How will tickling content creators combat the tidal wave that is AI?

[Toesheldback]

Since this is the discussion forum, let’s discuss..

With ChatGPTs new image creation and countless other companies’ abilities to create images, how can they compete? AI is nearly free, easy to access, and if you want, you can create images of celebs.

I’m thinking that content creators will need to engage deeper.. Make their brand “sticky”. Also specialize in some facet or genre.

What say you?

 

[hopefulscrambl]

I think that AI art retains the issue that it's primarily shit. Like, deviantart has been overwhelmed by AI generated tickle porn for ages, but luckily for deviantart tickle artists, most of it is garbage images of the same AI woman with different hairstyles laughing while a hand is vaguely in the area. Making good AI art is possible, but it isn't easy, quick or something that some random person can just do with a chatgtp account.

The AI art we're worried about is going to be no different from the streams of crude sketches or poorly written 3 sentence "tickle stories" already clogging smut sites - most content creators are already going to be able to compete against it by virtue of making art that's good.

 

[DebonairDavid]

In all honesty, AI seems like another tech fad and how modern technology keeps getting worse by coddling the end user. Granted, I created a post about how I've personally had sessions with chatbots, but originally that was done just to troll the chatbot creators. I get that people want to live out their fantasy of wanting to tickle a particular person or character, and chatbots do mimic human responses (as that's their reason for existence), but you have to remember that it's simply a computer program and tickling someone in real life is a completely different experience. As far as using AI for artwork, writing, or videos, that's not going away anytime soon because the convenience of it enables lazy people who don't have any creative skill, or in the case of real life videos, people who lack the money, business know-how, or ability to hire models, to use AI as a cop-out. You could shame that person for using a cop-out, especially if you're someone who's had to put effort into their writing or drawing like I have, but if their audience is a bunch of idiots who will feed that person's ego and fake self-esteem, you've lost that battle. What's even worse is they can report you for shaming them and claim you're being "harassing". On the other hand, what could cause enough people to lose interest in AI is constantly being exposed to it, whether it'd be hearing about it in the mainstream media or seeing how fake, lazy, and possibly repetitive it is first hand.

 

[DebonairDavid]

I think that AI art retains the issue that it's primarily shit. Like, deviantart has been overwhelmed by AI generated tickle porn for ages, but luckily for deviantart tickle artists, most of it is garbage images of the same AI woman with different hairstyles laughing while a hand is vaguely in the area. Making good AI art is possible, but it isn't easy, quick or something that some random person can just do with a chatgtp account.

The AI art we're worried about is going to be no different from the streams of crude sketches or poorly written 3 sentence "tickle stories" already clogging smut sites - most content creators are already going to be able to compete against it by virtue of making art that's good.

EXACTLY! THANK YOU!

 

[U.N.Owen]

I make AI images, because it's the only way I can make any kind of visual images from ideas I have (i.e., I can't draw at all, and I don't have the money to commission artists). And I like being able to make and share them.

But is it "art"? No. Does it compare to what real artists do? No. Real art has intentionality. The tickling contact is planned and tied to the reaction. You can approximate that with AI, but it always has the feel of being a lucky overlap between contact and response... it's never really right. Plus of course AI has an inevitable generic style in "art" production (which I don't do) and an overly-smooth non-reality in photographic-style images (which I do).

AI will of course continue to improve. But I don't think it will ever capture the intentionality and integration of real art, any more than AI "writing" will ever actually be creative or original in the way a real author is. AI images will always be a pastiche of elements, not a true composition.

 

[DebonairDavid]

I make AI images, because it's the only way I can make any kind of visual images from ideas I have (i.e., I can't draw at all, and I don't have the money to commission artists). And I like being able to make and share them.

But is it "art"? No. Does it compare to what real artists do? No. Real art has intentionality. The tickling contact is planned and tied to the reaction. You can approximate that with AI, but it always has the feel of being a lucky overlap between contact and response... it's never really right. Plus of course AI has an inevitable generic style in "art" production (which I don't do) and an overly-smooth non-reality in photographic-style images (which I do).

