86
It's over. Gooners will pledge eternal loyalty to the CPC. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 week ago* by to c/technology@hexbear.net
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[–] 16 points 1 week ago (1 child)

i'm going to go slightly against the grain and say that i don't think buying a sexbot would change things in either direction. i think if you're radicalized to violence there is nothing that will divert you away from that (apart from the usual: having stable enough material conditions that you never make your violent impulse reality), if you're already a misogynist having a sex bot won't make it worse, and I'm also sure that there are also people who are able to view them as just sex toys and not be weird about it.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    Is that true? Do you not believe there's a negative psychological element from getting to physically, literally act out fantasies of sexually abusing a somewhat lifelike slave on maybe a daily basis that would have any impact on someone? I feel like people already get their worst traits aggressively cultivated by much more mild forms of facilitation.

    Obviously some people would not be (that) seriously affected, but it doesn't seem realistic to me to say that there would be no negative impact overall on the, uh, userbase of sex slave simulacra.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I think the core premise of that is a bit off. People already consume products that are like the human equivalent of a cat toy, a simulacra of a victim that they get some joy out of doing whatever to, but the unreality of it keeps it as something detached and distinct, and where those people are antisocial it's sourced from their socialization and material conditions rather than reinforced by something safe and unreal.

    Robot bang-maids would just have a serious risk of making their consumers more broken and pathetic, becoming dependent on the chatbot powering them and probably developing chatbot psychosis from it as they retreat further and further from society. The crime in slavery is in harming a human, in reducing an actual, thinking, feeling person to the level of an object and enacting further violence and cruelty on them to control them, not in becoming emotionally dependent on a fancy roomba/fleshlight combo that gives you chatgpt psychosis.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    While there are points of comparisons we can draw if you like, I don't think think a little wicker doll or existing sex dolls or anything else are so similar to a life-sized, self-moving, reactive fake person who speaks to you that we can just say if one is fine then so is the other, though I already think existing sex dolls are probably not that good for some of their owners (people who are already particular varieties of psychologically vulnerable but clearly not being helped by this).

    For the record, I also think something similar about other slave simulacra, though this is surely worse because for many just doing daily simulated sexual abuse is literally the one and only point of having it, and for many of the rest there's someone more in line with traditional ideas of AI psychosis, of a fake partner who always agrees with you and if they don't then you change their settings so they do.

    But if we can acknowledge that the flattery robots can hurt your mental health, surely we can acknowledge that robots designed to receive sexual abuse with the same regularity and psychological untethering (of being able to dictate their responses) while being behaviorally grounded in a physical, lifelike simulacra of a victim presents cause for concern.

    I'm not talking about any crime, that should be overtly obvious, I am talking about psychological impact from being constantly conditioned via this elaborate simulated "relationship" that you get to enact with great frequency.

    Edit: as I said before, it's just observably, blatantly true that things on the internet that have much less experiential reality or concrete, behavioral reinforcement than this can, at minimum, cause unwell people to be more unwell. This is just a worse version of it that it seems much more easily could produce, among other things, even more actual physical violence than the other things already do.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    My main problem with this line of reasoning is that it's largely just transposing the same logic that's used against things like BDSM or kink in general, of positioning it as something uniquely or at least especially harmful when the reality is that where it's abusive, it's abusive in the same ways and with the same or lower frequency than the equivalent vanilla relationships or scenes, that the fundamentally most harmful thing is just vanilla cishet patriarchy and even the tame and "safe" things that reinforce and feed into that.

    Like the starting point is that it's "icky" and so must be something uniquely or exceptionally harmful and then imagining how all the ways it's different must make it especially bad, when we know from other comparable examples whether this is violent or sexualized media or kink scenes or whatnot that that's not how it works.

    That's why I think the way to evaluate the potential harm is to start from the ground up and try to see materially what it's most likely to do, which is where I'm getting "it would cause addiction/dependence and probably increased isolation, while having all the hazards of extant chatbots dialed up a few more notches", and if it's going to reinforce toxic norms that's going to be more in it mimicking the dynamics of a traditional patriarchal heterosexual relationship (or a homosexual mimicry of the same, because I can 100% imagine gay men buying a femboy robot bang-maid too) rather than it coming from some more "salacious" kink place. Especially since so many people are just intensely, unwaveringly boring, and would think a robot blowjob while they eat some microwaved breakfast treat is the literal peak of their imagination and desires. They're not gonna be playing out The Story of O or the like, just some pathetic existence where their fancy roomba tells them they're a special good boy before sucking them off.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    You're just talking past me. You are alleging that what I am saying is connected to reinforcing the logic of the cishet patriarchy and the stigmatizing of sexual orientations that I guess you say I at least implicitly find "icky," but you make no effort to connect what I said to this, you just described people with shitty positions that I do not have. You have not established a basis for my argument being a "transpositon".

