George Orwell’s dystopian classic novel ‘1984’ seems to appear ever more prescient with each passing year. Published in 1948 when Orwell was virtually on his death bed, it delivers a warning of a future totalitarian society in which a socialist government led by ‘Big Brother’ controls and polices both language and thought, closely watching every detail of the lives of its citizens for evidence of any possible ‘thoughtcrime’. One of the principle ways this is done is through ‘telescreens’, which are placed in every person’s home, and today bring to mind a smart TV screen with Alexa type functionality. It can see and hear everything that takes place in the room, as well as barking out instructions from the ruling Party.
However, in the novel, it is only the party members who are subjected to this level of constant surveillance. The ‘proles’ who make up the vast majority of the population, are largely left to their own devices – stupefied by government engineered mass entertainment, they are not seen as a threat to the rule of Big Brother. And it is the party members themselves who create the pulp fiction and even hit songs and their tunes, that the proles devour and which keeps them largely content. Orwell briefly describes the process as to how this is done. A ‘Fiction Department’ employs party members to work with “big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were ‘roughed in’”. Of course, modern computers were only slowly beginning to be developed at the time Orwell was writing, and hitherto, they had more resembled mechanical machines. But we can see that Orwell is imagining the creation of fiction and even song through a purely artificial and mechanical process, that uses some mathematical formulae to produce countless different readable results. This sounds incredibly like the generative AI that has exploded over the last 12 months. And these ‘kaleidoscopes’ produced porn too.
In another passage from the novel, Orwell writes :
There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
Later, Orwell describes a particular department called Pornosec, which was another sub-section of the Fiction Department, whose job was to produce cheap and gratifying pornography for the proles, and then to distribute it to them while under the pretense that such material was illicit. Julia, the lover of the main character in the novel (Winston Smith), works in the Pornosec department.
It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night In A Girl’s School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
However, there is some human element involved in the writing itself it appears, because in the next paragraph, Julia tells Winston that her role in Pornosec was limited, as she did not have the literary talent to be in the ‘re-write squad’. Still, there’s no doubting that George Orwell imagined a future in which fiction, music, and even porn would be produced artificially. Furthermore, he gives the artificial creation of porn, in particular, a special role in providing an ‘opium for the masses’. It is remarkable how the sudden advance in AI porn has taken even the adult industry community largely by surprise. This can be shown by the fact that so many premium AI porn domains were only registered last year, whereas for example the best VR porn names were long registered, even up to 20 years ago. Yet here was George Orwell writing almost a century ago, pretty much predicting the rise of AI-generated porn.
