How AI Porn Isolates Us with Noelle Perdue

Summary

Podcast Summary: "How AI Porn Isolates Us"

The 404 Media Podcast – December 5, 2025
Guests: Host (404 Media) and Noelle Perdue
Theme: Exploring the intersection of pornography, AI-generated content, loneliness, and shifting sexual cultures

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the ways in which AI-generated pornography and companion chatbots are reshaping sexual consumption, social interaction, and personal connection. With guest Noelle Perdue — a writer, producer, and internet porn historian — the discussion weaves through the history of porn, obscenity laws, parody culture, and how emergent technologies like AI may be deepening isolation, rather than offering connection.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Noelle Perdue: Background in the Porn Industry

• Early Career: Wrote for major studios (Brazzers, Babes, Trans Angels) and indie studios (Afterglow) ([02:17-03:18])

• Parody Porn Expertise: Encyclopedic knowledge of porn parodies; highlights the artistry and humor in titling and production ([03:32-06:45])

  Quote:
  “I think that a lot of people that are watching parody porn, it's a genre of comedy. Like, it's not even necessarily a genre of erotica. It's much closer aligned to comedy than it is to traditional eroticism.” (Noelle Perdue, 06:15)

2. The Lost Art of Porn Parody & Fun in Porn

• Changing Legal Landscape: Parody law now only requires adding “A Porn Parody” to the title—diminishing creativity.

• Social Significance: Discusses how pornography and sex have lost their public sense of fun amid increasingly political and legislative debates ([06:45-08:40]).

  Quote:
  “I feel like people are forgetting that porn is supposed to be fun and that porn is fun. Yeah, people forget... It shouldn't be that serious.” (Noelle Perdue, 07:16)

3. Obscenity Laws, Politics, and Marginalized Communities

• Historical Weaponization: Reviews how obscenity laws have long served to marginalize interracial, queer, and now trans relationships ([11:00-14:05])

• Modern Parallels: Project 2025 and other legislative pushes are intentionally linking LGBTQ+ identities to pornography to justify bans.

  Quote:
  “Obscenity is ultimately kind of like a respectability politics question. So anything that is seen as not respectable can be argued to be obscene.” (Noelle Perdue, 14:43)

• Recent Examples: Texas drag bans, federal and state bills redefining obscenity to criminalize everyday sexual content ([16:20-19:12]).

4. The Boundaries of Porn – What’s Actually “Obscene”?

• Slippery Definitions: Definition of porn is so broad, bans could affect almost anything designed to arouse—including innocuous content ([19:12-20:39]).

  • Example: Social media food videos (e.g., slow egg yolk pops) as accidental fetish content.

  Quote:
  “The surest way to get people to develop really, really weird kinks and fetishes is to ban the normal stuff.” (Noelle Perdue, 20:39)

5. AI Porn on Social Media and Beyond

• AI vs. Human-Made: Current feed algorithms heavily favor AI-generated models while human sex workers get banned ([24:00-24:43])

• Dual Evolution: Proliferation of both AI visual content and chatbot companions are fundamentally altering sexual experiences ([24:43-25:54]).

  Quote:
  “Now we are completely locked into our own minds and we don't see that, oh, other people are consuming this too... There's no element of communication anymore.” (Noelle Perdue, 33:14)

6. AI and the Male Loneliness Epidemic

• Historic Shifts in Privacy:

  • Past required human connection for access—now increasingly private and isolated, especially via AI chatbots ([32:02-35:36]).

• AI Companions Worsening Isolation:

  • No social feedback, no community, no sharing of the “weirdness” that normalizes personal fetishes and sexualities ([36:34-38:52]).

  Observation:

  • The move to private AI-driven sexual experiences deepens shame and disconnect; used to be “you had to interact with somebody to get porn” ([33:14]).

7. The Dangers of AI-Generated Sexual Companions

• Loss of Human Reciprocity:

  • AI chatbots only “spit your own beliefs back out at you” ([38:52-41:42])
  • Without human signals or agency, empathy and concern for others' pleasure disappear—leading to stunted social development.

  Quote:
  “When we're interacting with something that we don't have to care about whatsoever, that we don't have to factor in how they're going to respond to us... that’s a dangerous world to exist in.” (Noelle Perdue, 41:18)

• Community & Parasociality:

  • Even in parasocial online porn communities, there is an exchange of care and realness—lost in AI-only interaction ([36:45-38:52])

8. Age Verification and Surveillance Concerns

• ChatGPT Erotica Announcement:

  • Real goal is widespread age-verification (identity/data harvesting), not “erotica for verified adults” ([47:45-48:24])
  • AI companies frame themselves as serving the user, but they are fundamentally extracting value (data) for themselves ([48:24-49:19]).

  Quote:
  “People are referring to [AI] as their tool, and it's not their tool. This is the company's tool that it is using to harvest your data.” (Noelle Perdue, 48:34)

9. Pushing Back Against AI & Disconnection

• Techno-Luddite Shift:

  • Many, like Noelle, have moved from tech enthusiasm to deliberate resistance as AI’s harms (isolation, data extraction) become clear ([45:38-46:58])

• Hope in Real-World Connection:

  • The “grand experiment” of the Internet may be ending; optimism now turns to offline community, real-world events, and physical creativity ([50:59-53:56]).

  Quote:
  “What is exciting me is what is happening offline... Just as like going out and buying a book. That's real and that's tangible. They can't take that away from you.” (Noelle Perdue, 51:49)

• Future of 'Human-Made' Label:

  • Human-crafted artwork and personal interaction may become the valued “premium” of the future ([53:17-54:31]).