    Edit: I want to add that I generally think BDSM practices are generally exactly the opposite here of any problem I am mentioning, because they are intensely intersubjective and require attention to consent and the perspective of your partner. The opposite is true with the sort of robots we are talking about, where one is going to some truly extreme lengths to engineer solipsistic sex and/or sexual abuse. I don't know how relevant this is to the overall point, I just want to affirm a conceptual difference rather than leave it open-ended as I did.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    What? Your argument is the same as what the UK press releases about the criminalization of BDSM media say, where they paint it as something especially harmful because of it mimicking violence or slavery or whatnot and just state this as an accepted natural truth despite all evidence being to the contrary. Meanwhile, as we all know the real harm of pornography (abuse and exploitation in the industry aside) comes from the mass market vanilla cishet slop as a commodification of women's bodies aimed at incredibly boring chauvinist straight men, which is perfectly accepted and legal even though that industry really should not be tolerated the way it is (if nothing else because of the rampant abuse and exploitation in the industry we skipped over earlier).

    Like the entire "this is a safe, accessible simulacra of [violence/slavery] which is why it's bad" premise just doesn't hold water, nor does this salacious idea of chuds practicing abusing and tormenting their robot bang-maids. Like I can tell you 99% of them would just end up crying on their emotional support roomba until it cheers them up by microwaving a poptart and telling them how smart and right they are about everything. Which is bad, obviously, but it's bad in a really boring way and in way more pathetic ways than this vision of unusual and deviant cruelty people are painting in this thread.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    What? Your argument is the same as what the UK press releases about the criminalization of BDSM media say,

    I apologize, I edited in a part to explain the difference but was late in doing so

    the mass market vanilla cishet slop as a commodification of women's bodies aimed at incredibly boring chauvinist straight men,

    Which is very easy to apply to the present subject

    doesn't hold water, nor does this salacious idea of chuds practicing abusing and tormenting their robot bang-maids.

    I didn't mean some elaborate BDSM thing, I just mean straightforward eroticized r___, which is also a very prevalent aspect of the "mass market vanilla cishet slop as a commodification of women's bodies aimed at incredibly boring chauvinist straight men" that you correctly cite earlier. I can go into more detail of you really want me to, but I've been trying to spare us both that.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    I apologize, I edited in a part to explain the difference but was late in doing so

    I think I was also unusually fast in opening the inbox there - the inbox indicator changed in front of me right as I was tabbing through so I saw the post less than a minute after it was posted and missed any edits.

    I didn't mean some elaborate BDSM thing, I just mean straightforward eroticized r___, which is also a very prevalent aspect of the "mass market vanilla cishet slop as a commodification of women's bodies aimed at incredibly boring chauvinist straight men" that you correctly cite earlier.

    You're still focusing on the supposed imitation of violence as the issue, while I'm arguing that the problem is principally that it's a pathetic recreation of like the most milquetoast basic straight guy fantasy except in the form of a roomba that gives them chatbot psychosis.

    I'll grant that we may just be using different rhetoric to describe fundamentally the same thing, although I'm still sticking with my prediction that this would be way more harmful to the person trying to do it than it would make them more dangerous towards others, except in the context of them becoming addicted to it and attacking someone who tries to get them to stop using it for some reason or another.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Playing the video game Hatred doesn't make somebody more likely to commit mass violence, and I don't think talking to Siri makes somebody more misogynistic either.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Is AI psychosis made up?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Kind of. It isn't a distinct new thing created by AI, but a feedback loop that someone who is predisposed to certain addictive behaviors can get caught up in.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    I think it's a bit too narrow to cite just addictive behavior but sure, we basically agree there, which makes me wonder why you made your initial point. Clearly, you can tell that these sorts of flattery machines that try to simulate human responses except anything you don't want is stripped out and everything else that pleases you is added in can be bad for people, so when you have that same basic paradigm but the psychosis machine is hooked up to a detailed, lifelike robot for you to fuck, whether on the basis of it affectively wanting you to or not (or, frequently, going from one to the other while you continue fucking it all the same), suddenly those negative impacts on certain types of mentally vulnerable people disappear?

