Meet the New Porn: Even Worse than the Old Porn

Pornography is a strange thing—it takes something good and natural (sex), exploits that appetite for the good, inverts it, turns it inward, monetizes it, and sets the table for a one-man digital gorge-fest. The flood of digital images in the pornographic realm over the past three decades has been exponential and simply impossible to reign in…not that anyone is trying to do so. 

This is not a world I inhabit, but I would imagine if I had access to a limitless glut of digital images at my fingertips used to tantalize my sexual faculties that was difficult to regulate, I would have to consider seriously the zero-tolerance words of the Apostle in order to function in moral society: “Among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality” (Ephesians 5:3). What other option does one have? We are simply not made, evolutionarily speaking, to see so many naked bodies in a lifetime. Those who sow the seeds of online pornography in their lives reap the thorns of erectile dysfunction, distorted perceptions of the opposite sex, and sexual illiteracy. As the Sage notes, “He who is sated loathes honey” (Proverbs 27:7).  

As bad as pornography is for the individual body, mind, and spirit, I’d like to argue that the blistering pace with which AI-generated imagery and content is flooding the internet is benign digi-porn 2.0 on crack. Why? Because this synthetic media or “AI slop”—low-effort digital content made with generative AI which lacks quality and deeper meaning is produced at such an overwhelming volume that we are literally drowning in it—is leading to an epistemological crisis that makes us question the very foundations of reality itself.  

Three years ago, I published an article at Crisis titled “In the Age of AI, ‘Even the Very Elect Will Be Deceived.’” In this article, I relayed the unnerving experience of being impersonated by an AI bot in a Facebook conversation in which I was tagged, despite having left the platform years earlier: 

Imagine a world in which we do not know what is real—not in a mere philosophical sense but in every aspect of human society. From the call-center representative to the gallery art to the “friend” you are chatting with online. Or imagine meeting a female counterpart of such striking beauty and falling in love, only to realize that “she” is no woman at all. When these artificial encounters become almost indistinguishable from what we believe to be real, we have truly entered into a digital epoch akin to that of the nuclear age.

I hate AI as much as I hate pornography. AI desensitizes and homogenizes online content, rendering it essentially meaningless and flaccidly impotent. It takes (steals) without permission, replicating and re-replicating its faceless dishonest appropriation. The government will throw an individual into prison for piracy, but a faceless AI amalgamation flaunts copyright laws with impunity. AI erodes trust and undermines the human experience. When we can’t know what is real and what is not, this is a true crisis. And a crisis of trust is the death knell of faith.

Perhaps the unease I feel when I see AI images draws from the hypothesis of the “Uncanny Valley” developed by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in the 1970s. This theory states that when robots become more human-looking to the point of being less distinguishable from an actual human being, a sense of revulsion sets in. It is an evolutionary defense mechanism we have relied on for millennia to identify our own. But as AI becomes more and more realistic and it becomes harder to distinguish deep fakes from actual documented images, it calls into question: What does it mean to be human? Who and what can we trust? What is real and what is not? 

If you don’t want to consume online pornography because it’s unhealthy and sinful, it’s doable. I’ve been doing it for the past two decades. What is harder is operating in the world while not inadvertently ingesting AI content—the Nouvelle Pornography—whether that’s through Gemini, YouTube, or Google’s Nano Banana Pro. I refuse to use ChatGPT or other LLMs for work, but for how long I will be able to keep that up under pressure to acquiesce to the technology, I don’t know. And the fact that most people regard this as neutral—rather than a threat to epistemological assurance and an undermining of societal trust—signals to me that we have not fully weighed the philosophical consequences of this runaway technology.

There are little glimmers of hope, though. Greg Foster-Rice, an associate professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago and a member of his university’s AI task force, has noticed something unexpected happening among his Gen-Z students over the past few months. Digital photography is out; film, dark rooms, and black-and-white pictures are all the rage. “Our students are returning to analogue practices,” Foster-Rice said. “There’s a retro return. Maybe because they have a sense of it being more authentic in terms of its relationship to the real.”

The three transcendentals at the heart of our faith and our humanity—Truth, Beauty, Goodness—cannot be embodied in Artificial Intelligence. AI does not possess the true, it is not beautiful, and it is not a good in and of itself. With billions of dollars of investment pumped into its development, and what the technocratic developers have in mind for it, it is doubtful that AI will simply be limited to a better-than-Google search engine or a sophisticated LLM. 

Rather, AI in its developing forms will make the threat to the transcendentals, to our humanity, to the arts and literature and human cognition something that makes the public health crisis of pornography of twenty years ago seem quaint by comparison. My only hope is that enough people will eventually find themselves experiencing revulsion to AI in the “uncanny valley” and perhaps opt out altogether.