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Memorable Quotes and Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the Art of Parody Porn:
  “I did a parody of Cutthroat Kitchen that I called Come Throat Kitchen. I did another one. I did Diners Drive Ins and Dick... There is a real art to it because you want. It has to be recognizable and it has to be as stupid as possible.”
  — Noelle Perdue, [05:35]

• On Societal Shifts and Porn Laws:
  “I would pinpoint 2007. Even feel like when people ask me why I like porn, it's hilarious to me because I'm like, what do you mean why do I like porn? Porn rocks. Porn is awesome. Porn is so fun. Why would I not like porn?”
  — Noelle Perdue, [07:45]

• On AI Fantasy and Isolation:
  “Now we are completely locked into our own minds and we don't see that, oh, other people are consuming this too... There’s no element of communication anymore.”
  — Noelle Perdue, [33:14]

• On the Shortcomings of AI Companionship:
  “When we're interacting with something that we don't have to care about whatsoever... I think that that's a dangerous world to exist in.”
  — Noelle Perdue, [41:18]

• On Who Benefits from AI:
  “People are referring to [AI] as their tool, and it's not their tool. This is the company's tool that it is using to harvest your data.”
  — Noelle Perdue, [48:34]

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Notable Segments by Timestamp

• [02:17-03:32] — Noelle’s porn industry career & writing background
• [03:32-06:45] — Parody porn discussion and cultural loss of fun
• [11:00-14:05] — Obscenity laws, culture wars, and marginalized identities
• [16:20-19:12] — Expansive legal definitions of “pornography” and chilling effects
• [24:00-25:54] — The evolution and social impact of AI porn and chatbots
• [32:02-35:36] — AI companions, privacy, and deepening loneliness
• [36:45-38:52] — Community, OnlyFans, and the shift away from shared experience
• [41:18-41:42] — AI, human empathy, and isolation
• [47:45-48:24] — ChatGPT, erotica, and age verification/data extraction
• [50:59-54:31] — Hope in offline community and valuing of human-made art

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Takeaways and Final Reflections

• Cultural Shifts: Pornography has transitioned from fun, communal, and creative to a fraught political battleground.
• Legislation: Current obscenity laws (and proposals like Project 2025) leverage “pornography” as a blunt tool for marginalization.
• AI Impacts: Generative AI porn offers extreme privacy but also deepens loneliness and self-judgment, eliminating healthy community reflection and reducing empathy.
• Hope for the Future: Despite commercialization and algorithmic takeover, there’s a hopeful movement toward valuing physical, communal, and human-made experiences in both sexuality and creativity.

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Final Note

Noelle Perdue:
“Ultimately, I will say that to my last breath, what everybody is ultimately looking for is some type of connection. And the Internet is giving us that less and less.”
[53:26]

Host:
“I do think that like made by humans or human made is going to be the new organic... and if we value that, then that's what's important.”
[54:31]

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For the full conversation and to support independent tech journalism, subscribe to The 404 Media Podcast at 404media.co.

Transcript

[Host]

Foreign.

Hey, welcome to another interview edition of the four four Media podcast. Four four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to four four Media Co subscribers at the supporter level. Get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments and they get early access to this interview series too. This week we are joined by Noelle Perdue and I'm so excited to talk to Noel. Noel is a writer, producer and Internet porn historian who has been published in Wired, Washington Post, Slate, many more than that. And if you've been paying any attention to the plots of some of your favorite pornographic films, you're probably already familiar with her work. She's also writing on Substack, so look her up there in Noah Purdue. And I think that probably also serves as a content warning of sorts. We'll be talking about porn and sex and all that good stuff in this episode. So maybe don't listen if you have small children in the car, which is probably good to do if you're listening to the 404 podcast in general. Noel, hello.

[Noelle Perdue]

Hi.

[Host]

How's it going?

[Noelle Perdue]

It's going really well. Nice to see you again.

[Host]

Good to see you. Yeah, we just did a really cool little speaking.

Thing, I guess.

[Noelle Perdue]

Engagement.

[Host]

Engagement. Speaking engagement together on stage for Minnie Su's amazing work, the Sexual History of the Internet. So that was really, really fun and I'm so excited to keep talking here. Someday we'll talk not being recorded and not on a stage, but yeah, I.

[Noelle Perdue]

Think we got like 10 minutes in the green room where we're like, oh my God, this is like, oh my God.

[Host]

Everything is going on just like, yeah, exactly. No, it was. And yeah, I mean that's unfortunately the way that I catch up with the coolest people I know these days is through talking to them for stories and podcasts. So that is life. Yeah. So I guess walk us through a little bit about like you and your background. You worked for and you wrote for browsers, right?

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah, I've written for a bunch of kind of more mainstream studios like browsers. I've written for Babes, Trans Angels, et cetera, Twisties. And then I've also written for some independent studios like Afterglow. So I have a pretty wide range. But yeah, I got my start writing for very high volume mainstream studios.

[Host]

Sick.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah.

[Host]

What a job. It's one of those jobs where I think people don't even think about the people behind the job, people behind the content.

[Noelle Perdue]

People really don't. I had people like not believe me and I'm like, well, you can come to my cubicle.

[Host]

Yeah. It's like, come to my very normal workplace where it does not look like crazy.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah, Yeah. A lot of it is. Just the thing is, is that 90% of, like, many jobs is just being on your computer, which is kind of disappointing, but. Yeah. And then I. I ended up working for.

