Um…is it too much pride to beg?
With artificial intelligence so similar to humans, entrepreneurs are already trying to take advantage of the ease with which they can generate sexy chatbot bodies to make some creepy money from horny internet users. Recently, AI-curious denizens of the web got together to vote for their favorite digitally developed model in an AI beauty contest. The winner of the contest (i.e. the developer of the sexy bot) walked away with a cash prize of more than $20,000.
Meanwhile, scientists are becoming increasingly interested in how we will perceive machine-generated humans and whether this knowledge will have any impact on human behavior.
New research Published in According to a paper published in the journal Cognition and Emotion, a team of Italian and Finnish scientists wanted to observe how humans would respond to AI images designed to be sexually arousing, and hypothesized that if people believed the images were avatars, they would be less aroused.
“In particular, we wanted to answer the question: are supposedly artificially generated images capable of eliciting the same level of arousal as real images, or whether the latter are superior in this regard,” study authors Alessandro Demichelis and Alessandro Ansani asked in a joint statement. Visit PsyPost.
The researchers conducted two tests using images of attractive men and women (all real people) wearing swimsuits or underwear. In the first experiment, participants were asked to rate the arousal level of each photo and guess whether the image was generated by an AI. In another round of the experiment, the same images were used, but this time they were clearly labeled as real or fake.
Both experiments supported the researchers’ hypothesis that perception of authenticity plays an important role in sexual arousal for the heterosexual men and women who participated in the study, but they also found that it was easier for men than women to identify with the fake photos.
“While our findings support the notion that supposedly artificially generated photos are less arousing than allegedly real photos, we found that allegedly fake images still had the ability to induce arousal, albeit to a lesser extent, especially in men,” Demichelis and Ansani explained.
The authors said the findings provide important insights into humans’ interactions with digital content.
“AI-generated imagery is here to stay, and like any technological advancement, AI brings both opportunities and dangers,” the researchers told PsyPost. “Our findings suggest that in the realm of sexual arousal, AI-generated images are unlikely to replace the ‘real’ world, as the mere belief that the image is AI-generated reduces arousal. In other words, we appear to (still?) have a strong preference for human-likeness over artificiality, even if it is merely alleged to be artificial.”
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Additional variables to be explored in the future include a wider range of sexual stimuli (including more explicit content) and whether homosexually-oriented participants are able to discern authenticity in the same way. Physiological measures such as heart rate and skin sensitivity may add further nuance to human arousal responses.
Demichelis and Ansani hope to conduct similar studies comparing real images with completely faked images. “We believe that the effects we found in our study will be amplified and strengthen the strength of our claims,” they said.
