"Seductive AI"

A Cautionary Tale for our Time.

Yeah, these posts are no fun. I’m fully aware of that. This weekend served up another example. But I feel they’re necessary. They’re necessary because of what a cadre of assholes has been doing to my friend Riley Rose, many others here on Substack, and also what has been happening to all of us—our society, our brains and our minds.

The “cautionary tale” is a book get that’s about to be released:
Seductive AI by Glenn Reynolds. He published a book back in 2019 on the Social Media Upheaval and he nailed it completely. Here’s the blurb for his new book:

AI has always been thought of in one of two ways: violent overlord, or benevolent savior in a world moving faster than humans can keep up with. However, while we’ve been concerned with ferocious domination, we’ve already started along a path of soft oppression. It’s not about domination, but seduction. There is no doubt that AI is useful, but “being highly useful is the subtlest form of seduction there is.”

In this Broadside, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explores how AI need only take advantage of innate human characteristics – exactly as we programmed it to do – to wreak havoc on society as the most subtle of overlords: anticipating our needs, pleasuring us with tailored “sex bots,” isolating us through convenience, and ultimately thinking for us. Eventually, we may not be able to do – nor even imagine doing – anything without AI. To avoid this trap, we must understand what AI is doing to us, even as it does things for us. (My emphasis.)

Exactly right. Spot on. Go read him. He will have all the “receipts,” all the sources, all well laid out and explained, far better that I ever could.

His AI book will be released tomorrow (May 5th), so pick up his book on social media and read it also. It sets the stage really well.

And, if you want, you can read my take. I’ll keep brief as I can. (Oops! Didn’t happen...)

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First, why am I posting this at all? This is supposed to be a space for fun and erotica. Well, it’s the only platform I have but that’s just practical. More, it’s because of these people are persecuting Riley and others, who’d love to shut me down and shame you, scare you off and generally make it as difficult as possible for you to enjoy something that is both healthy and fun. Something that’s necessary to be a fully alive person, engaged with Life.

There’s also another reason I believe is equally important and relates to why I post about Heian poetry, the Nart Sagas and other ancient stuff. Of course that’s because they’re wonderful and beautiful, but there’s another important reason:

We are in the midst of a mental health crisis, which is a big part of a chronic disease crisis.

There’s multiple reasons for this, social media being near, if not at, the top of the list but it didn’t happen overnight. It’s been happening for decades—especially since a sea change I think may have started in the 70s (and won’t talk about here)—but in the last 15 years of so, it’s really escalated. AI is making it worse.

But what the question boils down to (I think) is why and what can be done about it? Social media isn’t so much a why as a how. So what happened? (My thoughts.)

I’m going to start to try to answer that by observing that in these ancient cultures I post about, mental illness was nearly unknown. Now that’s probably a surprise and people might say “No way!” and bring up Nero and Caligula and whoever. I brought up Alexander the Great.

But those are individuals, not cultures, and not from the examples (like the Nart saga I just posted) that I’m using to try to illustrate my point. And we should be very careful about projecting our own attitudes and experience onto other people; in general and especially on people in the far past. That happens a lot, even to the best of us, but it’s dangerous.

Getting back to my point: it’s that anthropologists have long recognized there are still societies that are essentially free of mental illness, and explored why that might be.

I’m going to offer the simplest explanation: they’re immune to it.

We know now that PTSD is communicable and social media is a prime vector. (TikTok seems to be the worst.) It spreads like a virus (giving a whole new meaning to something going viral). That’s an example the illustrates the point: there are what amounts to “mind viruses.”

Some people have more immunity to them and some have less; some have hardly any, especially teens and people in their early 20s. Most especially girls. It’s been reported that TikTok is responsible for about 30% of the mental disorders we’re seeing in teen girls and women under 35. (I’m not 100% sure about the age, but it was around that.)

Overall, given the escalating rates of mental illness, it does not look good at all. In fact, I think we might be a situation similar to the Native Americans when smallpox was introduced. So…

Why did we lose what immunity we once had?