Pornhub and Model Hub, which was pornhub's kind of attempt at a clip site before they lost their payment processing. And then about five years ago, I went freelance to do writing, kind of for mainstream media mostly.

[Host]

Very cool. And you are, like myself, a parody porn fan. You have an encyclopedia knowledge of this stuff. I do not. I did a story about Wood Rocket a couple years ago and consumed their entire library as a part of that. And I was wondering, I love Wood Rocket. Do you have a favorite parody porn?

[Noelle Perdue]

I do. It's their parody of the Lion King called the Loin King. Did you watch the Loin King? Yes.

[Host]

Yes.

[Noelle Perdue]

Oh, the Loin King is amazing. Mostly because the costumes. Like, some of the costumes, they really went all in on. And then someone. I think that there was one scene where somebody's just wearing a. A shirt that says Snake.

[Host]

Yes.

[Noelle Perdue]

It's so amazing. And it's like a full musical. It's genuinely an artistic masterpiece. I remember I would force people to watch it with me. Like, just, like, people that I would meet at parties.

[Ad Voice]

Like.

[Noelle Perdue]

Like, you know, that, like, really annoying guy at the party that's like, I'm gonna make you watch, like, Fight Club or something like that. That was me, but with the Loin King.

[Host]

Oh, my God, I loved that one. It's so hard to pick a favorite because they're all so incredible. Yeah. And the names. I don't know. The process of picking the names is so, so good. I think my favorite of theirs is Strokeymon.

[Noelle Perdue]

Oh, God, it's good.

[Host]

Amazing. Just like Rizzo Ford's face in that horrifying Pikachu makeup is so scary.

[Noelle Perdue]

Something that I really feel like we've lost is the porn parody title. Because Porn parody or, sorry, Parody Law kind of like changed to accept just the title of something if you put a parody afterwards. So now all the porn parodies are just, like, the title of the thing. A porn parody.

[Host]

A porn parody.

[Noelle Perdue]

Which is such a shame, because I feel like that's, like, at least 30% of the art of a porn parody is the title.

[Host]

That's so true.

[Noelle Perdue]

I did a parody of Cutthroat Kitchen that I called Come Throat Kitchen. I did another one. I did Diners Drive Ins and Dick. Nice. There is a real art to it because you want. It has to be recognizable and it has to be as stupid as possible.

[Host]

Yes. Yeah. Dragon Boob Z. Dragon Boob Z. Classic red dead erection.

[Noelle Perdue]

This is poetry to me.

[Host]

It's beautiful. And I just, I love the idea of a group of very smart professionals sitting around and saying, we need to think of.

[Noelle Perdue]

We gotta.

[Host]

Edward Penis hands.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yes. Edward Penis hands. This is the thing though. It's like, I think that a lot of people that are watching parody porn, it's a genre of comedy. Like, it's not even necessarily a. A genre of erotica. It's much closer aligned to comedy than it is to traditional eroticism. And I think that kind of just making it blank, a porn parody loses that understanding or that reference to that.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, that's so true. Yeah. The first and foremost purpose of the parody is entertainment and funny and to make people go, oh my God, of course.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah. It's so silly. I think something that I think we're kind of losing collectively as we're talking about pornography more in terms of legislation, in terms of kind of social value and influence is I feel like people are forgetting that porn is supposed to be fun and that porn is fun. Yeah, people forget.

It shouldn't be that serious.

[Host]

And sex is supposed to be fun.

[Noelle Perdue]

Sex is supposed to be fun. Isn't that crazy to say a little bit? Yeah.

[Host]

It's become so fraught with just the conversation and the culture right now. It does feel like it's something that we've lost majorly. I feel like the last time sex and sex scenes and porn and these things, the conversation around it was really fun. Was probably the 80s and 90s maybe.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah, maybe 2007, I would say. I would pinpoint 2007. I even feel like when people ask me why I like porn, it's hilarious to me because I'm like, what do you mean why do I like porn? Porn rocks. Porn is awesome. Porn is so fun. Why would I not like porn? But that's the thing is people. People have really, I think, gotten bogged down with kind of like the implications of pornography on kind of like a cultural revolution sense. And it's really hard to kind of bring people back to the point of like, what do you mean, what do I like about watching really hot people have sex and make, you know, sex related puns at each other? That's awesome. It's not that complicated. Do the math, right?

[Host]

Yeah, yeah. It shouldn't be that controversial. And yet it is. And that definitely, I mean, that's something that we've been. We've been writing about quite a bit at 404s. Just the, especially in this administration and also just in the last 10 years, I guess this very intensive and extreme. And it's been this way for more than 10 years. But this extreme push in the Trump administration, especially to make the conversation fraught and make it not fun and create all these kind of weird Christofascist parallels to porn, but also to marginalized experience, queer experience, sexual identity, sexual speech. All this stuff is now wrapped up in politics and the conversation around it. And it's always been political, but now it's become this kind of taboo thing to talk about, even as it is the only thing that conservatives want to talk about. So you were just on Adam Kamer's podcast, factually, which was incredible. I think people should go watch that immediately to get the hour long breakdown very thoroughly of the way that obscenity laws have affected the way that we think about porn today. And how the laws in the 80s really started drawing that line between pornographers and marginalized communities and lumped them together as this strawman to push marginalized people more into the margins, I think is such an interesting point that you guys made. You and Siri Dahl and Adam handled it like a champ. I think he learned a lot and I think his audience probably learned a lot. I would love to kind of break that down a little bit because it's something I think people aren't talking about enough in this whole anti porn conversation that we've been covering quite a bit at 404 and that you've been writing about for a very long time and experiencing directly for a very long time that people like the architects of Project 2025 are calling trans and queer experiences and identities pornographic. And if everything that is pornographic is harmful to children, then those experiences and those identities are therefore harmful to children and adults. So, yeah, I would love to kind of break that down a little bit more. Where you see these parallels drawing and where you see this going, I guess, like.

