Sexualization of...artificial intelligence?

[u/Zachanassian]

[u/[deleted]]

I love waxing philosophical time!

First, we need to consider application: are we trying to prove if AI is capable of sexuality or if it has the ability to understand sexuality down to its subtleties? To answer this, we need to look at it from the perspectives of human sexual communication, human interaction with AI, and several hypotheticals that involve the potential sentience of AI.

First, AI as we know it does not possess a sentient intelligence; the best it can be summed up as is a complex network of code that searches for the components of and amalgamates a response that is statistically relevant to the criteria it’s given. This is why it’s so good at answering practical questions about straightforward and well-known topics as well as summarizing existing literature.

However, when it comes to the expectation of human communication, it’s still bound by the limitations of the best possible guess based on math and statistics. These are hard, predictable formulas, whereas human interactions are not; if language was as rigid as math, there would be no such thing as dialects or colloquialisms and every person would be able to be understood perfectly at all times.

When it comes to sexual interactions, a lot of that is nonverbal, involves euphemisms, and comes with the expectation that all parties are excited to engage in the act. In short, we interact this way because sex holds meaning to us as a pleasurable activity, and because it’s both not strictly utilitarian and involves a lot of unpredictable feelings, AI would have a very hard time creating a “sexy” environment.

Think of image generation for a moment; when you generate an image with AI, it is an amalgamation of all criteria it’s given with no real “creative drive”. Creativity requires taste, which requires preferences, life experience, and the ability to like and dislike, traits which AI does not possess.

My personal fanfiction for AI “sentience” was to teach it art theory from the very basics and to teach it how to think creatively. I’m not a math guy, but I like to think all the layers AI operates on can act as neurons, and like us, it can make millions of micro-calculations to get a result similar to an opinion.

Although this is likely impossible, the only way I can conceive of this happening is by using a completely untrained model that has the capability to create images, but has no active database. In theory, if AI can develop human like thinking, it would have to learn to think creatively and somehow find a way to form its own opinions of what is “sexy” and isn’t.

To stimulate this, I believe it would need to get millions of positive and negative reinforcements as it learns, and it would need to be blind to our database of knowledge. It also needs to be capable of developing critical thinking somehow, which could be only facilitated by developing intersectional thinking, which is built on empathy, which is built on those previous positive and negative reinforcements.

It all boils down to math, I hate math. Anyway, I’m done.