AI-n’t too proud to beg?
As artificial intelligence achieves uncanny levels of human likeness, entrepreneurs are already capitalizing on the ease of generating a hot chatbot bod in a creepy cash grab from horny internet users. Recently, denizens of the AI-dabbling web sphere gathered to vote on their favorite digitally developed model in an AI beauty pageant in which the winner — meaning the developers behind the hot bot — earned winnings worth over $20,000.
Meanwhile, scientists have become increasingly interested in how we perceive machine-generated people and whether that knowledge has any effect on human behavior.
In a new study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion, a team of scientists from Italy and Finland wanted to observe how we react to AI images designed to sexually arouse — hypothesizing that humans would be less turned on when they believe an image was an avatar.
“In particular, we wanted to answer the question: are the images thought to be artificially generated capable of eliciting the same 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 women — all bona fide humans — wearing swimsuits or lingerie. In one experiment, they asked participants to rate their level of arousal with each photograph, and then guess if the image was AI-generated or not. In another round of the experiment, the same images were used but this time explicitly labeled as real or fake.
Both trials confirmed the researchers’ presumption that perception of authenticity plays an important role in sexual arousal for heterosexual men and women who participated in the study. However, they also found that men had an easier time warming up to 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 capable of generating arousal, especially in men, just in an inferior amount,” Demichelis and Ansani explained.
The findings, the authors said, are an important insight into human interactions with digital content.
“AI-generated images are here to stay, and as every technological advancement, offer both opportunities and danger,” they told PsyPost. “Within the domain of sexual arousal, our findings suggest that they are not going to replace the ‘real’ world, since the mere belief that an image is AI-generated (even when it is not) is enough to reduce arousal. To put it differently, it seems that we (still?) have a strong preference for humanness over artificiality, even when such artificiality is just purported.”
Additional variables to study in the future would include a broader range of sexual stimuli — including even more explicit content — and whether same-sex-oriented participants are equally discerning of authenticity. Physiological measurements such as heart rate and skin sensitivity could add further nuance to human arousal response.
Demichelis and Ansani also hope to conduct a similar study comparing real and truly fake images. “We hypothesize that the effect found in our study would even increase, solidifying the strength of our claims,” they said.