Better Fantasy-To-Image Conversion Tools

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.

Porn: An Engine Of Progress

I mount the pulpit again for another Sunday sermon.

There is a common accusation cast against pornography, indeed against erotic arts of any kind, indeed against anything resembling a hedonistic theory of value, that it encourages people to be passive, to be mere consumers, couch potatoes even. I am in the pulpit this week to tell you that this is not true.

I’ll coin a term to cover the broad concept I need: neophorics, the bearing of the new — to represent together invention, creation, discovery, innovation — that lie at the heart of progress, whether in the sciences or the arts or in engineering. And I shall use an older word — hedonics — to represent the art of achieving enjoyment (and correspondingly avoiding suffering) in sentient experience. That the erotic arts and practices are a big part of hedonics I doubt many readers of ErosBlog will deny.

The key to understanding here is that hedonics and neophorics are intimately connected, as entwined with each other as the coupling snakes seen by Teiresias of old. Each needs and drives the other, and would wither without the other.

Hedonics needs neophorics. A simple thought experiment should make this clear. Take your favorite fantasy, the thing that makes you really hot, your best personal X in the language of earlier sermons. Eliezer Yudkowsky at one point offered “living in your volcano lair with a bevy of sexy (and presumably eager, skilled, and willing) catgirls” as an example of one that someone might have (it’s not my X and I don’t think it’s Eliezer’s X either, but it’s a good example). Now ask yourself: is that all you would want to do with the rest of your life? Or if the fond wishes of transhumanism are realized and you become effectively immortal, is that all you would want to do for the next thousand years? The next million? Wouldn’t there come a point at which you would get bored? Feel a lack of achievement? Wouldn’t your life be much better — even in purely hedonic terms — if you could be surprised by things at some point? Get outside your lair and meet something or someone that wasn’t a catgirl? There will always come a point for the sort of beings that we are at which something new will be needed in our lives. That’s one reason why I urge people who can to get busy in the arts and create new erotica.

But what’s more, hedonics drives neophorics. The quest for pleasure is a mighty force for innovation. I cannot think of any artistic medium aside from absolute music (and maybe not even that) that has not been pushed forward by the drive for erotic satisfaction. As soon as the Greeks figured out how to paint on vases they were painting amazing orgy scenes on them. As soon as the camera was invented someone took his clothes off in front of one. The Internet really is for porn, like the song says, and certainly wouldn’t have been built out as fast as it was had people not wanted to look at naughty pictures or share naughty stories.

And it’s not just erotic pleasures that drive achievement. Centuries ago there were great voyages of exploration motivated by…the search for fisheries? The quest for new fields in which to plant barley? No, by search for cheaper and better ways to get pleasure commodities, silk and spices. No one ever perished for want of the taste of cinnamon or the touch of silk, but many men nonetheless risked their lives to get these things. And out of these voyages grew mighty forms of commerce,not just in silk and spices, but in other tangible forms of enjoyment: coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, sugar, wine, spirits, and lets face it, opium and other drugs.

And the neophorics will go on and on, driven by hedonics. Right now we are just scratching the surface with new media like video games. Immersive virtual reality is probably yet to come. And who knows? Maybe someday some clever bioengineer will actually deliver up a catgirl.

The lesson to take away? There is nothing passive about porn. It is an engine of progress.