The recent leap forward in AI generative image technology has made the creation of extreme and surreal AI porn as easy as typing and clicking, and the rise of a ‘NSFW’ community around AI image generator Mage has raised questions about what is fuelling its popularity. However, in recent weeks, the platform has removed all reference to its NSFW capabilities and the explicit images its users are creating, in an apparent push towards attracting more mainstream users.
Officially launched to the public in 2022, Mage quickly became a go-to platform for what some would call the darker or less-visited corners of the AI porn world. Unlike most mainstream AI image generators, such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, Mage allows the creation of hardcore explicit sexual images, violence and gore.
A Mage community has sprung up on Discord where users share their creations, a large swathe of which was comprised of AI porn images of women being penetrated in various bizarre ways until the change of rules.
There were previously dedicated ‘NSFW’ channels within the Mage Discord group for ‘genderqueer’, animation and furries: an anthropomorphic subculture in which people behave and style themselves like animals, but these have now disappeared from view.
AI porn image generators are pretty common, and people have been seeking out online communities to share fetish interests with for decades, so on some levels Mage and its Discord community isn’t breaking new ground.
However, the level of detail users put into writing AI prompts on the platform to create some of the most extreme images has got some considering whether this is serving fetish interests or has in fact become a sort of game, in which users create ever more surreal images using increasingly granular written prompts.
With the removal of public NSFW images, or more accurately there dissemination into further private unaffiliated Discord channels.
Extremely violent and sexual images involving blood, rutting corpses and tentacles (a fetish category itself) were prevalent on the Discord. Thomas Brooks, assistant professor of psychology at New Mexico Highlands University, told 404 Media that what we’re seeing is ‘gamified pornography’.
“There’s an internal motivation to solve the puzzle and get the prize. But then there’s an external motivation of, ‘Can I come up with this crazy thing to show my anonymous internet friends,’” he said.
It also seems possible that this extreme-leaning section of Mage’s user base is a different kind of voyeur to those that sought out similar material before the rise of AI image generation. Everyone looking at these images (hopefully) realizes that they aren’t real, and that no-one was harmed in their creation. Seeing how women are depicted in many of the images, though, makes it tough to imagine that there isn’t at least some kind of straight male aggression and dominance factor in play.
“The appeal is to be able to create and manipulate things as you please, just like with painting and drawing,” one active Mage user in the Discord group told 404 Media.
We’ll keep that in mind next time we see an anime image of an elf-eared, large-breasted woman having her clothes ripped off by giant octopus tentacles.
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