AI will of course continue to improve. But I don't think it will ever capture the intentionality and integration of real art, any more than AI "writing" will ever actually be creative or original in the way a real author is. AI images will always be a pastiche of elements, not a true composition.

At least you have the honesty to admit you're not a real artist. I'm guessing you've tried getting better at drawing, but find it too frustrating because you keep making mistakes? Have you tried getting into writing or other forms of art, such as using CGI or modeling clay?

 

[U.N.Owen]

At least you have the honesty to admit you're not a real artist. I'm guessing you've tried getting better at drawing, but find it too frustrating because you keep making mistakes? Have you tried getting into writing or other forms of art, such as using CGI or modeling clay?

Writing is an area where I'm very comfortable - I write for a living. And I used to write tickling stories - I had a Yahoo group for them 20+ years ago. To my amazement, some people still ask for them from time to time (unfortunately I don't have them anymore - they went many computer crashes ago). So I would never use AI for words.

I took art classes through high school. I could never get beyond the point of being frustrated that I couldn't get my ideas onto paper. (I am a good photographer, but that doesn't help.) I did fiddle with CGI modeling, but the decent programs are too expensive and too time consuming. And since I'm good with words, I can often figure out AI image prompts that get at least decent results.

And no, I make no claim whatsoever to be a visual artist. I just have some ability to describe ideas in a way that an AI generator can, sometimes, render adequately.

 

[Toesheldback]

I might be beat up on here, but there might be an “art” to writing prompts? This was a low effort prompt by me.

 

[DebonairDavid]

Writing is an area where I'm very comfortable - I write for a living. And I used to write tickling stories - I had a Yahoo group for them 20+ years ago. To my amazement, some people still ask for them from time to time (unfortunately I don't have them anymore - they went many computer crashes ago). So I would never use AI for words.

I took art classes through high school. I could never get beyond the point of being frustrated that I couldn't get my ideas onto paper. (I am a good photographer, but that doesn't help.) I did fiddle with CGI modeling, but the decent programs are too expensive and too time consuming. And since I'm good with words, I can often figure out AI image prompts that get at least decent results.

And no, I make no claim whatsoever to be a visual artist. I just have some ability to describe ideas in a way that an AI generator can, sometimes, render adequately.

I get you're overwhelmed with writing and you want to separate your professional life from your personal life. As far as CGI modeling, have you tried using Blender? Its used by Hollywood studios and its free of charge to download and use. I've never used it myself (although I'm interested in doing so), so I don't know how hard or time consuming it'd be to use, but it's something to consider. As far as being a good photographer, you could use that to your advantage by hiring models and having your camera either record videos or take pictures at 5 second intervals.

 

[WickedTouch]

Since this is the discussion forum, let’s discuss..

With ChatGPTs new image creation and countless other companies’ abilities to create images, how can they compete? AI is nearly free, easy to access, and if you want, you can create images of celebs.

I’m thinking that content creators will need to engage deeper.. Make their brand “sticky”. Also specialize in some facet or genre.

What say you?

It's an interesting but complicated topic. Most of this is not so much a reflection on what I hope happens, but how I see what could be the state of things now, and where it might be headed:

I think of this problem a little more broadly than that, as it's difficult to isolate AI's the disruption to the tickling content world from AI's disruption to the general world of creative content (movies, books, music, art, etc.). factors such as political dynamics and legal developments around the topic will affect how such AI tools are perceived going forward (Will governments try to control the industry? Is the singularity around the corner? How does AI fit into copyright law, and will copyright law be revisited? Etc.) No one has definitive answers to those questions yet, but my point is that the world at large is looking at AI from the angle of, among many other angles, increasing worry about threat to industry, livelihood, and stability. So, while they are not looking at it from a tickling content creation perspective, likely most solutions, attempted solutions, or even unattempted solutions for that wider problem will have implications in the tickling content world as well. But people are also looking at it for all its benefits too, and it's possible that economic disruptions will happen smoother than some expect. It could just be that many industries are eaten up by the AI industry, and that AI is just how you make content now, much like the typewriters, traditional film equipment, and making your own paint have greatly faded out of wide adoption.

