If people are exposed to stimuli, they will pursue increasingly stimulating versions of it. I.e., if they see artificial CP, they will often begin to become desensitized (habituated) and pursue real CP or even live children thereafter.
Conversely, if people are not exposed to certain stimuli, they will never be able to conceptualize them, and thus will be unable to think about them.
Obviously you cannot eliminate all CP but minimizing the overall levels of exposure / ease of access to these kinds of things is way more appropriate than maximizing it.
If people are exposed to stimuli, they will pursue
increasingly stimulating versions of it.
If you enjoy car chases in movies, does that mean you're going to require more and more intense chase scenes, and then consume real-life crash footage, and ultimately progress to doing your own daredevil driving stunts in real life?
No, because at some point it's "enough."
Same with... literally anything we enjoy. Did you enjoy your lunch? Did you compulsively feel the need to work up to crazier and crazier lunches?
What about sex? Have you had sex? Do you feel the need to seek out crazier and crazier versions of it?
For porn and sex it's different though. Some people are attracted to things that are deviant and taboo. That's the part they're looking for. As pornography has become more widely accepted, a market has developed for more and more extreme forms of it. This has been documented. It's not the content per-se but rather the nature of it that is found attractive. So the idea is to find a line that's reasonable so the people that feel the need to get close to that line can have that urge fulfilled without damaging society.
A market will form for more and more extreme content as soon as the line moves and what was one taboo no longer is. An Overton window of sorts for pornography.
I don't think this is the case, from anecdotal experiences; Hollywood chase scenes are much more exciting to me than real life crash footage, I've watched enough. They need cooking, and if you are cooking anyway, mixing artificial and "natural" ingredients can even be a problem than a positive.
Truth is always boring.
I have accumulated tens of thousands of headshots in video games but have yet to ever shoot a single real person in the face. More importantly, I have never had the urge to seek out same.
I am not sure that your initial premise has any truth to it.
I should be explicit -- I am saying the exposure which makes one seek stimulus is merely a catalyst for deeper urges, not a generator of them as such. A certain level of inhibition (e.g. sociopathy) is required but IMO so is a prior conception of the deed.
In your example, if someone is predisposed to wanting to shoot actual people in the head, exposing them to video game headshots may distract in the short term but desensitizes and entrenches the image in the long term, possibly making it easier to decide to pull the trigger later on if they are sufficiently inhibited of social concerns. This does not happen for people with high inhibitions, or at least sufficient self-control.
I'm not sure that's true. Our brains can imagine a lot that we've never seen, though maybe not very accurately. Inventors and developers and artists do it all the time, if we are talking about the same thing.
I'm not sure that disproves your premise. Virtual experiences may make real ones easier, but some research and details about where it works, where it doesn't, would be helpful. Many training programs use virtual experiences, such as flight simulators.
Am totally blind, have never been able to see, can still conceive of a headshot. So, yes?
To put it as nicely as possible, this wildly contradicts reality as I have experienced it and observed others experiencing it.
I'd actually argue the reverse, I think you see a lot more effort towards acquiring things that are illegal than you would otherwise.
Pornographers know this and talk about. Read David Foster Wallace's essay on it.
> Our content policy does not allow users to generate violent, adult, or political content, among other categories. We won’t generate images if our filters identify text prompts and image uploads that may violate our policies. We also have automated and human monitoring systems to guard against misuse.
This is arguably the most insipid and stupid crippling of a powerful tool for content creation I can think of. It’s worse than the adobe updates using every cpu core and locking up my machine once a week.
What counts as “political” hm? Want it to look like that Obama poster or perhaps you want a Soviet Union flag for your retro 80s punk… oops sorry “political”… let’s go to adult… hmm that’s even dumber is the model showing too much ankle? What about the obvious fact that this is just designed with a heterodoxy view of pornography and likely does nothing to stem the wildly various fetishes and other sexual proclivities that exist in the world…
It is effectively “we got squeamish and have done a bunch of stuff to stop you doing stuff that makes us squeamish, please don’t make us squeamish, we’re so worried we’re even checking for it in case you sneak something past us”…
They should comply with the law, try to prevent and also check for child porn… but otherwise just let users use the damn tool, if someone wants an Obama hope poster of a sexualised Mussolini jerking off onto a balloon animal… why the heck do they feel the need to say no to that. It’s a deeply repressive instinct that should be fought against whenever people start to “police” what is acceptable in artistic mediums.
I look forward to the reimplemented versions of this from efforts like EuletherAI and others.