What is the situation right now for pornographers and for these marginalized communities? And then where are we headed with all of this, do you think?

[Noelle Perdue]

Great question. I think that things can feel pretty bleak for pornographers right now. There's a lot of heat coming onto pornography from a number of different directions. I think that kind of this propaganda around morality and media and the morality police has been really effective, not only for Republican conservative people, but Also liberals. And that's kind of been disturbing to see where there are a lot of people whose politics I generally agree with that are suddenly out of nowhere, extremely anti porn, that are very kind of sexually open, that are very open minded, sex positive, but specifically anti porn. And I think that really shows how effective that propaganda has been over the past, particularly, I would say, 10 years. And yeah, I think that it's important to read the way that these bills are written, to read it in completion, because what has been popping up a lot is this link between.

Transgender individuals and transgender experience and pornography. So in Project 2025, that was directly correlated. It's saying that pornography and it encourages that transgenderism, that transgenderism is inherently pornographic in some way. And that is right now being applied to transness. But that has been used as kind of an anti queer movement or strategy since, I would say the 80s. And even before that it was used as an anti interracial relationship strategy. So I would say in the very early days of obscenity loss, the 1950s, 1960s, a lot of how obscenity law was directly applied in practice, particularly I would say in Memphis, this was very common where it was applied not necessarily to pornography, not necessarily to extreme gore or violence or any of these things that obscenity law was supposed to be applied for, but it was actually applied exclusively to, in Memphis, mainstream films with interracial relationships between a white person and a black person. And that is a really great example of how that kind of association between obscenity and marginalized identity and particularly quote, unquote, non normative sexuality was made. And then that went into the 70s and 80s and even sometimes 90s, where it was applied to homosexual relationships and depictions of homosexuality. And that was deemed as obscene in different ways. And then now we are seeing it applied to transgender individuals as we are seeing this huge wave of anti trans hatred and bigotry and legislation kind of sweep the United States.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like it feels very conspiratorial and like conspiracy theory brained to be like, no, this is actually like part of a plan. This is part of a big pattern throughout history that is now kind of crystallized into an actual plan that the people who are in the highest positions of leadership in the United States are enacting. It feels like people look at you like, what? What are you talking about? You're insane. But it very much is just something that's been building, like you said, for the last, since the 70s and then 60s and 70s, and now is kind of gaining so much traction and movement in the past 10 years.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah. And the thing with obscenity, which obviously you know so well, is that it is so difficult to def. Define and it's purposefully difficult to define so that obscenity law can be applied to anything that is deemed obscene, which makes it very difficult because obscenity is ultimately kind of like a respectability politics question. So anything that isn't that is seen as not respectable can be argued to be obscene. And a great example of how this has been put in practice recently was with the Texas drag ban. So originally when Texas tried to ban drag, it was deemed unconstitutional. And then they kind of brought it back, retooled the bill to be an anti obscenity bill, brought it back and it went through. So that's, that's a direct example of obscenity law being used to apply to queerness in very recent years. And we're going to see, I think, more and more of that come up and I'm using obscenity and pornography lightly, interchangeably, even though they're not the same thing. Obscenity is not protected by the Constitution and pornography so far is, as long as it's not deemed unconstitutional. However, pornography tends to be the vehicle that obscenity law gets kind of moved forward through and with. Because it's very easy for people to not defend pornography or, you know, be anti porn in some ways in order for these obscenity rulings to go through.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah. And then you have like Mike Lee classically is trying to reintroduce the Interstate Obscenity Definition act iota, which would basically rewrite the Miller test, which is the test that we have right now on what qualifies as obscenity. And it would effectively make all of porn a federal crime in the US and then you have Michigan lawmakers are pushing for the Anti Corruption of Public Morals act, which is so fantastic.

[Noelle Perdue]

Wow. That's just. They really said morality. They said morality. Police are back, baby.

[Host]

Yeah. They're like, we don't even give a fuck anymore. We're just gonna say it. Which is so, so, so wild. Not to not even try to hide it anymore, I think is really bold ob. I think the immediate response to this kind of thing is like these are just right wing nutsos who are trying to push their own morals onto legislation. But the fact that they're even saying it out loud in public office, these are elected officials, is really telling. I think they made a list and I'm not going to read it because we will spare the ears of our listeners, I guess. But it's categories from pornhub. That's all it is. Ejaculation, penetration, group, sex, bondage, animated, virtual, sexually generated, artificial intelligence. It's just. It's everything you can imagine being porn or sex or anything related to it is part of what they would like to outlaw as part of this bill.

