The news flitted by, as so much does in the torrent: OpenAI, the parent entity of ChatGPT, announced that the guardrails put in place to restrict it from producing erotic and sexual content have now been removed. We're "not the elected moral police of the world," or so OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it. So now, if you want and you spool up the correct prompts, ChatGPT will play the role of your idealized lover.
This is not a good thing. Not just for kids, either. It's bad for humans of every age.
An acceptance of porn as "natural" and "sex-positive" seems baked into American progressivism, which hasn't ever made a lick of sense to me. Why in the name of the sweet Lord Jesus would anyone trust the forces of predatory capitalism with human sexuality? How is turning physical intimacy into a commodity to be bought and sold a good thing?
Surely, surely we've learned by now that this ain't the case.
We know that corporate social media has supplanted our natural sociality with algorithms designed to addict us, hitting us with little burps of dopamine as we're pushed further and further from genuine human interaction. Porn is and has always done that too. Since human beings first learned to scratch a clumsy sexual image onto a cave wall, it's been sexuality as objectification, sexuality as seeing the other as a means to your own pleasure rather than a person, and it was that even before the internet arrived to bring it into our homes and offices and everywhere we go.
In the last three decades, algorithmically-amplified online sexual content has had a catastrophic impact on contemporary sexuality. It's poisoned a generation of the young, warping their understanding of sex, driving them away from the complex reality of actual flesh-and-blood partners. This isn't even faintly healthy.
A lover is a person, complex and alive, and requires us to adapt and grow. If one is Christian, as I am, we also acknowledge that partner as worthy of love, another sentient being whose pleasure is as important as our own. This is a great deal of fun, and is also organically complex and unpredictable. It requires us to learn from one another, and to appreciate one another.
But an AI simulacrum does none of those things. It demands nothing of us as persons, because it is not a person itself. It has no desires. It feels nothing. It needs nothing. It is...for now...truly and actually an object.
Now that pornography has integrated AI, it can offer up an infinite array of purchasable "partners" that only do and say exactly whatever we want, and look precisely like whatever we lust for in that moment. AI will adapt to us and indulge us, an erotic sycophant that will shapeshift itself to our solipsistic onanism with the precision of a lab-designed virus overcoming the natural defenses of a cell.
It does not bode well for the future of human physical intimacy.
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