A study carried out in the Czech Republic (now officially known as “Czechia”) has revealed that a majority of men already find AI-generated nude pictures to be more appealing both aesthetically AND sexually to nude photos of real women. Researchers questioned 649 heterosexual adults of varying ages, but mostly men, as to their responses when shown pictures of AI nudes and real nudes respectively. Participants in the survey where asked to rate the pictures in four different ways – realism, aesthetic appeal, sexual attractiveness, and valence (pleasantness). Whilst the real nudes scored (unsurprisingly) higher for realism, the AI-generated nudes outscored the real pics on all of the remaining three measures.
Since AI porn burst on to the scene earlier this decade, many have debated as to whether men will continue to prefer “the real thing” or start to veer towards AI women. The study, which was published this February in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, suggests the latter. As is often pointed out, and very likely permanently the case, “this is the worst that AI will ever be”. In other words, AI, including AI nudes and AI-generated porn, will only get better, and probably at an ever faster rate. If men already prefer AI nudes, it’s not likely they will ever start to prefer the real thing again. A further thing to note is that the study appears to have involved only showing men AI nudes, rather than allowing the men to generate their own AI nudes to their specific tastes (though, admittedly, the real nudes were presumably not selected for their specific tastes either).
AI porn is likely to come under increasing attack from legislators and campaigners, using cases such as the Grok deepfake and CSAM scandal to force generative-AI tools to implement strict guardrails for fear of devasting legal consequences, making NSFW image or video generation difficult. Several leading NSFW image and video generators currently face payment processing problems as processors increasingly insist on ever tighter guardrails that are near impossible to satisfy without turning the generator into a SFW only tool. *As if to confirm this point, I asked Grok to draw me an image that represented a happy man preferring pictures of AI-generated women to the real thing, and it refused.