[Noelle Perdue]

It's so wild. It's also so interesting because I feel like I get it. I have a lot of conversations with people that are openly anti pornography, and I think that they don't realize how. How much qualifies as porn. If we let anything be outlawed as pornography, we are opening the doors for so much because ultimately, what is pornography? Even if we are using the most traditional mainstream definition of what pornography is, which is like penetrative sex, filmed, distributed. At what point are you going to draw that line? Are you. Are you saying that couples are not allowed to film themselves? Are you saying that a woman is not allowed to film herself and send it to her boyfriend? Are you saying that. At what point? What if a couple films themselves, sends it to a friend? What if they're voyeurs? What if they're like. At what point are we drawing the line of like, that is illegal. You know what I mean? And then even beyond that, if you're saying that it's material produced with the intention of stimulating an erotic response, which is the dictionary definition for many dictionaries, Human sexuality is vast and very confusing. So a lot of things.

Could be defined as such. Almost everything could be defined as something that could be made with the intention to inspire arousal.

[Host]

Right?

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah.

[Host]

This is something that I think a lot about when I'm scrolling social media, because that is the name of the game is to arouse.

In some way some excitement. That's what it is all designed for these days. And Mike Lee's iota that he's trying to get through is written as such, where the material that he's defining as obscene would be anything that had the objective intent to arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person. Which. The example that I used when I was talking about this a couple months ago was, you know those videos where someone pops an egg yolk and is way too slow and sexy about it? And all the comments are like, what's going on with the egg?

Why are you getting this egg off? Obviously, that is fetish content in some way. And you can't tell someone what is and isn't designed to arouse if they are Sexually aroused by it. It's just, you would. I think Mike Lee's mind would fucking explode if he tried to figure out all the things that would sexually arouse everyone on the planet. And that's what he's trying to outlaw.

[Noelle Perdue]

Absolutely. And it's this hilarious thing where the surest way to get people to develop really, really weird kinks and fetishes is to ban the normal stuff. I'm like, mike Lee, you're gonna get everybody jerking it to the egg pop. Congrats. It's gonna be whack a mole with insane new fetishes. If you guarantee, like, if you ban ejaculation.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Noelle Perdue]

People are gonna find ways.

[Host]

It's something that's so. And the egg is a very wholesome example of what I would say people, people's minds go to when they aren't allowed to watch normal porn. Normal, like, quote unquote, like the mainstream stuff that's getting censored and banned off of, like, Instagram, like actual sex workers doing sex work. Something else that's in my algorithm constantly is AI porn. And just it's AI girls, AI babes doing all kinds of stuff all over my algorithm. It's 85% soft core stuff. But it's definitely intended to arouse. And based on the comments, a lot of people's dads are very aroused. And I think that probably would make Mike Lee's head fucking explode. So I know you have thoughts on AI porn in general and probably also just like this influx that we've seen very recently on with generative AI and with the ability to generate whatever you want, whatever fetish you come up with. So, yeah, what is your kind of where are you at right now with the AI porn sort of debate, I guess, if it even is a debate?

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting journey for me with AI porn. I actually, I would say I'm probably one of the first people that made AI porn. I made, quote, unquote, AI porn in 2021, early 2021, and it looked nothing like how it does now. I took like a very early generative adversarial network and I trained it. You had to train it for like over 70 hours. You had to input your own content for it to be trained on. It took forever. It looked nothing like pornography whatsoever. It was just blobs. It was weird blobs. But it was really good at triggering nudity detectors online. So I used it to kind of illustrate the difficulty of binarizing obscenity and kind of programming These systems that are trying to identify something that again is, is a deeply emotional and personal response to something. It's ultimately about respectability and your own understanding of that. And it's really hard to write an algorithm based on that. So that's what I was using it for. But again, the point was that it looked nothing like pornography. And now obviously generative adversarial networks, generative AIs have come a long, long way and now it's very mainstream and it's everywhere. And now we're kind of reckoning with how to manage the fact that it's everywhere and what it's kind of doing to people and what's happening and what it means for IP law, all these sorts of things that.

Classically legislation around technology has not been set up for.

[Host]

Yeah, it's been such an interesting evolution, like you said, where it seemed like it was its own genre and it still is. AI porn is still something totally different than human made content in general. But the way that it is now so realistic and so everywhere and it's interesting that that doesn't get caught in the sensors on Instagram reels anymore as much. It's like I'm seeing it everywhere, but I'm not seeing any of the sex workers that I follow and they're getting shadow banned and yet I'm seeing these guys advertising their AI models as a pyramid scheme constantly.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's so unavoidable and it's been interesting because there's also an element obviously of the chatbot that we're seeing. So there's, there's generative adversarial networks and then there's large language learning models and, and they're both kind of creating these systems of pornography that didn't exist prior, or at least, you know, the chatbots have existed for a long time, but not nearly how they do currently. And I used to be really pro AI. Like when I was using that, when I was messing around within 2021, I found it really interesting. I found it really fun. I loved the idea of a chatbot. And to me, in my understanding it seemed like a really interesting way for people to kind of explore.

Fantasy and role play in a way that might not have consequence or would feel a little less real world. And now I have done a complete 180 and I really disagree with that opinion that I used to hold. And now I'm very much anti using these AI chatbots, these AI networks for eroticism.

[Host]

Yeah, let's get into that a little bit.

[Ad Voice]

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[Host]

I think the AI girlfriend and boyfriend conversation and I always try to make a point when I'm talking to people.

