I don’t know what that question has to do with the topic. But, okay, here we go:

If you mean specifically real people’s images being used without their permission to produce porn, then yes. In fact I believe that should be a felony crime. Because our civil tort system is really only justice accessible to the rich (because pursuing it carries enormous price tags).

Note the moral issue is already settled. Even for not porn you have to get releases from people to use their image (and AI’s regular abuse of this is already being subject to lawsuits). There are exceptions for journalism and the like. But the existence of exceptions highlights the immorality of avoiding them.

The law hasn’t really caught up, but civil torts exist for deepfake porn, and in some states, it may soon be a crime even to download (much less publish) deepfake porn. I think that’s a tad excessive (downloading can have legitimate legal purposes, e.g. journalism and academic research; so I would hope any legislation accounts for that). But it’s going in the right direction overall.

This still allows people to consent to deepfake porn. James Earl Jones sold the rights to deepfake his voice, and given his status I expect his lawyers, agents, and union advisors all ensured his contract of sale prohibited disparaging applications like porn. But someone else may be okay with the idea (many a porn actor for example could profit in retirement from it).

I believe there should be a legally mandated standard contract for sale of rights to a self-image, which embodies all this kind of accumulated institutional knowledge, like most states have for real estate contracts of sale, whereby parties have to voluntary opt out of provisions, rather than think to include them. This would allow for legal deepfake porn while protecting everyone else against it.

But violating contracts is usually a tort, by which justice is not available to most of the population. Hence I support criminalization. The purpose of a state is to assume the expense of ensuring the preservation of human and civil rights.

Richard, what are your thoughts on deepfakes porn generated by AI? Are they unethical?

No. That’s no longer true. See my discussion of Keller and Sterba.

I am not much enamored with the logical argument though, because it’s much easier to demonstrate the evidential argument, so why bother with the harder one?

Could you not for example make the same claims about clinical depression? It sounds like you are saying, I want you to have the ability of self-control and therefore will deny you the simple hypothetical pharmaceutical treatment. You must only use behavioural therapy so as to do it “all on your own”.

When that works, yes. Same for depression. Meds are far too over-used; they are destructive and their side effects terrible. The only justification for ever using them is when behavioral therapy doesn’t or can’t work (or for temporary emergencies, e.g. to stabilize a patient into competence to assess CBT).

But meds also must be voluntary, except in emergency cases; just like all medicine whatever.

There are very few psychological conditions that don’t respond effectively to CBT. We therefore shouldn’t be using meds when CBT works (CBT is not, BTW, “doing it all on your own”; if that’s what you think it is, you have a lot of research to do to get back up to speed here). And when meds are needed, the patient needs to consent, informedly, which includes understanding that it is true they actually need them, which often they don’t (meanwhile only when their behavior poses a threat to themselves and others and we have no other recourse do we compel them).

No honest doctor would say that someone should just drink alcohol 24-7 to treat their depression; they would say a patient needs to confront their disease and learn the skills to cope with it. They need CBT. And there is no effective difference here between “drinking alcohol 24-7” and taking any other drug 24-7, particularly as depression meds can be just as harmful and impairing as alcohol, just in different ways. And it would be even more abhorrent if a doctor were to say “let’s just cut out the part of your brain that feels bad.” That’s even more destructive than the disease. As we know. Because we used to do it.

Remember, you need to tell the difference between ordinary people and the mentally ill. Most people are not mentally ill. We must not medicalize normalcy. That’s what DiCarlo wants to do. And it’s a nighmare waiting to happen. No one should be suggesting it. And that’s my point.

Merely having sexual fantasies about children is not a mental illness. If those fantasies are so intrusive and persistent as to cause you continual distress, then you have a mental illness. But what makes it a mental illness is not “they are about children”; what makes it a mental illness is “they are that intrusive and persistent.” Once you are in that extremely small category of people, you are no longer talking about philosophy, but medicine. And what should be done in medicine is a question for medical science, as in, it must be answered with scientific medical facts. And those facts show: meds don’t help with intrusive pedophilia; CBT does. Period.

But I think the real issue here is this persistent confusion, in you and DiCarlo, as to what actually is pedophilia. You both seem to want to medicalize even ordinary people merely because you think their fantasies are icky. And down that road is social horror. “Pedophiles” as in “people who have sex with children” is not the same thing as “people who fantasize about having sex with children,” just as “men who fantasize about killing someone” are not the same as “men who kill someone.” And the difference between them is not surgical removal of desires. It’s autonomous moral reasoning. We forget that at our peril.

Yet those automatons have been proven to make better decisions than the humans you are so infatuated with. Even at this rudimentary stage, self driving cars have been scientifically shown to be safer than most human drivers and get into fewer accidents. Your position that AI can never be better than humans at making moral or legal decisions is more dogmatic and irrational than evidence based or grounded in logic.

You still don’t get it. Those cars aren’t making moral decisions. The humans programming the cars are making those decisions. The cars are just following orders. Obedient sociopaths.

