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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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The Fascist-Feminist synthesis that the majority of normies implicitly agree with is that men viewing explicit material is metaphysically damaging in some way, and thus it must be curtailed as much as possible. There's a bunch of laws that obliquely touch on these aspects (often relating the "production of child porn"), as well as a ton of potential PR damage. That's why webhosts, credit card processors, sites like Patreon, etc. have always been weirdly prudish about any explicit material. We should expect the same thing to happen to image generators. It'll probably reach a similar steady-state eventually, with explicit stuff existing on the periphery while facing periodic crackdowns.

Why expect that as opposed to a pornhub model, where there’s a separate image generator for porn? Mind geek gives 0 fucks, I’m sure.

Mind geek gives 0 fucks, I’m sure.

I'm quite sure no service would be willing to be declared the world's first public-use CP generator, which it will become 100% within 4 seconds of its release to the plebs (whether it would be actually deserved is entirely irrelevant). The possibility of genning anything that looks even remotely teenage remains a hard technical problem, as of yet unsolved; while open-source's answer can be "yes, and", I think this will not fly for anything corpo-adjacent. This was discussed earlier wrt textgen, and the same is doubly, triply, orders of magnitude more true of imagegen; doing it properly requires painstakingly curating the dataset of your model, and even then I imagine there will be no shortage of borderline cases from crafty coomers proompters to incense the normies.

The…what?

Hosts and processors have generally erred on the side of prudishness because that’s the side of caution. It is harder to get sued or boycotted or arrested for not doing something than for doing it.

Why is explicit material so risky? Because most people recognize some sort of lazy deontology, and pornography triggers most of the common “boo” lights. For the spiritually inclined, that’s metaphysical damage. The rest of us have to dig for some physical justification. Harming children is a PRETTY GOOD REASON to criticize something. Thus, near-universal condemnation of the central examples, plus an umbrella of distaste for anything remotely related.

It sounds like we agree on almost everything here, we just use different language.

The only bit I'd raise an objection to is the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" excuse being a good reason for much of anything.

I think describing this casual morality as a “fascist-feminist synthesis” is either very confused or very inflammatory.

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