I’m behind SEVEN proxies!

Even when consent is informed it can still be fucky. Do you think I want to consent to an arbitration agreement with my employer or a social media platform? Fuck no, but I want a job and interaction so I go where the money/people are. I can’t hunt around for a place that will hire me and also doesn’t have arbitration.

Consent at the barrel of a gun, No matter how well informed, is no consent at all.

This, above any other reason, is why I’m most troubled with AI CSAM. I don’t care what anyone gets off to if no one is harmed, but the fact that real CSAM could be created and be indistinguishable from AI created, is a real harm.

And I instinctively ask, who would bother producing it for real when AI is cheap and harmless? But people produce it for reasons other than money and there are places in this world where a child’s life is probably less valuable than the electricity used to create images.

I fundamentally think AI should be completely uncensored. Because I think censorship limits and harms uses for it that might otherwise be good. I think if 12 year old me could’ve had an AI show me where the clitoris is on a girl or what the fuck a hymen looks like, or answer questions about my own body, I think I would’ve had a lot less confusion and uncertainty in my burgeoning sexuality. Maybe I’d have had less curiosity about what my classmates looked like under their clothes, leading to questionable decisions on my part.

I can find a million arguments why AI shouldn’t be censored. Like, do you know ChatGPT can be convinced to describe vaginal and oral sex in a romantic fiction is fine, but if it’s anal sex, it has a much higher refusal rate? Is that subtle anti-gay encoding in the training data? It also struggles with polyamory when it’s two men and a woman but less when it’s two women and a man. What’s the long-term impact when these biases are built into everyday tools? These are concerns I consider all the time.

But at the end of the day, the idea that there are children out there being abused and consumed and no one will even look for them because “it’s probably just AI” isn’t something I can bear no matter how firm my convictions are about uncensored AI. It’s something I struggle to reconcile.