For better or worse, let's assume that we're going to keep moving into a world where AI-generated content is better and better, and is generally acceptable from a legal perspective. In that case, I think that traditional (real) productions are likely not competitive in terms of business viability. I think there would still be room for people interested in traditional content that need to know it's real. But if future AI can generate content that looks completely real with no ability to tell whether it is or not, people who value real vs generated content will probably be forced into a corner. And if AI can generate such content with better scenarios and qualities on demand, producers will adopt the tool instead. If that happens, it will inject a ton of supply into the market and almost no one will make money from it. Depending upon how available that quality of generation technology becomes, producers themselves may be a thing of the past (For example, in the case where anyone can generate whatever content they want by simply having an AI service subscription).

Pulling back from the AI-specific element for a minute, I'd guess that the tickling content production domain is suffering more than ever even without AI disruption. Copyright infringement and content theft is rampant. There is a lot of content that still gets produced, but a lot of stores go down all the time because of copyright and theft issues. People illegally upload clips to adult content platforms at faster rates than those sites and producers can manage their discovery and take down. In some ways, new legislation in several US states requiring age verification before accessing such sites has reduced availability of pirated content, though that also affects sites such as clips4sale, likely greatly impacting profitability and incentive for the many producers that use those platforms to distribute their content. So there are many pre-existing cracks in the tickling content domain, and I think even the early stages of AI will act like a wedge to dismantle it from there.

 

[U.N.Owen]

I get you're overwhelmed with writing and you want to separate your professional life from your personal life. As far as CGI modeling, have you tried using Blender? Its used by Hollywood studios and its free of charge to download and use. I've never used it myself (although I'm interested in doing so), so I don't know how hard or time consuming it'd be to use, but it's something to consider. As far as being a good photographer, you could use that to your advantage by hiring models and having your camera either record videos or take pictures at 5 second intervals.

I'm not familiar with Blender, but I'll look into it.

I might be beat up on here, but there might be an “art” to writing prompts? This was a low effort prompt by me.

IMO, yes, there is a kind of an "art" to writing effective prompts... but it's a combination of verbal skill and an ability to figure out how the AI generator "thinks" when it responds to verbal cues. The only way that overlaps with visual art in any way is that both require imagining a composition. But a visual artist transfers that imagined vision directly to imagery with actual artistic skill, while someone writing AI prompts nudges a computer towards hopefully coming up with something that approximates the mental image.

It's an "art" only in the sense of a skill, not in the sense of visual art, which is profoundly different than AI.

 

[C4urself85]

Things could change drastically in the future, but as it stands today, AI can't hold a candle to the real thing. The AI feet images are getting better, but you can still always tell it's AI. The tickle images aren't remotely convincing. And I've yet to see video that isn't uncanny. So I think content creators don't have to worry just yet.

Now, there is deep fake technology that is improving. I've seen celeb feet deep fakes that are passable, the tickling a little less so. Of course, quick movements like the lee throwing their head back and laughing ruins suspension of disbelief when the filter slips off the original models face. They also have to use existing video, so the original model's voice/laugh is being used. I think a day is coming when someone will have the skill to fix both issues and you'll see a super convincing tickle vid that actually sounds like the person they're impersonating. Scary, but I can't lie, a little exciting too.

 

[U.N.Owen]

It's an interesting but complicated topic. Most of this is not so much a reflection on what I hope happens, but how I see what could be the state of things now, and where it might be headed:

I think of this problem a little more broadly than that, as it's difficult to isolate AI's the disruption to the tickling content world from AI's disruption to the general world of creative content (movies, books, music, art, etc.). factors such as political dynamics and legal developments around the topic will affect how such AI tools are perceived going forward (Will governments try to control the industry? Is the singularity around the corner? How does AI fit into copyright law, and will copyright law be revisited? Etc.) No one has definitive answers to those questions yet, but my point is that the world at large is looking at AI from the angle of, among many other angles, increasing worry about threat to industry, livelihood, and stability. So, while they are not looking at it from a tickling content creation perspective, likely most solutions, attempted solutions, or even unattempted solutions for that wider problem will have implications in the tickling content world as well. But people are also looking at it for all its benefits too, and it's possible that economic disruptions will happen smoother than some expect. It could just be that many industries are eaten up by the AI industry, and that AI is just how you make content now, much like the typewriters, traditional film equipment, and making your own paint have greatly faded out of wide adoption.

