AI-n’t too proud to beg?
As artificial intelligence achieves uncanny levels of human likeness, entrepreneurs are already capitalizing on the benefit of generating a hot chatbot bod in a creepy money grab from horny web users. Recently, denizens of the AI-dabbling web sphere gathered to vote on their favorite digitally developed model in an AI beauty pageant through which the winner — meaning the developers behind the recent bot — earned winnings value over $20,000.
Meanwhile, scientists have turn out to be increasingly focused on how we perceive machine-generated people and whether that knowledge has any effect on human behavior.
In a recent study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion, a team of scientists from Italy and Finland wanted to look at how we react to AI images designed to sexually arouse — hypothesizing that humans can be less turned on after they imagine a picture was an avatar.
“Specifically, we desired to answer the query: are the photographs considered artificially generated able to eliciting the identical level of arousal as real ones, or do the latter still keep an edge in that regard?” asked study authors Alessandro Demichelis and Alessandro Ansani in a joint statement to PsyPost.
Researchers conducted two tests involving images of attractive men and girls — all bona fide humans — wearing swimsuits or lingerie. In a single experiment, they asked participants to rate their level of arousal with each photograph, after which guess if the image was AI-generated or not. In one other round of the experiment, the identical images were used but this time explicitly labeled as real or fake.
Each trials confirmed the researchers’ presumption that perception of authenticity plays a crucial role in sexual arousal for heterosexual men and girls who participated within the study. Nevertheless, in addition they found that men had a better time warming as much as the phony photos than women.
“Our findings support the view that photos believed to be artificially generated are less arousing than those considered real, but we found that allegedly fake images are still able to generating arousal, especially in men, just in an inferior amount,” Demichelis and Ansani explained.
The findings, the authors said, are a crucial insight into human interactions with digital content.
“AI-generated images are here to remain, and as every technological advancement, offer each opportunities and danger,” they told PsyPost. “Inside the domain of sexual arousal, our findings suggest that they should not going to exchange the ‘real’ world, for the reason that mere belief that a picture is AI-generated (even when it will not be) is enough to cut back arousal. To place it otherwise, it appears that evidently we (still?) have a robust preference for humanness over artificiality, even when such artificiality is just purported.”
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Additional variables to check in the long run would come with a broader range of sexual stimuli — including much more explicit content — and whether same-sex-oriented participants are equally discerning of authenticity. Physiological measurements similar to heart rate and skin sensitivity could add further nuance to human arousal response.
Demichelis and Ansani also hope to conduct an analogous study comparing real and truly fake images. “We hypothesize that the effect present in our study would even increase, solidifying the strength of our claims,” they said.