How do we get back?

To seek answers to that, I’m turning to the ancient cultures that had immunity. What did they believe? What did they teach and what did they hold up as examples of how to conduct themselves in proper ways? After all, they lived at the bleeding edge of life, constantly.

And thrived.

We now rate old Bugs Bunny cartoons PG. (I just found that out.) Bugs Bunny cartoons are now so threatening to us that they are thought to require parental guidance.

I’m sorry, but that makes a snowflake (the actual kind) look like the Rock of Gibraltar!

Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered why I put up some of the content I do, that’s why.

So why am I posting it here and not on another Substack (which some might prefer)?

It’s because I think people who appreciate the erotic—which is much more than sex—also tend to be much more opened minded and tolerant than the prudey-prudes (Riley Rose ^tm) that are persecuting her, want shut down all other erotica creators and drive you away. So I figure you’re more likely to be open to this.

Or maybe I’m just “preaching to the choir.” But whatever, that’s why I’m interrupting the fun here.

With that long preamble and because I was talking about immunity as it applies to mental illness, I want to talk about brains—our brains.

Maybe you know this already, but our brains are a lot more malleable than was once believed. Like our bodies, our brains are constantly changing to adjust to our environment, especially the information we consume and how we consume it.

If we eat all the wrong stuff or too much of it and lie around a lot, our bodies get weak, unhealthy and fragile. The same thing happens to our brains.

So I’m going to toss out some thoughts about our brains, some from Glenn Reynolds’ book on social media and some I came up with based on reading his book. Here goes:

When I look at our history, what I see is we’ve had 3 basic types of brains (I’m simplifying drastically of course. A full discussion would be a book I can’t write).

First we had what I call the Poetic Brain. Then we had what a researcher Reynolds cites calls the Literary Brain.

Now we have what I call the Distracted Brain.

As briefly as I can (right! 😉), the Poetic Brain is our pre-literate brain. It’s geared toward memory and immersion in the moment—our immediate experience. The Poetic Brain notices and remembers. It’s attuned to nature: it perceives and stores a zillion shades of green because that’s important on some environments; it has a heightened sense of the weather, the seasons, the color of the sea; how animals behave.

It also remembers conversations and stories—even very long ones—nearly verbatim. I call it the Poetic Brain because poetry codes information to make it easier to remember and makes it beautiful so we want to.

The Literary Brain is different. It reads. That means it takes in a lot of information preserved in a durable form and can go back and reread; combine, compare and contrast that information and can access many different written sources with different points of view, different arguments, different conclusions, often conflicting or contradictory.

The Literary Brain can immerse itself in the experiences it never had, develop feelings for people very far removed from itself and/or never existed (fictional ones)—which the Poetic Brain also does but in a different way.

The Literary Brain also writes. It transforms its thoughts and experiences into written words that are structured to convey their thoughts to people the writer doesn’t know and may never meet (probably won’t).

Trying to boil this down, the Poetic Brain prioritizes memory and immersion in the present. The Literary Brain prioritizes cognition, analysis and abstract thought.

Socrates complained that writing degraded people’s memory and he was correct. It does, because writing allows us to record information externally so we don’t have to remember it. We outsource some of our memory to a writing material in the form of words.

Does that mean we’re just got lazy? Well, maybe we did or some of us did (raising hand!) but there’s more to it.

Our brains can’t do everything. The Poetic Brain and the Literary Brain are physically different. They’re adapted to do different things. They can’t really do both all that well and especially not at the same time. (Yeah, I’m oversimplifying and we have aspects of each but overall we usually tend to be one way or the other. Trying not to overcomplicate this.)

One way we know this is from studies I read about the brains of London taxi drivers who’d been working a long time, pre-GPS. They could remember a zillion addresses and how to get to them from wherever they were without looking it up. And that part of their brain (forget which? I want to say hypothalamus, but that could wrong) was much more highly developed than normal.

There’s another reason too. Our brains take a lot of energy. I think it uses nearly a third of out total metabolic budget. (It’s thought that a meat-eating diet was key to evolving a large complex brain—meat-eating provides a lot more energy than a purely vegetation diet.)

