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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Seeing this and the replies about lookalike porn actresses made me have a random thought. As alluded to in the replies, lookalike actresses that actually really look like the original in a way that doesn't break suspension of disbelief are not easy to come by, which means porn parodies of live action works are always likely to be highly imperfect. If the idea of Han Solo playing with Luke Skywalker's lightsaber turns you on, the closest thing you're gonna get is probably gonna look like 2 young men cosplaying, and the image of actually young Harrison Ford and young Mark Hamill is stuck in your imperfect imagination.

And this is an area where I thought anime had a huge advantage over live-action. If you like the idea of watching some cartoon characters bang, you can usually pretty quickly find hentai artwork of that, often in a style very very similar to the original cartoon, and sometimes even by the exact same artist who drew the original cartoon using the exact same style. You're not getting a porn parody, you're essentially getting a porn version of the original work, in a way that you don't and simply can't get for a live action work.

Well, until now with generative AI. Of course, photorealistic CGI - or at least, close-enough-to-photorealistic CGI - has been a thing before this generative AI technology, but the skills and resources required to pull off a truly believable porn version of a live action work was just out of reach for hobbyists. AI is not there yet, certainly for video but also for still images, but, as they say, it's only going to get better. And given how in the anime world, a flood of hentai fanart of basically any semi-popular character is guaranteed, I wonder if we'll see this kind of thing happen with live-action works, which, of course, involve real actors with real faces and real bodies that they walk around in the real world with.

But then, we could enter an Ouroboros kind of situation where, as video gen AI gets easier and cheaper, all popular live action works are actually "live action, as presented by Disney," aka not live action but entirely computer-generated, with photorealistic CGI characters who don't actually look like real people, at least not intentionally. Imagine if photorealistic movies and TV shows that achieve that photorealism by actually taking video of real people acting in real places instead of using genAI go the way of plays, which still exist and are even quite prominent, but are eclipsed in audience size and stature by similarly styled video art.

Realistic deepfake pornographic imagery is definitely feasible with current technology. A moderately bright person with a decent GPU could probably start churning them out after a week of self-study and experimentation.

I think the reason you rarely see or hear about this is that no company wants to be associated with this content. It's banned on all mainstream platforms like Reddit, Discord, and Twitter. Maybe they fear legal liability, but I think the sheer "ick" factor is already sufficient to dissuade them from hosting it, for fear of reputational damage. So the discussion and dissemination of this stuff happens in private/obscure/sketchy forums.