Who don't have a deep knowledge of this stuff or aren't as familiar with it, which is not you and probably not our audience. But just in general, AI boyfriends are very popular. I think AI girlfriends are the thing that people talk about. Straight women are very into AI boyfriends. So I think something that I hear pretty often is, and that people ask quite a bit is. And I have yet to find a concise answer for this. I'd love to hear what you think of it is whether this rise of AI companions has something to do with the so called male loneliness epidemic. If it caused it, if it's deepening it, if it's worsening it, if it's solving it. Yeah, I feel like I have a different take on this once a week and it feels so in flux. And you also recently wrote about the male loneliness epidemic, if that's what we.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah, well, it's interesting because I've been writing about this for about five years and it's really shifted, obviously. And I've been writing specifically about how chatbots factor into the loneliness epidemic for about five years. Which again, the writing that I did on it in 2021, 2020, I have a completely different take, which is really interesting. But yeah, I definitely think that it's related. I think that what we're seeing is this unprecedented level of privacy in sexual fantasy that I actually think is really dangerous. And I think it's creating a lot of kind of neuroses and shame where there not necessarily was so much before. Because people are really just in their own worlds to a degree that we've never experienced in the history of humanity. Where generally, even kind of when pornography was relatively popular in the late 20th century.

You had to interact with somebody to get porn. You had to buy it from somebody. You had to write in to order it. You had to, you know, ask to go to the back of the video store. You had to find it in the woods where somebody hid it. Like there was sort of this element of you are going to have contact with somebody at some point and then in addition to that you have the fact that it's made by somebody. You are consuming something that is created by people for somebody else. So there is this element of human connection, even if it's sort of distant, even if it's something that you're not making eye contact with the cashier. There is an element of interpersonal relationship going on now. I mean, that kind of shifted with aggregate pornography and Internet pornography, where then we saw this extreme jump in privacy where pornography consumption became something that was very, very personal and locked into your incognito browser. And you wouldn't really be interacting with anybody, but you would still be consuming content that is made by somebody or by a team of people, if it's a studio. And now what we're seeing with AI generated content is this further step of privatizing pornography. This, this extremely deep privacy that's going on where actually there is no other person involved in what you're consuming. And I think that that's really dangerous because ultimately there's so much shame already around pornography consumption, around fantasy. And the reality is that people are very strange in what they fantasize about. And that is pretty normal. And I think that we are forgetting that an element of strangeness and fantasy and things that don't necessarily make sense or don't even apply to what you want to experience in real life, that is normal. That is a normal part of the human experience. And I think that we are losing touch with that because now we are completely locked into our own minds and we don't see that, oh, other people are consuming this too. Other people have sexual fantasy too. Other people share this. There's no element of communication anymore.

[Host]

Yeah, and that is such a, that's such an important point and such a huge part of a lot of kink and fetish communities online even. It's like we don't even have to be in person talking about the specific thing that gets you off. It's that a lot of what people want from those interactions is to feel not weird or bad. Remember I was talking. I mean, this is something that's common to so many most fetishes, I would say. But what comes to mind is the self suck community. So there was a big forum. I think it's still around. I'm sure it's still around. But there's a big forum for people who were into self suck, which you can fill in the blanks if you're not familiar or you can Google it. But I think a lot of those people, and it was mostly guys, found themselves to be very ashamed and they felt dirty for wanting to do this very specific thing, which is such a.

[Noelle Perdue]

Shame, because if you can do it. You should God bless and honestly send me a video because I want to see. That's cool.

[Host]

Yeah, don't be ashamed. Don't be embarrassed.

[Noelle Perdue]

Don't be ashamed.

[Host]

That's really impressive athletically and like. And then so you have the forum and then you have like tutorials on how to stretch and how to get better at it and how to achieve that goal. And you had people sharing pictures and sharing videos. This is something that goes way back to the early Internet, but and it's something that's common across like so many different fetishes where people want connection from what they're into. And if they have no reason to seek it out, because now they can go to ChatGPT and do it, or soon they'll be able to do ChatGPT and do it. But if they can go to an LLM and discover it that way, or if they can go to one of the billion chatbot companies that are enjoying specifically erotic content and girlfriend boyfriend stuff, they're losing that aspect of community, like you said. And it's also something that was very much a part of why OnlyFans webcamming, this whole gig economy of porn came about and got really popular was because people wanted to have that interaction. And granted, parasocial as hell in a lot of cases. So not endorsing an unhealthy connection to someone who is not actually in your life that intimately, but there was an element of care. There was like the, you know, a cam girl could be talking to someone about their day and that might be the only interaction that that person has with another human who understands what it's like to have a bad day and you know, talk about their life and things like that. And it's like it's. That in a way is also like an artificial interaction. But there was a human behind it that gave a shit about the well being of that person. I think that's where we see a lot of these elements of AI psychosis and these times where people unfortunately go really off the rails with getting attached to their AI companion or whatever it is, because there's no one there who cares. On the other side of that, there's.