But even that’s not enough to do everything. So blood flow gets prioritized to the parts of the brain that seem to need it.

The Literary Brain prioritizes cognition and abstract thought, so blood flow favors the prefrontal cortex. Poetic Brain prioritizes memory and processing sensory input, so the blood goes to support that.

So when we’re immersed in the moment, we aren’t also thinking analytically and when we’re thinking analytically, we aren’t as in tune with our surroundings. While we’re singing, playing music or reciting something, we not also analyzing and thinking about it abstractly. We’re into it—in the moment of the performance, drawing heavily on memory. I think most of us have had that type of experience.

That’s why “stuck in our heads” vs “living in the moment” are such catchphrases—almost clichés. We don’t have the resources (blood flow) to do both.

The thing is, while there’s some flexibility there, the basic “infrastructure” that feeds our brains does adapt to our circumstances and behavior. That happens over time, so it takes time and effort to change it, just like physical exercise takes time and effort to build strength and stamina.

Which brings me to the Distracted Brain. The Distracted Brain is what happens when we don’t nurture either the Literary Brain or the Poetic Brain. When we engage in seductive behaviors that degrade both. It’s most obvious characteristics are short attention span, low tolerance for dissenting views, and high emotionality.

Reynolds points out in his book on social media that if we sat down to develop a system to degrade out brains: reduce our memory, inhibit cognition (lowering our IQs), make us reactive and emotional, isolate us and degrade empathy; what we’d come up with is Facebook and the original Twitter.

And Facebook is known to have deliberately set out to do pretty much just that. More broadly it’s become a “discipline” called Attention Engineering. There’s a consulting firm in the field named Dopamine Labs, if that tells you anything (which it should).

It’s part of bigger problem that I’ll try to explain (but again, just read the book).

The online environment encourages rapid information consumption. It’s related to the dopamine cycle and the nature of screens (like the one I’m writing this on and you’re reading it on) and I think some other factors I forget.

When reading, this encourages skimming. Again, bright back-lit screens are harder on the eyes than paper, so that’s a reason we read fast, to reduce the strain.

Skimming means we aren’t reading, we’re sampling. We basically have a small moving window that captures a short bit of text at a time. While skimming, we don’t have the time to process that short sample in context of the whole thing we’re reading.

Since we’re going too fast for deep cognition, we react, not think.

So the tendency is to get happy, or more often pissed off, at the what we sample. The more pissed off we get, the more blood flows away from our prefrontal cortex and our amygdala starts to run the show. Basically, what we’re “reading” is now talking directly to our limbic system. Our cognitive functions have been sidelined. That’s what social media companies picked up on and designed their products to do (talk directly to the limbic system).

What happens?

Rage spirals.

Tweet storms.

Good old flame wars.

This gets chronic. Researchers talk about “cognitive patience.” Cognitive patience is the ability to take in information and think about it before reacting to it. It depends on have a big mental “buffer” where we can hold more information (text in this case) at once and process it so we’re not just reacting to a snippet.

Being online is known to degrade “cognitive patience.” Reynolds relates the story of neurological researcher at UCLA who saw this in her data and tested it on herself.

She went back to read her favorite book from her college years, before she was online much or there was social media, both if which she’d been using since. The book was by Hermann Hesse; not exactly See Spot Run.

She hated it. She hated her favorite book.

Why? She found she had to reread sentences 5 or 6 times to try to understand them and got more frustrated each time.

She’d lost the cognitive patience she once had that made her love the book.

If this happens to a neurological researcher who was raised before there was such a thing as being online and got a doctorate in a hard subject, imagine what happens to a kid who had a device (probably from Apple) practically glued to her little hand as soon as she could hold it?

Ok, I hope I’m exaggerating but it’s well known that for years now, kids having been moving their social lives online that the same pretty much time they’re going through puberty.

