this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Let's change it to grenades.
People have been killing each other forever. Stabbing someone's chest. Smashing their head in with a rock. Before everyone gets their pitchforks, I'm not saying this is not harmful to the victims or that there should not be consequences for murder. Explosives are just another tool.
At some point this AI-evangelist "it's just a tool" argument stops holding water. We can't just enable all people to do things 1) rapidly and 2) at scale without any consideration for how they will use it. Teenagers doing lewd things with images in the 90's or 80's or whatever period you want to harken back to also didn't have the ability to rapidly disseminate this information to, quite literally, the entire world in a matter of seconds.
Why bother with DUI laws if we're going to go down that road? Why restrict usage of anything with a legitimate purpose?
This right here.
I'm so fucking sick of the "it's just a tool" or "sO YoU wANna BAn EvErYthiNG?!" bullshit. It's all bad faith garbage that people hide behind because they want the results of these "tools." They want the AI porn fakes of teenagers and celebrities (because they're pathetic creeps and incels with no concept of dignity or consent). They want to be able to rip off actual artists so they can pretend like they've done something "creative" so they can get social media clout. They're completely unserious people who can't be reasoned with. They need to be shunned and shamed.
That's a lack of vision.
I want... people to put on a VR set, and fuck off to their fantasy world instead of messing up IRL. I want creepy incels, rapists, and similar, to have a means to act out their creepiness without impacting real people's lives. Even more, I want them to prefer their virtual fantasies, because they can control them with a push of a button, instead of brainwashing, gaslighting, grooming, drugging, and finding other ways to control real people.
The faster that AI+VR gets more realistic and easier to use, the better for everyone.
I don't believe that there are any studies that have shown that acting out fantasies in virtual spaces will reduce actions being taken out on real people.
Since it seems like your argument rests on that, do you have anything you can reference to back up the claim?
Are you asking for studies about virtual spaces that don't exist yet? Seriously?...
For an approximation, you can check some like these:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222552404_The_pleasure_is_momentarythe_expense_damnable_The_influence_of_pornography_on_rape_and_sexual_assault
https://www.psypost.org/violent-video-games-decrease-stress-hormones-study-finds/
Well, if you are going to argue that we need to figure out a way to get virtual kiddie porn to pedophiles so that we can protect kids, you should be sure it won't lead to more kids being abused first.
Did I misinterpret your position?
"Be sure first"... like how? Do you suggest running an experiment, then counting the abuses...? 🙄
Unethical human experimentation is kind of frowned upon, so the only before-the-fact information that's ever going to be available, is the behavior of component elements present in other studies.
My position, is that we should follow those studies. Right now, they indicate that realizing fantasies in more controllable virtual environments, correlates to a decrease in the incidence of the same behaviors in less controllable IRL settings. Meaning: if you want to see less of a behavior IRL, give it an easier to control virtual outlet.
Do you want to protect kids? Well, given that those who were to listen have already listened, and those who were to be deterred by punishments have already been deterred... and lacking an effective method of detecting future abusers... there don't seem to be many options left other than luring the remaining abusers towards a decoy.