For better or worse, let's assume that we're going to keep moving into a world where AI-generated content is better and better, and is generally acceptable from a legal perspective. In that case, I think that traditional (real) productions are likely not competitive in terms of business viability. I think there would still be room for people interested in traditional content that need to know it's real. But if future AI can generate content that looks completely real with no ability to tell whether it is or not, people who value real vs generated content will probably be forced into a corner. And if AI can generate such content with better scenarios and qualities on demand, producers will adopt the tool instead. If that happens, it will inject a ton of supply into the market and almost no one will make money from it. Depending upon how available that quality of generation technology becomes, producers themselves may be a thing of the past (For example, in the case where anyone can generate whatever content they want by simply having an AI service subscription).

Pulling back from the AI-specific element for a minute, I'd guess that the tickling content production domain is suffering more than ever even without AI disruption. Copyright infringement and content theft is rampant. There is a lot of content that still gets produced, but a lot of stores go down all the time because of copyright and theft issues. People illegally upload clips to adult content platforms at faster rates than those sites and producers can manage their discovery and take down. In some ways, new legislation in several US states requiring age verification before accessing such sites has reduced availability of pirated content, though that also affects sites such as clips4sale, likely greatly impacting profitability and incentive for the many producers that use those platforms to distribute their content. So there are many pre-existing cracks in the tickling content domain, and I think even the early stages of AI will act like a wedge to dismantle it from there.

You may be proved right, but I remain skeptical that AI is anywhere near replicating, let alone replacing, real people and real art. I'm not sure it can ever fully bridge the gap. There will always be a lack of spontaneity and humanity in AI, even as the technical look of it becomes more convincing (and CGI has been struggling to close the uncanny valley for decades now without success).

 

[hopefulscrambl]

You may be proved right, but I remain skeptical that AI is anywhere near replicating, let alone replacing, real people and real art. I'm not sure it can ever fully bridge the gap. There will always be a lack of spontaneity and humanity in AI, even as the technical look of it becomes more convincing (and CGI has been struggling to close the uncanny valley for decades now without success).

I think the core issue with AI is that the only current way we can improve AI is to make it faster and give it more training data, but there's only so much you can do with speed and scale. A million ants given a thousand years are still going to make worse art then one human in an hour, you know? If you have a process that can only really repackage ideas people have already come up with, the only thing faster processing and more art can do is get it to repackage ideas people have already come up with faster and more accurately, and that's not really fixing the problems with the output.

What we need for true AI art is a way to allow AIs to be creative, to come up with new ideas, and we currently don't really even have a theory for how we would do that.

 

[U.N.Owen]

I think the core issue with AI is that the only current way we can improve AI is to make it faster and give it more training data, but there's only so much you can do with speed and scale. A million ants given a thousand years are still going to make worse art then one human in an hour, you know? If you have a process that can only really repackage ideas people have already come up with, the only thing faster processing and more art can do is get it to repackage ideas people have already come up with faster and more accurately, and that's not really fixing the problems with the output.

What we need for true AI art is a way to allow AIs to be creative, to come up with new ideas, and we currently don't really even have a theory for how we would do that.

I'm inclined to agree. Unless actual artificial sentience can be created, and we don't even seem to be on a path to that, AI can only ever recombine existing elements into a pastiche. That will probably satisfy a lot of simple demands, but it's not a substitute for reality.

