SXSW erotica story panel observation

[oneagainst]

Just came out of a session on ASMR, audio erotica and AI at SXSW and thought I'd share some thoughts.

First, audio is a growing market, primarily for female consumers by female authors, focused on intimacy more than porn. But that's not massive news.

The second part was the talk about LLM AI to generate erotic stories, concluding that the technology wasn't there yet and confession that the tools were lifting large sections of existing books verbatim. Again, sucks but yeah.

The final part was the rise of Small Language Models, ie instead of using the ChatGPT engine across the entire internet, I could train it just on my corpus to generate more stories in my own style (for better or worse).

Sounded neat at the start, and I guess it's maybe easier to get the AI to sketch a story and build from there, but if you extrapolate...? Instead of writing a story by hand once a month, generating a story every week through such a speed boost. If you're trying to make a living, it's about consistent new content.

Which brings me to the "terror" of it: if it becomes a contest between mass produced erotica versus the artisan stories we all make here, how on earth do we stand out amongst the beige? It's just going to get harder to be read if the signal to noise ratio drops further....

 

[Blind_Justice]

Next summer: 51 Shades Of Beige, the movie based on the NY Times Bestseller by Cher Gaz-PaTrick. The engrossing story of A Woman discovering Her Slot and what A Man can do to it!

....and a thousand elephants!

 

[bumpercars]

I think it'll be a long time before AI is good enough to get us off. AI also costs money to run, so it'll have a tough time competing against the free content here even if it does get that good. And, finally, AI content is currently against the Literotica rules, so the site is going to fight it as it arrives.

AI is still worth worrying about, but as the Hitchhiker's guide says, don't panic.

 

[John_Vandermeer]

On a related issue, anybody considered the impact of AI “girlfriends” (or boyfriends) on erotica? No idea how “good” they are at this point, but if it allows the mass customization of sexual interaction, it will certainly drain some of the erotica readership that reads as a form of mental fantasy fulfilment. After the AI has trained itself on your favorite characters of course. Screw authors twice over…

 

[Bamagan]

Which brings me to the "terror" of it: if it becomes a contest between mass produced erotica versus the artisan stories we all make here, how on earth do we stand out amongst the beige? It's just going to get harder to be read if the signal to noise ratio drops further....

The pattern is pretty likely to follow that of every other industry or art for the last 200-300 years that became possible to conduct via mechanization and/or computerization. Authors and artists will probably find themselves in the same boat as most other such craftspeople: 'hand'-making specialty pieces for people who aren't satisfied with mass produced options, or who lack the patience or whatever to do the custom prompting of an AI for themselves.

The more generalist authors may be able to find drone work prompting the AI and polishing its produce, which I somewhat cynically note is not all that different from what the "mom is forced to sit in her son's lap until she needs his dick" authors are currently doing. More niche authors may hold out a bit longer in such a market, if only because there's less comparable material to train an AI with (or because the intended audience is harder to generalize and therefore a market that mass production doesn't help to profit from).

That's my attempt at being Nostra-dumbass, anyway.

 

[oneagainst]

On a related issue, anybody considered the impact of AI “girlfriends” (or boyfriends) on erotica? No idea how “good” they are at this point, but if it allows the mass customization of sexual interaction, it will certainly drain some of the erotica readership that reads as a form of mental fantasy fulfilment. After the AI has trained itself on your favorite characters of course. Screw authors twice over…

That was covered a little too, the idea that if you pay for the premium service you get a bot that's actually permitted to use dirty words. I guess those work as well as you want them to, insofar as like anything it's a suspension of disbelief.

But to geek out for a moment, I've currently got a corpus on Lit of about 1M words, which is open to all to read. If you pointed a SLM at that and said "I'd like Anya as my lesbian girlfriend" or "I'd like Alena as my wife"... at current rate of evolution I can't imagine it'll be too hard to bring a character to life to at least a basic degree of fidelity to while away the lonely nights.

Imagine a Domme who has no other interests than keeping up your dwell time on the app. No concern for your mental well-being.

Sounds like crack cocaine for the soul...?

 

[John_Vandermeer]

That was covered a little too, the idea that if you pay for the premium service you get a bot that's actually permitted to use dirty words. I guess those work as well as you want them to, insofar as like anything it's a suspension of disbelief.

