Weekly Digest: The Coming Tsunami of AI Porn
Ovary longevity, charging kids to use public playgrounds, and the latest on my book in this week's roundup.
Welcome to my weekly digest for February 16, 2024, with the best articles from around the web and a roundup of my recent writings and appearances.
Next Saturday, February 24 I’ll be speaking at a conference at Providence Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Arizona. If you are in the greater Phoenix area, come check it out.
Life in the Negative World Roundup
My new book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, continues to generate a lot of discussion.
The week the book was reviewed by the American Conservative, the Gospel Coalition, and Kevin Watson. Thanks to those folks for these reviews. I was particularly gratified that the Gospel Coalition, whom I expected would have some disagreements with me, nevertheless concluded their review by saying, “I have no hesitation in recommending you get the book and read all about it.”
The book got a mention in American Reformer and the Indianapolis Business Journal. And Glenn Beck and Josh McPherson talked about my framework in a recent podcast.
I also had a number of media appearances again this week talking about the book. I was on Crosspolitic, the American Reformer podcast, the Think Institute podcast and Chicago’s Morning Answer.
I need your help to make the book a success. If you haven’t yet picked up your copy, buy it. If you’ve already bought it - thanks! - please leave a rating at the place you purchased it.
A Word From Our Sponsor
Our sponsor this week is Union University, a great Baptist school I was pleased to be able to visit a couple of month’s ago. Please be sure to check them out.
Christians Are Not Ready for the Age of "Adult AI"
Samuel James has a great piece on the coming tsunami of pornographic AI:
All variables being equal, it is likely that within twenty years, most online pornography will not feature real human beings. Artificial intelligence systems are already sophisticated enough to fabricate entire bodies convincingly. There’s certainly no reason to think the technology will recede or fail to progress. The demand for AI-generated porn already exists; there are apps and codes to generate it. Greater education in automated systems means more people will know how to create it, and software that gives consumers what they want will follow.
Most importantly of all, providers of explicit content will be able to pivot away from paying actors, with all the costs, legal compliance, and problems associated with live action. This is not to say it will happen overnight (neither the home video nor Internet revolutions were able to instantly destroy the adult film industry). But all variables remaining as they are, it will happen. Porn’s future is post-human.
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For many years, one of the key arguments anti-porn crusaders have used is that pornography objectifies and degrades women…..This raises an important question: Do most modern women agree that pornography is degrading, and if they don’t, why are many conservatives still centering this idea in their critiques of the porn industry? Culturally, we inhabit a moment in which elite society is almost uniformly agreed that sex is an industry that women can legitimately enter….Given this, it is increasingly harder to make a credible case that pornography is wrong because it harms women.
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This will be uncomfortable, because it will force Christians to make moral arguments that appear irredeemably at odds with the secular society. The benefits of emphasizing things like exploitation is that such concepts resonate with non-Christian audiences. There’s nothing wrong with seeking this common ground, but the reality is that we’re not going to have that ground at all very soon. The arguments against consuming or licensing pornography that will matter in the age of AI will be moralistic arguments: arguments rooted in the goodness of embodied sexuality in the context of marriage, and the destruction that occurs to hearts and emotions by feasting on a fake version of sex that collapses us inward. “This is somebody’s child” will have to become, “You are somebody’s child.”
Click over to read the whole thing.
What James flags is but one example of a larger trend: evangelicals often frame their objections to secular morality via appeals to secular ideologies like feminism. This is also true of, say, their view of marriage and complementarianism. I would almost sum up their rhetoric around marriage - such as their notion of the servant leader - as “complementarianism is the real feminism.”
Such arguments almost never work - but what they do accomplish is legitimizing and reinforcing the moral frameworks of secular society.
On the other side of this issue, some people on 4chan decided to use AI to make women look more modest, delete tattoos, etc. Their hash tag for this is #dignifAI
Ovary Science
The Financial Times has an interesting piece about a woman who is funding research to try to extend female fertility by studying ovaries and longevity.