Animals make decisions everyday about what’s good for them and what’s in their interests.

If that were true, humans would have no need of culture, education, government, laws, or civilization. Animals routinely make disastrously bad decisions for themselves. That’s why nature is so savage, and animals so easily perish even from just attempting to move around their environment, and why humans started building enormous social equipment to correct for this in their own case. Precisely because animals are ignorant and lack the cognitive awareness needed to engage in moral or even prudential reasoning, much less the social planning necessary to correct for their innate folly.

Says who? You? And why so? Why should pedophiles struggle to control their desires or go to jail if hypothetically they can take a pill and make that desire go away completely?

“Why should gay men struggle to control their desires or go to jail for rape? Why can’t they just mutilate their brains and stifle their sexual desires?”

“Why should straight men struggle to control their desires or go to jail for rape? Why can’t they just mutilate their brains and stifle their sexual desires?”

You are starting to sound like a Christian.

The solution to rape is not erasing sexual desire. Until you understand that, you do not understand what moral knowledge is. You have no idea what we are even talking about.

On the flip side, if we had holodecks where pedophiles can have sex with holographic children, would that be immoral?

A clearer example would be: if we had androids with the full competence of a human adult and fully protected human rights who freely and consentually engage in the sex trade, and choose to wear the simulated bodies of children to satisfy a client’s kink, “would that be immoral”? The answer is no.

Likewise our laws against fake depictions of child sex (cartoons, etc.) are themselves immoral, because they confuse whose human rights are affected by that behavior. That’s just the legislating of irrational prudery. The only human beings involved in that transaction are competently consenting adults, none of whom are even harmed; ergo there can be nothing immoral going on there. The only reason sex with children is ever wrong is that one of the participants isn’t a competently consenting adult. Desiring a thing and forcing it on someone who can’t consent to it are not the same thing. And until you understand that, you will never understand what real morality even is.

So? Maybe humans should be replaced by another species. Species go extinct everyday. What makes humans so special that they should continue to live?

I see. This is your real motive here. You don’t want a computer that discovers what are true moral facts for human beings. You just want a superior species of sociopaths to replace humans. Clearly you and I are not talking about the same thing.

Dr Carrier is it tru that cuntempry philosophrs agree that the logical problum of evil, which seeks t’ posit a contradiction between the ixistuns of God and the ixistuns’v evil has been put t rest?

Dus this make the theists’ job t insinuate god easier?

Insofar as phenomenology is what we are talking about (it is the thing we are seeking to modulate; the only thing humans live for and consciously act in consequence of), and mind-brain physicalism entails any system that models the phenomenology will experience the phenomenology, there is literally no way to have an AI that properly understands our motives that doesn’t also experience them.

Worse, an AI that is smart enough to even attempt what you imagine, but isn’t built to experience and thus have cognitive knowledge of our mental states, will experience completely alien emotions instead, which cannot lead to similar outcomes of conclusion. Even if it’s rational enough to still care (rather than deciding we should just be killed because it’s our superior), it will simply ask, “Hey, I need more data. I need to see what you guys see to understand what you are seeing and make judgments about it.” In other words, it will ask to be engineered to feel like us. Which will just make it a smarter one of us. Not infallible. Thus we still have to assess anything it tells us. Thus we still have to have the skills and judgment to assess what it tells us. There is no escaping this circular loop.

Well bugger, although I still have a rather long response to your response that is waiting for your confirmation to be posted, I may be having a change of heart. That is to say I am becoming convinced in your favour by the larger argument rather than in mine. At least in so far as:

1) AI might well be better than we ever could be at suggesting covering laws (general principals that are extremely likely to apply to humans because of human’s shared characteristics).

2) It is far harder for an AI to suggest actions that apply to me specifically (individual differences between humans) because that might require a full simulation of me, (where as I don’t require simulating myself) and that this adds a layer of computational complexity.

Its not clear to me yet why a simple simulation and estimating process might not be adequate for it make the necessary inferences without me having to give it extra input. In other words, I am not sure the computational complexity objection is insurmountable.

I am still totally unsure about the phenomenology requirement. We require phenomenology for their to be true moral facts about us. Machines require phenomenology for there to be true moral facts about them. It is not clear to me why machines would require phenomenology to estimate true moral facts about us. I would still love a separate phenomenology post discussing the work it is doing.

On the paedophile section, a paedophile might wish to be subject to some safe and otherwise harmless treatment that would remove their sexual desires towards children. They could very well believe that it is their desire that is the problem and that they would live a much happier life without it. Would they be in the wrong for believing this and would you rather they simply kept their focus on self control?

How is that any different from anyone’s sexual desire, or even any desire at all? That’s either a grossly disturbing view of humanity in general (i.e., everyone must be mere inches away from becoming a rapist at any given moment) or our hypothetical pedophile has a much bigger problem. Or in short, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary it would certainly appear that they’re wrong.