But to geek out for a moment, I've currently got a corpus on Lit of about 1M words, which is open to all to read. If you pointed a SLM at that and said "I'd like Anya as my lesbian girlfriend" or "I'd like Alena as my wife"... at current rate of evolution I can't imagine it'll be too hard to bring a character to life to at least a basic degree of fidelity to while away the lonely nights.

Imagine a Domme who has no other interests than keeping up your dwell time on the app. No concern for your mental well-being.

Sounds like crack cocaine for the soul...?

Exactly. An app designed to give users a decent but relentless approximation of what they most crave sexually/romantically sounds as exciting as it does terrifying. You can imagine an evil mastermind that takes over the world that way.

It would not have to be that fidelious a rendition even. If, as you alluded, Domme Wives are your weakness… you could even just say “give me something like Alena, or Jaime, or Becky, or…” and there is more than enough data.

EDIT: Maybe that is a cautionary erotic scifi horror storyline there. A brilliant but lonely man that has his life destroyed, like a relentless and lethal virus, by an AI domme wife of his own prompting, that matches his wettest nightmares to a T. Would be interesting, in that all the eroticism would have to be virtual. How does she/it enslave him to her feet if she actually has no feet, just AI generated feet pics, clips, and dirty talk? On the other hand, getting him to cage his own dick and send “her” all his money is easy..,

 

[oneagainst]

Exactly. An app designed to give users a decent but relentless approximation of what they most crave sexually/romantically sounds as exciting as it does terrifying. You can imagine an evil mastermind that takes over the world that way.

It would not have to be that fidelious a rendition even. If, as you alluded, Domme Wives are your weakness… you could even just say “give me something like Alena, or Jaime, or Becky, or…” and there is more than enough data.

EDIT: Maybe that is a cautionary erotic scifi horror storyline there. A brilliant but lonely man that has his life destroyed, like a relentless and lethal virus, by an AI domme wife of his own prompting, that matches his wettest nightmares to a T. Would be interesting, in that all the eroticism would have to be virtual. How does she/it enslave him to her feet if she actually has no feet, just AI generated feet pics, clips, and dirty talk? On the other hand, getting him to cage his own dick and send “her” all his money is easy..,

It makes for a good Dark Mirror story. I think unfortunately it makes a better IRL business model. If only there was a free site that the language model could scrape that had all this sort of wording on it....

 

[joy_of_cooking]

stroke your pathetic little clit, worm, and tell me how much you long to plunge that ten inch baby bazooka into my hot, tight slit. I'm so wet, Daddy. Spank me!

More seriously, didn't some service already try AI girlfriends, and then freak out and lock down the explicit sex talk, leaving a bunch of men bereft?

 

[AG31]

I haven't been able to get ChatGPT to complete a BDSM story, so no lure for me there yet.

But the idea of AI boyfriends and girlfriends is just appalling to the extent that it purports to mimic real relationships. How can people imagine a relationship when there is no there there??? Doesn't love or even affection involve caring about and wondering about the other's interiority? For me this is a really depressing peek at the possible trajectory of humanity.

 

[John_Vandermeer]

I haven't been able to get ChatGPT to complete a BDSM story, so no lure for me there yet.

But the idea of AI boyfriends and girlfriends is just appalling to the extent that it purports to mimic real relationships. How can people imagine a relationship when there is no there there??? Doesn't love or even affection involve caring about and wondering about the other's interiority? For me this is a really depressing peek at the possible trajectory of humanity.

The idea of AI partners is certainly dystopian. But it would seem the economic incentive is certainly there. If the technology is also there, baring regulation, it would thus seem inevitable. Sexual romantic loneliness and frustration creates latent demand, whether it comes from gender imbalanced countries like China or India, or "involuntary celibate" Western men. How much would any such men, or even so called happily married men, pay for a software robot to flirt with them and provide some wanted attention. If she/it can string two sentences together and wink flirtatiously behind a pretty face you got the seed of a product that just needs to mature and grow, and at some point you have fully fledged AI augmented reality "Stepford wives". Freaky, but likely would happen. The key is that the AI mistakes do not cross the line into being complete mood killers (like the AI images that result in congenital abnormalities point to). So again, the question is, is it a fatal flaw, or just lack of product maturity.

