Porn has driven everyday tech. Online payment systems, broadband adoption.
Porn (visual and written erotic impression) has been a normal part of the human experience for thousands of years. Across different religions, cultures, technological capabilities. We're humans.
There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity.
Generate your own porn is definitely a huge market. Sharing it with others, and then the follow-on concern of what's in that shared content, could lead to problems.
> How do you know those relationships are "sexually fulfilling"?
You either believe what people report, the clearly-stated position on erotic material of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (1), or you can just imagine in your head what you think other people’s sex lives are like and just believe whatever you come up with.
Self-reporting isn't something to be taken at face value. It's not a dichotomy between they say, and you imagine, there's a healthy scepticism option. Also the URL leads to "Our mission" section of some organization's rather clunky website, so if it was intentended as a proof, it failed.
> It's not a dichotomy between they say, and you imagine
Buddy when it comes to strangers’ sex lives, those are pretty much the only two options.
I’m trying to figure out how “healthy scepticism” in this context means anything other than making something up in your head and then believing it. Do you mean that your imaginative process is really good?
> some organization's rather clunky website
Trying to figure out if “I don’t know what AASECT is and don’t like scrolling down a simple webpage” was meant to be a complaint or meant to be a brag.
1. I'll explain, no worries! Here: the absence of verifiable source doesn't make unreliable one worthy of blind trust. So being healthy sceptical means you just don't pretend that matter is settled when it's not. In fact, it's encouraged for whatever science students to actively look for ways why self-reporting may bring invalid or distorted data, and make hypotheses stemming from that possibility.
2.I had no idea what AASECT is (still not sure if it a good source), and I think it puts me in a vastly bigger share of the world's population compared to those who know. And especially to those who believe that everybody knows.
3. This "Our mission" in itself is just that, you know, statement of their mission/values. I found neither proofs, nor farther links there. Maybe I couldn't find anything important because I'm inattentive or dumb. But I self-report as genius, and according to you theory, it must be accepted as truth.
None of this post says anything about how you know stuff about stranger’s sex lives without believing what they say or imagining stuff.
Can you complete the statement “I am able to ascertain the truth of the sex lives of strangers by ignoring self-reported data or imagining things by the following process through which I reach my conclusions about strangers’ sex lives”
Now keep in mind if you want to sort of vaguely gesture at any scientific study of sexuality you have to exclude it due to your own rules. There is no such thing as a study of sexual relationships that doesn’t rely on self-reported data. I certainly hope you have the self awareness here to not attempt to imagine in your head that some self-reported data is valid (because it sort of feels right to you) but not other data (that feels icky) and then believe it. That would be kind of embarrassing.
I’m going to have to guess that by ignoring the basis of every scientific study of sexuality and not imagining things, your insight comes from your… heart? Divine revelation? Messages decoded from a numbers station? Sections of the digits in pi converted into ascii? Anime?
>Porn (visual and written erotic impression) has been a normal part of the human experience for thousands of years.
You need to stretch 'porn', 'thousands if years', and certainly 'normal' definitions really hard to believe it. Even my granddad's (not thousands of years ago) exposure to porn was a one-time event when he served in army. My nephew's exposure is everyday. Which he realized to be an addiction at one point way stronger than nicotine.
This is a meme I see online often (and in the show Silicon Valley), but I don't think it holds up in practice.
Re: payment systems, Visa and MC are notoriously unfriendly to porn vendors, sending them into the arms of crooked payment processors like Wirecard. Paypal grew to prominence because it was once the only way to buy and sell on Ebay. Crypto went from nerd hobby to speculative asset, shipping the "medium of exchange for porn purchases" entirely.
As for broadband adoption, it's as likely to have occurred for MP3 piracy and being 200X faster than dialup, as it was for porn.
To be very fair here, a long time before gpt-5 porn was already being produced with stable diffusion (and other open models). Civitai in particular was an open playground for this with everything from NSFW loras, prompts to fined tuned models.
I had to work for a bit with SDXL models from there and the amount of porn on the site, before the recent cleanse, was astonishing.
The party of grindr-crashing sexual repression[1] outwardly denounces such depravity, but inwardly rejoices at all the shameful images they intend to generate.
1. Red states are way ahead on porn consumption, based on past annual reports by Aylo.
What we got next: porn