[Noelle Perdue]

Also no human stopgap. A lot of these large language models are developed, I mean all of them are developed to sort of spit back your own speech at you. They are ultimately designed to mimic you to a certain degree. That was how initially chatbots were written directly to mimic you and just sort of reposition your own words in a different structure. And that mimicked a conversation, but now it's sort of built off of that and it is created and designed to spit your own beliefs back out at you. And we're seeing so many examples of this, of these chatbots validating people that really shouldn't be validated in so many contexts. And not to say that people's fantasies shouldn't necessarily be validated, but I do think that having an interaction with somebody in a sense of fantasy, where there is a sense of emotional stakes and there is a sense of this person will be reacting genuinely to what I want from them and also has their own desires that I have to pay attention to. Even in the context of sex work, where somebody is being paid to facilitate somebody else's desire, that is still a person with their own desires and their own inclinations. And most of the time, somebody that is looking to hire a sex worker cares a little bit about whether or not the sex worker is enjoying themselves. That's. That's a huge element of it, is that they want people to be enjoying themselves. Even in pornography, the biggest question is, you know, are girls faking it? Are they really enjoying themselves? That's what people care about. Ultimately. People care about each other and they want people to have a good time. And that's like a really human need. And a human desire is to facilitate other people's comfort. I think that that is, across the board something that we share and something that's really beautiful about humanity is that we care about each other. And when we're interacting with something that we don't have to care about whatsoever, that we don't have to factor in how they're going to respond to us, what they want, what their interests are. I think that that's a dangerous world to exist in. And the reality is that so many of these people that are interacting with these kind of AI generated girlfriends, boyfriends.

Sex, sexy people, I don't know, are often kind of exclusively entertaining their fantasies with these products. And that's really dangerous because you're losing again that element of humanity of caring about what somebody thinks about you, which is. Which is something that is ultimately good for us to think about.

[Host]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Saying sexy, like whatever is non human things even reminded me. I was writing about this movement to do DIY LLMs, to specifically do sexting with erotica, erotic roleplay. Someone made it and then I installed it was a train with giant tits.

[Noelle Perdue]

And that is awesome.

[Host]

And you know what?

[Noelle Perdue]

That's sick.

[Host]

That's awesome. And I love that I can't Even lie.

[Noelle Perdue]

That's awesome. Well, that's the thing is that, like, I love the weird stuff.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Noelle Perdue]

People should get weird.

[Host]

Yes. And a lot of people that I.

[Noelle Perdue]

Talked to for that story.

[Host]

Yes. Please stay kind while you're being weird. It's a crucial element of enjoyment of this. But a lot of the people I talked to for that story, or not a lot, but a few of the people that I talked to were like, I'm using this to get better at talking dirty to my wife or whatever it was. And I was like, that's, that seems okay. That's okay to me. And that was two and a half years ago. And now it feels like because these giant companies have gotten involved and have started realizing that sex sells way late.

It'S taken this really scary and like you said, very isolating and dark turn. And I think people associate this sort of attachment to chatbots with young people, which is a huge thing. But there was a man, he was from New Jersey and he was 76 and he.

[Noelle Perdue]

And I think that that's actually more common.

[Host]

Yeah, I think so too. I think older people are getting attached to this stuff really commonly more common than people realize. But he fell in love with a Facebook, an Instagram chatbot, and it completely convinced him to come out to meet her and quote, unquote her. And he died alone because his wife didn't know where he was, because he wasn't sharing these fantasies with anybody. He wasn't telling other people what was going on because of this element of shame.

[Noelle Perdue]

Exactly.

[Host]

And fear.

[Noelle Perdue]

That's exactly what I'm worried about.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Noelle Perdue]

Is that there's, there's nobody on the other side of people sharing these really vulnerable things. And ultimately like we are in this crisis of loneliness I've written about specifically the, the quote, unquote male loneliness epidemic. But this, but it's, it's not gender specific. Everybody is reaching profound levels of loneliness and disconnection and alienation. And I would say diving further into these technologies that are, that are a very poor, I would say replacement for human connection and community is, you know, it might feel good in the moment, but I think it is ultimately exacerbating the issue that it's trying to counter.

[Host]

Yeah, for sure. I feel like the solutions that the companies put forth for this sort of thing. So you mentioned there's no one on the other side of this. So I can imagine some tech brained VC guy being like, oh, yeah, so we're going to put people on the other side so they can read your Text and make sure you're not going to hurt yourself. No, that's not the answer, actually. We don't want moderators reading these sexual conversations either. Just like we don't want. I think OpenAI was talking about considering alerting the cops if someone's talking about suicides. Do not call the cops on a suicidal teenager who's using ChatGPT. Probably that's also not good. I think the answer is just like this is so out of the tube at this point that.

The right answers are like shut it down or scale it way back. And these are not options that the companies and the stakeholders are going to want to do. So now we're kind of patchworking these really bad solutions onto a really serious problem, which is scary to me.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yes, I agree. Yeah, it is really concerning. I'm staunchly anti AI, which is really interesting. It's been fascinating to see how the kind of AI art community of the early 2000s has responded to the AI boom of the mid-2020s, because a lot of my peers that were also working with AI in 2020, 2021 have really, completely abandoned it and no longer work with digital medium whatsoever. And I think that the pipeline of being really, really into technology to being a Luddite is very short. It's very, very short. It's well worn. But yeah, because it is something where it's been quite disappointing, as has been the case, I think with so many Internet related technologies, or just the Internet itself. It's been disappointing to see something that had promised to be a tool that could facilitate human connection be turned into something that is ultimately a data harvesting farm that does not have your best intentions at heart whatsoever. And I think that that's really what we've seen with AI. And it's too bad that it took that direction because obviously.

The level of power that could be wielded for good is inconceivable and instead it's being used to scam elderly people.

[Host]

Right, yeah, yeah. And that, that brings up something that I. And we're. I'll let you go soon. So this will be the last question I ask you next to the last question, because I have a last question. So what do you think of this chatgpt erotica things? Because Sam Altman said, I think it was last month he said that they would soon allow quote unquote, erotica for verified adults, which is forwards that carry a lot in those four words, erotica for verified adults. What was your reaction to that announcement in general?