Now, from a narrative point of view, the potential seems awesome. A disembodied relationship, even one you can look at but still not touch, seems to have challenges, to say the least. But for many of us there are also triggers, levers, that provide much of the experience. Femdom fetishists like myself for example are very responsive to certain looks, gestures, demeanors, words imbued with damning meaning, which would not be that far fetched for an AI to master. Yet an AI has not empathy, or conscience, or guilt, or shame. Its destructive power seems... limitless. So a great premise for an erotic scifi-horror.

 

[AG31]

How much would any such men, or even so called happily married men, pay for a software robot to flirt with them and provide some wanted attention. If she/it can string two sentences together and wink flirtatiously behind a pretty face you got the seed of a product that just needs to mature and grow, and at some point you have fully fledged AI augmented reality "Stepford wives". Freaky, but likely would happen. The key is that the AI mistakes do not cross the line into being complete mood killers

My advice to someone on a different site, asking for recommendations for an AI girlfriend, was to start lerning how to attend to the "other." Start small. Open the door for someone. Imagine what someone is feeling when they say they're tired. Whatever. The cure for loneliness starts there.

 

[John_Vandermeer]

My advice to someone on a different site, asking for recommendations for an AI girlfriend, was to start lerning how to attend to the "other." Start small. Open the door for someone. Imagine what someone is feeling when they say they're tired. Whatever. The cure for loneliness starts there.

Absolutely. But like prostitution or mail order brides, i bet AI girlfriends have a latent market ready to be exploited.

 

[lovecraft68]

I prefer the one a month legit story writing over a weekly menu of I'm too lazy to write my own story.

 

[oneagainst]

Update: in one of the VC (venture capital) workshops today, he made mention of the tool I was referring to above (that the woman developing it admitted was a way off producing good content) claiming it was "getting traction" and "aimed at Hollywood". Leaving aside the endless miserable trail of startups that focused on solving only very niche 1st world problems and still raised money inexplicably from VCs, is this precisely the thing that the screen writers went on strike about? In a much more general sense to my question above, how do you stand out in a Netflix pitch against a corridor full of your fellow hopefuls who have AI-generated the story and then just polished the turd?

Update x2: in the "Creating Content" keynote, the local-geography heads of Disney, Amazon Prime and Netflix spent an hour hammering home that the key to success is content with a unique voice, one that doesn't try to explain what Bin Chickens are, that has a strong unique story able to break out of the local market and be sold globally. My point here is that even if you are utterly original, completely compelling, you could still be twentieth in line behind everyone else's pitch if all they do is press a button and edit the output. It smells like a death-spiral of beige regurgitation.

 

[jaF0]

On a related issue, anybody considered the impact of AI “girlfriends” (or boyfriends) on erotica?

Enter Minuet:

But only one iteration was perfect. Following versions were not the same. The personality and voice were not up to the original

If you were going to do a story using a similar product, you'd have to incorporate those kinds of differences as the program evolves, or devolves.

 

[oneagainst]

Enter Minuet:

But only one iteration was perfect. Following versions were not the same. The personality and voice were not up to the original

Or that hair. My god. Did we really think that holo-femmes would look like that in the 23rd century?

 

[Bramblethorn]

Update: in one of the VC (venture capital) workshops today, he made mention of the tool I was referring to above (that the woman developing it admitted was a way off producing good content) claiming it was "getting traction" and "aimed at Hollywood". Leaving aside the endless miserable trail of startups that focused on solving only very niche 1st world problems and still raised money inexplicably from VCs, is this precisely the thing that the screen writers went on strike about?

Yes it is, though it also makes me wonder how much of the studios pushing AI writing is because they genuinely believe in it, vs. how much is about wanting the WGA to believe it so they can be pressured into accepting a cheaper deal.

 

[oneagainst]

Yes it is, though it also makes me wonder how much of the studios pushing AI writing is because they genuinely believe in it, vs. how much is about wanting the WGA to believe it so they can be pressured into accepting a cheaper deal.

I just have a feeling it's going to be a very expensive lesson for a streaming service to learn if they did go major AI. If a show takes 3 years cradle to grave, you want an absolute gold storyline or else you (the showrunner) are bang out of a job, right? Cream rises, you have to hope.