Inception for Paedophiles?

What A.I. and the Sexual Revolution Want

WARNING: this article discusses subjects relating to sexual abuse which some readers may find distressing.

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Our society’s approach to sex is built on a single ethical premise: do no harm. Primum non nocere, as the doctors say. Actually, that means “first, do no harm”—medics should first ask if it is better to do nothing, since acting may make things worse. It’s merely the first principle for them—others come in later. In the bedroom, however, we’ve dropped the primum, and anything after the first principle is just preference.

We’ve all heard the line: “as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, whatever you do in your own bedroom is up to you.” 

What, then, do we do when it comes to AI generated images of child sexual abuse?

The BBC raised this unspeakable question this week. A joint  investigation with independent journalist Octavia Sheepshanks has uncovered a now thriving illegal trade in photorealistic images of child sexual abuse generated by the AI program Stable Diffusion, being sold to paedophiles around the world via Patreon.

Under existing UK law, such images—including “pseudo-photographs” and cartoons—are, in fact, already illegal. Authorities recognise that fictional child pornography does violate the “do no harm” principle. Quoted in the BBC article, the National Police Chiefs Council’s safeguarding lead rightly points out that a paedophile could “move along that scale of offending from thought, to synthetic, to actually the abuse of a live child”.

So, aside from the AI revolution of the past year creating a whole lot more work for the police—in part because it is now more difficult for them to police actual child abuse images—what more is there to say? We agree that fake child porn should be illegal, so let’s get on with doing our best to enforce the law.

But thinking that we are “sorted” on this issue fails to take seriously both the natural direction of AI and the natural direction of the Sexual Revolution.

What A.I. Wants

The inestimable Paul Kingsnorth (whose Substack, The Abbey of Misrule, is a must read) talks a lot these days about “the Machine”. It’s a name and idea he’s borrowed from other writers—Dylan Thomas, E.M. Forster, James Mumford, others—and pushed again to the fore. What is it?

This, then, is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up — cars, laptops, robot mowers and the rest. In fact, such ‘technics’, as Mumford calls them, are the product of the Machine, not its essence. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition. And it is not a new development. Indeed, it can be traced back much further than we might imagine, to the dawn of civilization itself. (emphasis added)

The Machine is a tendency within us—a tendency to control the world through our human making. It’s not synonymous with modern technology, but goes back to Cain, to Tubal-Cain, to Babel.

But the developments in modern technology mean the Machine has now come into its own. Kingsnorth summed this up pithily just yesterday:

The ultimate project of modernity, I have come to believe, is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfil the most ancient human dream: to become gods. What I call the Machine is the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged to make this happen.

Modernity and the Machine, then, were made for each other. The present day is what the Machine has been waiting for: nature replaced by technology. That, Kingsnorth says, is where we’re going—or at least, where some people are trying to take us and most of us are being happily led. 

Writers like Kingsnorth are proving afresh to anyone who will listen that technology is not neutral—it wants things. The Machine wants things, and the discrete technologies it uses want things. Different tech makes us behave in different ways that achieve the Machine’s ends—and AI is no exception.

So let’s ask: what will  the Machine do when it meets the problem of paedophiles?