The Science of Sex & Generative AI
A quick announcement about the nature of generative AI and my commitment to human-written content
Quick update:
Yesterday, I read a brief essay from
titled Humans Are Abusing AI—We Need Human Content Now More Than Ever and it was quite the read. Obviously, generative AI is on everybody’s minds right now. Personally, I think all the fears are way overblown. I’ve stated this several times on the record and have published a few Medium articles on why I think AI won’t amount to the catastrophic fears most people have envisioned.Call me a skeptic, but while I was preparing to come to Greece, I had to call my phone company to ask about cell service while I am traveling. I was greeted with an AI “assistant” to help me. Of course, it was totally inept. I repeatedly said, “representative” over and over until I got a human on the line. There are even sites you can go to that show you how to get the phone numbers of corporations most likely to deliver a human on the other end of the phone.
This isn’t merely a bias, a preference for human contact. These phone “assistants” are twenty-something-year-old technologies that are still far from perfect. Worse than that, they’re mostly unusable unless you need to pay a bill. In time, the “wow” factor from ChatGPT will wear off and we’ll see it for what it is—a clever trick that can produce a wall of text that kind-of-sort-of looks like something human written. But it can’t (for now) forge a coherent story.
Still, that hasn’t stopped people from assembling swaths of text from ChatGPT and submitting it to me for publication at Sexography where I’m the Editor-in-Chief.
I felt it’s important to let you all know that there is and will not be any AI-generated text here. I might make an exception if there’s a writer with a really brilliant idea and English isn’t their native language. I have no problem with someone using software to touch up their grammar. That’s not qualitatively different from Grammarly.
Between the six or seven Medium publications I manage and Substack, I’ve published people from all over the world and I believe the beauty of the internet lies in its ability to forge connections across distances and cultures.
But I draw the line at generated content. It’s a firm line that won’t be changing anytime soon. Al Anany’s essay was intriguing because it raised one simple question: if you were communicating online and could use only one word to communicate that you were a human and not an AI, which word would you choose?
Researchers at MIT asked people this question and the responses were:
love
compassion
human
please
mercy
empathy
robot
banana
alive
poop
As I watched the video, thinking quietly to myself, I was torn between two words that I would use in such a situation: Those words would be “assfucking” and “gangbang” because certainly, ChatGPT would have more than a problem spitting out either of these words. Penis, testicles, scrotum, breasts, and other words don’t quite pack the same punch as those two, so they would be my go-to.
This exercise got me thinking, not for the first time, about the future of The Science of Sex. While other places are currently being flooded with generative-AI nonsense, this is one sanctuary that, by nature of the themes discussed and content produced, is essentially guaranteed to be and remain a human place.
When I first toyed around with AI language models, they would flag my content as violations even when I asked basic things (hence why I don’t think they’ll amount to much). That, in itself, is fascinating—to think that many of the things worth writing and talking about are off-limits. When I started this project, I always knew I would run into obstructions from the big tech giants. Talking about sex is still seen as taboo, thanks to the simple fact that the tech giants all hail from the very sex-shy America.
Once upon a time, Google banned the polyamorous dating app called Open from the Google Play Store (I covered it here) under the presumption that it was facilitating casual sex, which means they had to make two intellectual leaps to reach this conclusion:
That polyamory is nothing more than just half-baked justifications for casual sex run amok.
That casual sex must inherently involve some sex trafficking or other illegal activity.
This is absurd to the point of being laughable.
But it reminds me of the invisible forces against us when we talk about (or God forbid practice) our very natural, very human sexuality. In catering to the anti-sex crowd, many of the machines we’ve created, the hives, the superorganisms, have been endowed with the same anti-sex tendencies that a minority of Americans have.
But unlike racial bias, sex-based biased, and biases against sexual orientation that are also being absorbed into the machines we create, few people if anyone is pushing to liberate sex from the dark dungeon of the unspeakable. That’s exactly why I started this project. Because someone needs to talk about the things that matter to us, even when it’s not popular, even when the algorithms will be working against them.
I have no problem being that guy.
I hope you’ve enjoyed and continue to enjoy the committedly human community and conversations here at The Science of Sex. If you’re not subscribed yet, click below to subscribe and if you’re already subscribed, consider becoming a paid subscriber to help me talk about our beautiful, natural, carnal, and often restricted human sexuality.
Here’s Al Anany’s post in case you wanted to check it out.
I don’t foresee AI ever being able to write human stories. It’s good at spilling out gobbets of goo, though.
Thanks, Joe. I don't usually think of AI at all, it doesn't leap to my mind when thinking about sex, which I think about a lot. But I'm happy to be reassured that you'll use it only when necessary. I don't believe that machines will ever replace the human body or mind where sex is concerned. At least the kind of sex I want in my life.