Shanahan felt IVF was sold as a “saving grace” to her and her peers. The statistics show that is far from the case. Each round only works about one-third of the time for a woman under 35, with success rates falling as she ages. Shanahan began to view IVF as a “commercial endeavour” rather than a scientific one. “It became abundantly clear that we just don’t have enough science for the things we are telling and selling to women,” she says. She admits her opinion is unpopular, then adds: “It’s one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”
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Shanahan recently rewatched a video of the first time she mentioned that longevity science could be important for women’s equality. She was still giving presentations about patents but, this time, she noted it was her “deeply held belief” that progress in longevity research would track with social progress. “We live in a time where most of us believe that we are created equal,” she said, being interrupted by audience laughter at the clipart of gender symbols balancing on a see-saw on the screen above her. “But in reality, half of us, meaning half of humankind, lose access to a fundamental part of themselves at the age of 30.”
Best of the Web
New York Magazine: The Lure of Divorce - all I can say is, “Wow!”
The Atlantic: The Paradox of Stay-at-Home Parents - American society is largely built around the assumption that one parent will stay home. So why is there so little material support for homemakers? - A good piece from Elliot Haspel
Angie Schmitt on why sometimes you gotta let yourself be bowled over by the joys of parenthood and ordinary love
A suburb in Boston wants to charge daycares and preschools thousands of dollars to let their kids play in city parks.
Time: An Explosion in Sports Betting Is Driving Gambling Addiction Among College Students - Here’s the stone cold reality: almost nobody cares.
NY Post: Former Dutch prime minister and wife die ‘hand in hand’ in legal duo euthanasia - basically, they decided to kill themselves together at age 93. Interestingly, the former prime minister had grown increasingly active in pro-Palestinian activism. There seems to be some nexus linking all of these social trends we observe, even where there’s no obvious reason why say support for euthanasia and support for Palestine should rise together.
BBC: Couple to Throuple: How polyamory is becoming a 'new normal' - Again, I started flagging the polyamory push back in 2017. I don’t predict the future, but I am often early to see what’s coming next through my media analysis. It’s another reason you should become a subscriber today.
New Content and Media Mentions
This week I was also mentioned in the European Conservative and at Crossway.
New this week:
In case you missed it, Newsletter #85 was on the need to create alternative forms of achieving status within the church.
He Gets Us Takes a Big "L" in the Superbowl - A billionaire funded ad campaign that trashes traditional conservative evangelicals
My latest urban policy column in Governing is about the return of the 1980s philosophy of “insulate, insulate, insulate.”
Re: The Boston suburb potentially charging daycares to use city parks.
I'm not sure charging preschools is the best way to handle this, but I will say that when I take my kids to public family places we definitely leave if a preschool or school group comes in. This is because:
a) they bring the children of something like 30-50 families at one time, which almost never happens when parents are taking their own kids. It oversaturates the play areas and equipment.
b) the ratio of adults to children is 1:8 to 1:12, so very, very little adult oversight of very young children who need a lot of constant oversight at their ages.
c) the children parented by daycare are far less parented/regulated than children parented by their own parent the majority of the time. That means they are more aggressive, loud, and rude. Tons of research shows this is the case with kids separated from their parents before age 6 in daycare and "preschool" settings, and it's absolutely true and noticeable IRL.
I just don't enjoy being in a park or at a indoor garden or play space with teeming mobs of largely unsupervised young children. They attack my kids, scream and fight, snatch toys, and generally make the experience extremely unpleasant. We go somewhere else or come back later when there's not a toddler mob around. It's another -- smaller than many others -- way in which urging mothers to work when their children are young is antisocial.
Sounds like I have a Federalist essay to write here, if I can fit the time in. You get the preview. :)
As I read the “Lure of Divorce”, I was saddened. Individuals with so much material prosperity are so utterly bankrupt spiritually. And these are the “elites” of the Negative World? They live outside of reality and will collapse due to their rejection of God who is the ultimate Reality.