 

[pitayatickler]

I think that for me there will be no trouble at all, since there will always be people looking for real tickling videos and I'm creating content because ot the passion I have with the tickling fetish (besides the oportunity to create other income sources). If somehow AI generated tickling videos become a thing and real tickling videos get more financially challenging to produce, I'd probably try to find other ways to keep it viable, such as doing very specific custom clips or exploring other similar fetishes. If you're doing it purely as a business and somehow AI tickling becomes a thing, you'd have to do some AI or else you're probably screwed.

 

[Toesheldback]

I don’t think that there is any cogent argument that AI is a fad. It’s here to stay.

 

[Toesheldback]

I think that for me there will be no trouble at all, since there will always be people looking for real tickling videos and I'm creating content because ot the passion I have with the tickling fetish (besides the oportunity to create other income sources). If somehow AI generated tickling videos become a thing and real tickling videos get more financially challenging to produce, I'd probably try to find other ways to keep it viable, such as doing very specific custom clips or exploring other similar fetishes. If you're doing it purely as a business and somehow AI tickling becomes a thing, you'd have to do some AI or else you're probably screwed.

I agree. That’s why I said that the producers and models will need to assert their brand.

 

[DebonairDavid]

I don’t think that there is any cogent argument that AI is a fad. It’s here to stay.

If you read all the articles about AI and how Big Tech keeps trying to make the masses believe its the new hot shit and its so futuristic, and then look at what little its currently capable of doing (and even then its doesn't always do that right), then you see its over-hyped and not what various talking heads keep saying it is. Once the hype dies down, which is already starting to happen when you see articles talking about ChatGPT telling you to add glue to pizza, then people will realize its always been a fad.

 

[U.N.Owen]

If you read all the articles about AI and how Big Tech keeps trying to make the masses believe its the new hot shit and its so futuristic, and then look at what little its currently capable of doing (and even then its doesn't always do that right), then you see its over-hyped and not what various talking heads keep saying it is. Once the hype dies down, which is already starting to happen when you see articles talking about ChatGPT telling you to add glue to pizza, then people will realize its always been a fad.

There's a huge middle ground between "it's a fad" and "it's going to replace all human agency in everything." Neither extreme is true. It is here to stay, it will get more powerful and more entrenched, and it still won't become "creative" or be genuinely able to do what people do. As I said above, short of artificial sentience - which may never happen, and is certainly not close - AI will always be a pastiche.

 

[WickedTouch]

You may be proved right, but I remain skeptical that AI is anywhere near replicating, let alone replacing, real people and real art. I'm not sure it can ever fully bridge the gap. There will always be a lack of spontaneity and humanity in AI, even as the technical look of it becomes more convincing (and CGI has been struggling to close the uncanny valley for decades now without success).

For the potential future AI capabilities I referenced, I truthfully hope that I am wrong, but I not only believe it to be possible, but unfortunately plausible. Creativity as we experience it may or may not be reproducible by technology at full capacity, but any of our creativity rendered into a physical or digital form then just becomes data. That data has patterns, no matter how complicated. Processes can render patterned data with enough resources and well-designed algorithms. With better visual assist tools, tweaking output will become easier and easier with less input required. Much bigger breakthrough may still be possible on the software side, but a lot of the limitations are on the hardware/resource/efficiency side right now. CGI and other CG systems' capabilities seem to be on an exponential growth path, and like for a lot of things growing exponentially, in the early stages their growth often appears more linear, but one day just seems to burst out of control (some of this is averaged out due to periodic bottlenecks and breakthroughs heavily influenced by outside factors such as education, interest, and economy).

Probably more disturbing to me is that a pattern in human behavior will likely manifest in this whole scenario too, which is the idea of "good enough." For a lot of people, future AI probably won't have to be perfect (as in indistinguishable from human creative output) before it profoundly disrupts creative industries and domains. The vast majority of people buy products with compromised qualities everyday. It's good enough at doing the thing they want, so they are okay with the compromised elements (it can sometimes feel like a race to the bottom in the sense of (how cheaply can we make this and people still accept it"). That happens with some adult content and tickling content now. All the more likely that a majority will accept similar compromises with AI generated content, which will likely also work out to be substantially more affordable and on-demand.