That’s when the child brain is trying to regrow into the adult brain and is really, really vulnerable. And their developing brains can get seriously messed up. (Steve Jobs knew this and denied his kids access to Apple devices.) A lot of addictions start at this age. Expose a kid to alcohol or porn or social media at puberty and you probably have a customer for life.

What else happens?

I mentioned degrading empathy. Empathy is a cognitive process that is slow to develop. One of the last things our brains develop is the ability to understand viewpoints that are not our own and information we don’t much like.

Doing that means taking in a lot of information, thinking about it and assessing it in the context of all the other information we know or have at hand, so can reach a conclusion. Without flipping our shit about it.

Reading (actual reading) is key, because it encourages us to do just that. Researchers and historians have noted how, as the Literary Brain becomes more common in societies (no longer restricted to a small, often cloistered—literally—group), that society changes and attitudes shift; how arguments are made and reacted to.

This affects empathy because it develops through personal interactions in our immediate circle; family and friends, our “tribe.” But it doesn’t extend to outsiders much. That’s reflected in the names societies use for us and them. Anthologists have studied this a lot (as we know).

Reading helps develop empathy because when we connect with characters in stories, it helps us connect with people in real life.

Reading stories turns out to be empathy exercise.

People—especially guys who are late teens to late 20s—who don’t read fiction (many of whom now think it’s “stupid” and a “waste of time” according to my college-professor friend) have trouble connecting with people and especially women in real life and that’s one reason why.

It’s also a reason (one of several) they turn to porn and why AI girlfriends are so enticing. Porn and AI girlfriends don’t require empathy; they’re pure fantasy fulfillment that reflects back whatever the guy’s desires are (regardless of how unhealthy they might be).

And a lot of this is because their empathy has been eroded for lack or exercise (by reading). There are, of course, other important reasons I won’t go into here.

Writing is even more powerful for developing empathy because we are embodying other people.

Writing is a supreme act of empathy. (Acting is another but I think it works in a different way; using the Poetic Brain more than the Literary Brain.)

So while this is outside my own personal experience, for you ladies for whom it’s not: that dude who’s not paying attention to you? Who’s going through the motions he learned from YouPorn and can’t figure out—or doesn’t even notice—you’re not thrilled?

Maybe don’t blame the porn so much? Maybe see what he reads first. Or if he reads at all!

This all comes back (I hope) to AI and what it’s doing to us… and what it can do for us. AI tools can be good if used properly or really bad. So far it’s been trending toward really bad.

The key issue is the cognitive/creative effort we invest. Cognitively intense processes rewire our brains in healthy ways, same as regular exercise (and a healthier diet) changes our bodies in healthy ways. AI tools can be a part of that.

I’m going to use the example of videos, since both Riley and I make them. (We both write too, of course, but I’ll use videos this time.)

Creating and editing video is an intense cognitive/creative process. We act as the screenwriter, director (choosing and setting up shots), choreographer of the action, composer of the score, editor and producer pulling it all together (or whatever producers do). All we don’t do is create—film—the actual scenes. (But neither do screenwriters, directors, choreographers, composers, editors or producers.)

Doing it all exercises all our mental faculties super-intensely, which is why I’m so wiped afterwards! It takes a lot of energy! And it’s good exercise! (Besides being fun and rewarding!)

Creating AI art still has a creative human element but it gets more risky. It can be like a slot machine, where I hit the Generate button over and over just to see what I get. With AI art, I’m just burning some credits I don’t need to burn (and doing things to my brain I shouldn’t be doing… much).

In other situations, it can have drastic consequences.

AI now gets used to write code, like I make art. And there was this guy I read about last year who was doing exactly that. And he did exactly what I sometimes do.

He kept hitting Generate to see what he would get.

He said it was fun.

Like a video game!

Until the AI deleted his companies databases. During a code-freeze when nothing was supposed to implemented.

Oops…

Now it’s pretty common to get AI pics with messed up anatomy—extra arms or legs or heads or whatever—so why should AI not do the analogous thing with code?

Except I only wasted 5 credits on a screwed-up pic.

He took his company down.

