all girls are real
In our emerging hyper-reality, fake is real
Machine learning has gotten pretty good. Large language model1 powered engines like ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL-E, etc. have solidified their positions in the zeitgeist. Everyone’s freaking out about this technology’s potential and, not to fear-monger, but they should be. Like many at the start of the Industrial Revolution, our jobs are once again threatened to be snatched up by cold and unfeeling machines with what seems like a sliver of a chance for us to re-skill. That’s progress though, isn’t it?
Recently, a model was used to generate images of young women clad in ill-fitted lingerie and micro bikinis, the ties and straps squeezing their breasts like sadistically tightened shibari rope (here if you’re curious). The user who shared them proclaimed “it is SO over” which prompted the creation of memes and fierce debates about: 1. whether AI generated women would make real women obsolete in the domain of internet sex work and 2. whether heterosexual men would even want to be with real women given the possibility of a ‘perfect’ AI girlfriend. When I saw these pictures, I didn’t share what seemed to be the universal feeling of shock. I know that any sufficiently advanced technology will be used to rouse up and relieve sexual desire. These women epitomize the desires of a generation steadily fed commercial production quality porn. They’re formulaic and devoid of eroticism, artificial, algorithmic. But what I really want to say is that as fake as we know they are, they’re still women. Their 6 fingers and maladapted thumbs being the only things assuring us they’re not. One day we won’t be able to tell the difference and we haven’t begun to come to terms with what that means.
I remember talking to a friend who works on virtual reality (VR) devices about the implications of seamless VR porn featuring realistic looking women. Men will be able to act out fantasies in a realm distinguishable from reality only by its access point without consequence. Is that something they’d considered? The answer was no. Porn featuring humans, with its biological limitations (there’s only so much harm someone can take before the porn becomes snuff), has had disastrous consequences on how younger men interact with younger women sexually and on what both groups desire. I’ve had plenty of men tell me they’ve dated women who demanded they choke or slap them with startling intensity. And while people are entitled to consensual kinks, shouldn’t we question the sudden emergence of desire centered around violence inflicted on women? Anal sex has become more popular amongst heterosexual couples in recent years due to porn, with rising emergency visits for tears and incontinence23. It makes every bit of sense that the ideal sexual subject for the bubbling extremity of contemporary heterosexual desire would be an artificial woman. A woman real in the ways relevant to desire (sensual perception, excluding touch for now) and otherwise synthetic to field the blows of rejection and repercussion. A woman who always consents.
What’s to become of society when there are no limits on what you can do to an artificial woman in a sexual context and everything looks real? When a woman is real in most senses except the ones of our natural material reality? I think this is a more urgent question than “will people still have sex with the proliferation of AI porn?” But it’s not one that has even skirted the current discourse.
With AI-generated images and video (‘deepfakes’), we’re accelerating toward a Baudrillardian hyper-reality (where one fails to distinguish between reality and simulation). In Simulacra and Simulation4, Baudrillard writes about the simulation coming to represent what it was meant to simulate: the real thing. In a hyper-reality, society’s perception of what’s real is informed and eventually overtaken by simulation. What then, will come of society when the internet is flooded with images and videos of women who look real doing unthinkable acts, represented in an overwhelmingly sexual, demeaning way. When you can generate a simulation of every other woman and keep them firmly under your thumb. How will our emerging hyper-reality shape our perception of women or more broadly, the feminine? How will it change social and sexual relations between men and women?
Donna Haraway thought that becoming cyborgs would liberate us5, but it seems that technology just continues to bind us to impossible fantasies. Sometimes on Pornhub I see women style themselves as anime characters, wearing wigs and contact lenses that make their eyes look huge in an attempt to imitate simulacra—a manufactured ideal. I know that this will only get worse as we gain the ability to generate women who look like whatever we desire.
We all know that pornified sex no longer resembles real intimacy or real eroticism. And it’s clear that the women we watch in pornography will deviate more and more from what most women look like, what they behave like. I think of the Scott Westerfeld book Pretties6, where most of the population undergoes a surgery at 16 that makes them perfectly beautiful—and dumb and compliant. Women today already subject themselves to silicone enhancements and hyaluronic acid fillers and Ozempic in order to be considered passably attractive. Are we moving towards a world where moving through the world as your unaltered self is considered a radical act, where liking natural bodies is a niche preference?
In the internet age, we have more optionality than ever before. And yet people have never been lonelier. It’s clear that we want companionship, intimacy, and we’re willing to pay to get it. But do we care whether our companions are human? There are vast numbers of men who survive with just fake intimacy delivered by piecemeal from women they obsess over online. These men have come to tolerate that the intimacy they receive is fake, if an illusion is persistent it becomes easier to convince yourself that it’s real. Again, girls are real, whether they have seven fingers or five. Whether artifacts from their simulation are obvious or not. So the question that follows is: are our simulated women happy? Are we considering how we treat them and how the effects of this cascade into our universally agreed upon reality, onto women in the flesh?
I grew up reading the manga Chobits7. A college student, Hideki, finds an abandoned personal computer (a “persocom”) in the trash, and takes her home. Isn’t that the beginning of any good romance? In the manga, they fall in love, but can never have sex. I think that in our particular dystopia, the inverse narrative will unfold: we have sex with our digital girls, but we wonder if they can ever love us back. Because how can they, after what we put them through? After we traded love for porn?
Edit: I updated some of the language here to reflect the reality that most men who consume fake or simulated intimacy aren’t actually satisfied by it—rather, it’s a temporary method of placation. The point remains that their experiences with porn/“fake” intimacy/etc. shape perceptions of the real.