There's so, so, so much more I could say about this, but I don't want to come off as argumentative or anything. I just wanted to share a sliver of why I believe the plausibility of it. I personally don't consume most tickling content these days outside of discussion and stories. and am much more interested in real-world human connections and experiences as far as tickling goes. I definitely understand and respect where you're coming from, and again, I really hope you're right for the sake of many creative industries!

 

[hopefulscrambl]

There's a huge middle ground between "it's a fad" and "it's going to replace all human agency in everything." Neither extreme is true. It is here to stay, it will get more powerful and more entrenched, and it still won't become "creative" or be genuinely able to do what people do. As I said above, short of artificial sentience - which may never happen, and is certainly not close - AI will always be a pastiche.

Yeah, i think we seem to be approaching the limits of what a LLM, even a really fast LLM, can do - future development will require some kind of sea change in programming methods.

Also this is an odd conversation to be having on the kink section of the kink forum. I like to think there's an Robot Fetish Forum that's inexplicably descended into a clinical discussion on the science of tickling somewhere to balance it out.

 

[U.N.Owen]

For the potential future AI capabilities I referenced, I truthfully hope that I am wrong, but I not only believe it to be possible, but unfortunately plausible. Creativity as we experience it may or may not be reproducible by technology at full capacity, but any of our creativity rendered into a physical or digital form then just becomes data. That data has patterns, no matter how complicated. Processes can render patterned data with enough resources and well-designed algorithms. With better visual assist tools, tweaking output will become easier and easier with less input required. Much bigger breakthrough may still be possible on the software side, but a lot of the limitations are on the hardware/resource/efficiency side right now. CGI and other CG systems' capabilities seem to be on an exponential growth path, and like for a lot of things growing exponentially, in the early stages their growth often appears more linear, but one day just seems to burst out of control (some of this is averaged out due to periodic bottlenecks and breakthroughs heavily influenced by outside factors such as education, interest, and economy).

Probably more disturbing to me is that a pattern in human behavior will likely manifest in this whole scenario too, which is the idea of "good enough." For a lot of people, future AI probably won't have to be perfect (as in indistinguishable from human creative output) before it profoundly disrupts creative industries and domains. The vast majority of people buy products with compromised qualities everyday. It's good enough at doing the thing they want, so they are okay with the compromised elements (it can sometimes feel like a race to the bottom in the sense of (how cheaply can we make this and people still accept it"). That happens with some adult content and tickling content now. All the more likely that a majority will accept similar compromises with AI generated content, which will likely also work out to be substantially more affordable and on-demand.

There's so, so, so much more I could say about this, but I don't want to come off as argumentative or anything. I just wanted to share a sliver of why I believe the plausibility of it. I personally don't consume most tickling content these days outside of discussion and stories. and am much more interested in real-world human connections and experiences as far as tickling goes. I definitely understand and respect where you're coming from, and again, I really hope you're right for the sake of many creative industries!

Since it's impossible to know who's right for years yet, we'll have to agree to (partially) disagree.

I don't, btw, dispute that even merely adequate AI will satisfy some people who might otherwise consume better material, so it will inevitably impact creative professions even if it fails to fully undermine them.

 

[BostonTickling]

I am not worried in the slightest, and I have been producing tickling videos for 17 years. There will always be a need and deep desire to watch real people being tickled. There are personality quirks and nuances you can get from watching real human connection on display that can never be attained through AI. My guess is that the desire for watching real life human ticklees will not be replaced by a preference for watching AI in our lifetime. Will there be people who view AI fetish content and enjoy it? Absolutely. The technology and its capabilities will only continue to grow. But real people watching other real people engage in "activity", whether tickling or otherwise has existed for what seems like forever

 

[P[a]pi]

I create non-AI content, but not to make $. I don't think AI content will kill any thing. It will be the mcdonald's of tickling content. Some will like it, some will want some thing more, and some will enjoy both.