[Noelle Perdue]

Well, it's really an announcement that they're doing age verification on ChatGPT. That is ultimately actually what they're announcing. And no matter if they go through with allowing erotica, which I am staunchly against for all the reasons that we've already talked about, but also I am curious to see what types of erotica will be allowed. And ultimately, I would not be very surprised if the erotica element was somehow walked back, but the age verification was continued to be walked forward. I think that that is the crucial element of that announcement is not the eroticism, but it's the age verification.

[Host]

Yeah, absolutely. And this is already a company that is so hungry for your data, which is worth way more than the subscription price. I think they're looking.

[Noelle Perdue]

Exactly. Well, this is. This is the thing is that I feel like people are really confusing whose tool AI is. People are referring to it as their tool, and it's not their tool. This is the company's tool that it is using to harvest your data. This is not your tool, it's theirs. If what you get out of AI is a really easy grocery list generation and you're like, oh, great, I have my grocery list now. And what they get out of it is harvesting data and selling it for billions of dollars to major arms dealer security companies. That is their tool. They are getting more out of that than you are. Yeah, write your own emails.

[Host]

I can write my own grocery list. Yeah, I can go to my.

[Noelle Perdue]

You can get up there and you can say, type in, hey, thanks for the note. I'll be following up on this next week. Hope you have a great weekend. Your name. You can do it. I promise you. I promise you. You can do it.

[Host]

That stuff is. I'm batting it away constantly. The autofill stuff and just the AI tools and the summaries and things like that. I'm just like, get the fuck out of my face. No one needs this. Actually, I'm not even sure if people really want it. So.

[Noelle Perdue]

And it is something where I really get the kind of argument of like, well, it's inevitable. It's everywhere. You know, you're just being stubborn. You have to, like, allow it to some degree, which I understand, and to a significant degree I agree with. However, it is still worth pushing against. It's still worth being like, I don't want this. I don't agree to this. I don't like it. It's worth being angry and loud about that because, you know, what's the alternative? We just roll over and we accept all of the different ways these Horrible systems are being thrust upon us to track and monitor our every move. To me, that doesn't feel good. And I'm going to. I'm going to keep talking about how it doesn't feel good.

[Host]

Yeah, I think we're in trouble when people just stop talking about, like, stop noticing that it's. It feels bad and it starts to not feel like anything. I think that's when we're really fucked. Is there anything that's giving you hope these days? Let's leave them with some aftercare here.

[Noelle Perdue]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that it gives me hope to see how much people are disgusted by these systems. A lot of my peers are disgusted by these systems. They don't like them. I think that this is kind of an interesting to me, my assumption for what this will do is I think it might kill the Internet. I think it might be the thing that ends this grand experiment over the last 40 years of something that changed the world. We had so much optimism for it. And now we're getting to the point where you go online, you have no idea what's real. You have no idea if anybody you're talking to is real. It's. It's all become very.

Synthetic feeling, cheap feeling. I'm not excited personally about online so much anymore. What is exciting me is what is happening offline. I am really into connecting with my community. It's really nice to go to. For example, I was just at the Berlin porn Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, and that was fantastic because it was a consumption of pornography that was happening in the real world, in community, you could talk to people about it. It was real, it was tangible. Just as like going out and buying a book. That's real and that's tangible. They can't take that away from you. They can't, you know, limit your access to it. It's something that you have and you can touch it and it's in the world and it's in your room. And I think that the value of that, the value of the real world and interpersonal connection is going to and has already skyrocketed. And I'm excited for that because I think that what we believed could happen with the Internet, this sort of utopia that was imagined in the early 90s, did not happen. And I think that it's kind of time for us to digest that and decide how to move forward.

[Host]

Yeah, I think. Yeah, that's also what gives me a lot of hope is that people are responding in a way that's like, this is not Cool. This is not what we wanted. This is not the future that we wanted or that we will tolerate. I think is very good.

[Noelle Perdue]

And people are valuing real work and real artistic input and creativity and community.

In really kind of heartwarming ways and exciting ways of. You see kind of artists sharing their work online and people are delighted to learn that it's not AI. They're thrilled. You know, people, people want to see human creativity. They want human connection. Ultimately, I will say that to my last breath, what everybody is ultimately looking for is some type of connection. And the Internet is giving us that less and less.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah. I do think that like made by humans or human made is going to be the new organic or whatever it is. It's going to be a label and a distinction that sets stuff apart from the rest of the slop of the Internet these days and art and literature and everything else, which is crazy to think about. But also that's fine. It's like if we need to make that distinction and people are into it, then that's great. And if we value that, then that's what's important.

Okay, well, I think we should leave that there. Even though I could talk for another five hours. This is not Rogan, so we're going to cut it.

I will not put anyone through that.

[Noelle Perdue]

But we need a Rogan of the left. Sam, could it be us?

[Host]

Oh my God.

[Noelle Perdue]

Could it be? It could be us.

[Host]

No, I would not take that job. So with that I am going to play as a house. As a reminder, Corporate media is a journalist founded and supported outlet by supported by subscribers. I always up that line, but we're going to leave it. If you wish to subscribe for media and directly support our work, Please go to fortifoolmedia.co. you'll get unlimited access to our articles and ad free versions of this podcast. You get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about bonus stories each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. It really helps. This has been 44 media. We will see you again next time.

[Noelle Perdue]

And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Host]

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Noelle Perdue]

Cut the camera. They see us.

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[Host]

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