    Say, totally unrelated, what do you think about media that, for example, eroticizes brutal sexual violence? Would you describe it as being a socially neutral thing? I know it's the classic position of Hexbear that media is apolitical and doesn't impact anything or anyone, so we shouldn't bat an eye at the r___ and genocide simulators, but of course I want you to be able to speak for yourself.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    I suppose what we have here is a clash of freedoms. The person prone to psychosis has their freedom to not have their mental state fucked with challenged by the existence of the machine, the person who is not prone to that has their freedom to own a sex machine challenged by banning or limiting access to the machine. When put into those terms, it seems that the sex machine itself is a silly thing and should be banned - but I'm not so sure. The person with a peanut allergy is threatened by the mass agriculture of peanuts, but we inherently recognize that banning all peanuts would be unfair to the vast majority of people who do not possess such an allergy. Thus "AI psychosis" should be educated about and guarded against as should other psychologically addictive behavior.

    That question is framed ridiculously. The "classic" opinion on hexbear is most certainly not that all media is apolitical, what the fuck are you talking about. The question is to what degree media should be censored - I would argue that censorship in a modern context is best authored from the algorithm, so such content should only ever be available to those who specifically seek it out, but not that it's creation or consumption should be criminalized. And to preempt the escalation that I know is coming next: obviously that logic doesn't hold if someone was harmed in the creation of the media itself, which is and should remain illegal, or if the class of media is such that its proliferation would make enforcing the previous rule impossible, which is a real and predictable harm to society by a certain class of generated content that AI psychosis does not represent.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    The person with a peanut allergy is threatened by the mass agriculture of peanuts, but we inherently recognize that banning all peanuts would be unfair to the vast majority of people who do not possess such an allergy.

    I'm sure there are interesting points regarding nutrition and agriculture that could be made about peanuts, but from a lay perspective what I find to be an overwhelmingly salient difference is that it's much easier to test for a peanut allergy, which of course does not cover the small minority of people who develop the allergy later in life (the more common version, pollen-food syndrome, is usually not seriously dangerous). That is not true about psychological issues, where yes you can look at psychosis (via much more intensive testing than peanut allergies) and put some people in the "definitely yes" category and most in the "almost certainly no (for now)" category, but there's a much hazier boundary, even focusing on these two groups in the distribution and not the people who (so far) fall between.

    I also think even beyond the diagnosis issue the matter of self-policing on not killing yourself with an allergen is not that similar to self-policing on being especially vulnerable to having the lying flattery robot loosen your grip on reality, for reasons that I would vaguely compare to but not equivocate with self-policing on consuming addictive substances.

    Thus "AI psychosis" should be educated about and guarded against as should other psychologically addictive behavior.

    A lot of this depends on if we're talking about our present society or some imagined socialist one where there are regulations in place to prevent the product from being malicious. The trendy example is gambling. Obviously I don't think people should be forbade from playing poker with their friends or whatever, but I don't think mere education is enough of a guard to counterbalance the intensely predatory and ever-evolving practices of the industry, so we would need better substantiation on the "guarded against" part to take it seriously.

    You can surely see how contemporary AI resembles this, where theoretically there are safeguards that could be put in place to make them much less dangerous, but we can't count on that happening and should have some idea of what our stance on how the present versions should be treated is.

    The "classic" opinion on hexbear is most certainly not that all media is apolitical, what the fuck are you talking about.

    I was being facetious. I apologize for the confusion. I am very familiar with lengthy discussions on here about which media is reactionary and why.

    And to preempt the escalation that I know is coming next: obviously that logic doesn't hold if someone was harmed in the creation of the media itself, which is and should remain illegal

    Contrary to your expectation, I at no point was going to bring up abuse materials, I understand that that's a different subject and its reasons do not apply here.

    or if the class of media is such that its proliferation would make enforcing the previous rule impossible, which is a real and predictable harm to society by a certain class of generated content that AI psychosis does not represent.

    I don't follow the allusion here, honestly, unless it's a different gen-AI thing.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    just to clear up the last thing I was alluding to, a common argument that I find salient as to banning generative CSAM where no actual persons were involved is that it makes detecting and policing actual CSAM much more difficult.

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