CGI (Computer-generated imagery) has come a long way since it was first used in movies like Westworld, Star Wars, Alien, and Tron. Recent advances in CGI has given us amazingly life-like characters like Smeagol from Lord Of The Rings and those giant blue Smurfs in Avatar. It’s only a matter of time before CGI will be able to deliver performances so life-like that we won’t be able to tell the difference between a human actor and a CGI actor. Then, of course, it will be inevitable that this amazing technology will be used to deliver porn.
This isn’t a new issue. CGI porn of one form or another has been around since the 1990s. I’ve never watched any CGI porn myself, but I don’t necessarily have an issue with it either. If you enjoy it, go for it… but where do you draw the line? And is there a difference between real-porn and virtual-porn? Most of us are not comfortable with pornographic images that involve children, or depict violent or abusive acts against adults. But what if they are computer generated? Does that make a difference?
The legalities of all this is still a bit confusing. For example, in the 1990s the US Government outlawed CG images of sexualized children – but a few years later, in a ruling in a case called Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the US Supreme Court said CG child porn is legal. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Is watching CGI porn depicting images of sexualized children a victimless crime? If it is, is there anything wrong with someone watching this kind of virtual porn if no children are harmed? It’s a difficult question, and I’m not sure where I stand on this yet…
Things will become even more difficult once CG images become so life-like that we can’t tell the difference between a real image and a CG image. What if someone caught with pornographic images of children on their computer claimed that they were all CG images? How could you prove they weren’t, unless you had physical evidence that the images were, in fact, based on real children. This is going to be a legal nightmare.
This is a photograph of EveR-2, a female android developed by the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology.
Of course, CGI isn’t the only area where the difference between real and virtual reality is blurring. What about those sex robots that scientists are trying to develop? Animatronic technology is advancing, and I’m sure sometime in the future there will be sex robots that are indistinguishable from real people. Think of the character of Pris in Blade Runner, a “basic pleasure model” as portrayed by Daryl Hannah. Or Jude Law as Gigolo Joe, a male prostitute Mecha programmed with the ability to mimic love in the movie AI.
How would you feel if your partner wanted to have sex with a “pleasure robot”? Would that be any different to using a vibrator? What if they wanted a HHR (human-human-robot) threesome? What if the robot looked like a 16 year old girl…or a 10 year old boy? What if people who were sexually attracted to children were able to satisfy their sexual needs on a robotic child? Could we ever feel comfortable about that? Would we be able to let them remain productive members of society knowing that they had sex with a child-looking robot in private? I have no idea. These questions just seem too difficult for me to answer as of yet.
What do you think?
Images by Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, Ernst Wilhelm Zwergelstern, and Brianna Beresford via Wikimedia Commons
