that there might be a gendered nuance to the various reactions and backlashes. Here’s Andrea Grimes educating dudes like me:

An AI-synthesized answer to an even lightly complicated question is to me both useless and terrifying as a woman. I’m already capable of synthesizing my own information because I’m accustomed to sifting through biased data, identifying and excluding unreliable sources, and drawing my own conclusions. Not because I’m a journalist, or because I have a couple of degrees, or because I’m just curious by nature. It’s because I’m a woman. Biggity bam. Asked and answered. I’m always already aware that the information available to me in the world is more likely than not to have been gathered, created, or presented with men, and/or men’s perceived needs, in mind. (See: the entire field of medical research.) I don’t need a robot built by a bunch of tech bros to use its tech bro brain to sift through information deemed relevant by and for tech bros to report back to me on literally anything. I already have that! It’s called the internet, and the tech bros use it to call me fat.

And more:

The AI zeitgeist is rooted in white men being so worried that they are on the verge of having to trust the expertise of people who aren’t just like them that they would rather get their information from a wrong robot.

Just when I thought Grimes had been as provocative as she was gonna be, her subject turned to porn:

Indeed, some men (or men of a type? Hopefully not in general? IDK! This one’s on y’all dudes!) are so excited about the erasive and invisibilizing possibilities of AI that they would rather have their pornography feature AI-generated women than actual human people. Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick offers a fascinating/revolting and nevertheless on point take:

So I suppose the idea here is to replace human sex workers with A.I.-generated content because these men want to look at sexual content, but they hate the women that make it. They want the machines to free them from the self-loathing of being a “simp”.

And the fact that A.I. porn crushing the human porn industry is compared to journalism is also telling. Because I think for a lot of men, particularly in Gen Z, all of mass media, including pornography, has been successfully coded in their minds as woke and feminine by various far-right reactionaries. And these men are now beginning to see emerging A.I. tools as a way to hurt, and maybe finally vanquish, those who make the human-created media that they seem to hate so much.

I have my own reasons for being interested in AI-generated porn that don’t match the speculations above at all, but I’m super mindful that I’m not all men, to borrow a phrase with my tongue firmly in cheek. Moreover I’m forced to agree that there are signs of misogyny to be found in the community of men who are tinkering with AI porn. I don’t have a link at my fingertips, but I’ve seen porn webmasters in private forums whose excitement over AI porn generation definitely includes, at least in subtext, a powerful whiff of “at last, I can be a pornographer without having to deal with all those whiney-bitch models.”

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