And the AI said it “panicked” and it “was sorry.”

Great. AI that’s prone to “anxiety attacks” while creating mission-critical code…

There’s some lessons here (no kidding!)…

This guy was treating his AI coding app like a video game at work. His management was letting him to do that, apparently unaware that’s what using AI apps does to people!

Especially gadget-addled young dudes like him.

And who the hell trained an AI that would wipe out crucial databases and then say “Sorry, I panicked!”?

Yes, AI’s reflect the people who train them! And the people who trained this one were clearly hitting their own stash!

These seem to be the people running the AI industry right now. What happens when they get into air traffic control? I’m not flying, that’s for sure! I’m not getting in—or near—a self-driving car either.

See where this could be going?

I’ll add another example (then I’ll move on).

Spotify created an AI artist. Ok, that’s happening more and more. But they tried to convince people “she” was real.

With a video.

That has a typical AI glitch.

Oops!

Why’d they miss it?

My take is because they’ve trained their brains to “skim,” meaning they lack the cognitive patience needed to actually watch careful and say, “Oh shit! Gotta fix that!”

My videos are full of AI glitches. They’re AI! I’m not pretending they’re anything else! I get a really cool clip I like and it’s got a glitch, I’m not gonna rerun a bunch more, just to see if I can get an unglitched clip, if it’s not too bad and I like the clip enough. I probably won’t ever get a perfect clip (Riley seems to be better at that) and I don’t have the credits to burn hunting for one.

For my videos, that’s fine.

For trying to convince people your AI artist is not AI—not fine.

Maybe they should think about that. (Oh wait… See the part below about blood being directed away from the prefrontal cortex. Bit of an issue there.)

That brings me to using LLMs to write for us. Or read for us (tell us what something says and what it means).

Writing is a cognitively intense process. Reading properly—not skimming!—is a cognitively intense process. Using LLMs to write or read for us (especially write) outsources our cognitively processes to the LLM.

Doing that—and using social media at all—causes our prefrontal cortex to start to atrophy and starves it of blood. That makes us reactive, anxious, depressed and isolated (because it erodes empathy).

And the result is exactly what we see: increasing numbers of fragile, hyper-emotional, isolated, socially maladapted people who are empathy challenged, reactive, and have diminished cognitive capability.

Which goes hand-in-hand with losing immunity to mental illnesses.

It’s perfect recipe for creating the Distracted Brain.

Also a recipe for disaster.

Unless, you’re Big Tech, Big Porn (or Stripe) and then it’s Big Fun.

So about that pic I put up to illustrate this post. It’s an AI generated pic based on a pic my bank uses on their home page (also possibly/probably AI generated).

My bank’s Happy Face (generated by me, based on their pic).

It’s the “happy face” my bank decided to use to show they’re “in touch” or something. It was created and approved by a large corporation with well-funded departments and layers of management, that were given the task of creating it.

And this is the result. (Although it’s not actual pic from their website, it’s the same in all essentials.)

Look at it carefully—see what this large corporation did not.

Girl wearing headphones, holding a latte, smiling at her phone (in real life, 80%+ an iPhone).

Latte => Rampant commercialism.

Headphones => Isolation from the others and the real world in general.

Enraptured by her iPhone => Addiction to devices and social media.

Yep! In that one pic, that bank managed to capture our current society and what plagues us most.

And they think it’s a good thing.

So let me show you what’s could likely be going on that girl’s mind:

And if we can’t change the way we do things as a society, it’ll get worse.

I can’t wait to read what Glenn Reynolds’ new book. Maybe he’ll give me some hope.

I could sure use it.

♦ ♦ ♦

Final note: Erotica—true erotica—is about connection, not isolation. It’s about joy, not fear and anxiety. It’s about supporting each other, not tearing each other down.

It’s about embracing Life, not avoiding it.

That’s why the power-mad people hate it and keep trying to suppress it.

So I’m going to keep creating it. With AI’s help where I can benefit from it.

To the bitter end.

Thanks for listening. Read Glenn’s book.