Laws Against 3D Sex Avatars Based On Real People Easily Circumvented

Any future tech sex blogger with a brain cell knows that the spheres of ‘deep fake porn’, ultra-life like sex dolls and robots, virtual/augmented (XR) porn, and AI and facial recognition, are all coming together to create a perfect storm of ethical and legal conundrums. Enough to scramble the brains of any legislator, well-meaning or not, trying to get to grips with the job of regulating all of this.

Unlike virtue signalling sex tech bloggers, I can see that there is no easy solution to this. The only way to entirely prevent new problems and potential abuses would be to introduce broad sweeping laws that effectively ban the whole tech, or at least its use for adult entertainment.

For example, although I’m not aware of any laws yet being introduced, mainstream and social media hysteria has been enough to largely stop realistic sex doll manufacturers to cease the controversial (but exciting!) practice of offering to create a life-like doll based on photographs of a real person (for example an ex-girlfriend) provided by a potential buyer.

A similar hysteria was whipped up recently on the news that horny Redditors were using software such as the amazing ‘Virt-A-Mate’ to create 3D avatars of real people for digital sex scenes, including in virtual reality.

Is it wrong to masturbate over the thought of an ex-girlfriend?

My view on this pretty libertarian. The world of the mental and the digital is merging. Is it wrong to masturbate over the thought of an ex-girlfriend? Or your neighbour’s wife, or your secretary? Only radical feminists would argue that it is, on the grounds of lack of consent (Conservative nut jobs and NoFappers believe masturbation in itself is wrong).

Is there really much difference between privately masturbating to the thought of a real individual and creating a digital or physical (sex doll) representation of that person to masturbate over or with? I don’t think so, although of course when it comes to sharing these representations, I can see that that is an entirely different ethical ball game.

But for the sake of argument, let’s agree with my fellow virture signalling concerned click bait sex tech writers. Of course masturbating privately to the representation of a real person who has not given consent is wrong. How do we prevent this serious harm?

Donald Trump And Vladimir Putin Did Not Consent To Their ‘Kiss’

Well we could simply introduce a law banning the creation of a realistic likeness of a living person in a sexual context (without the person’s consent).

Fine. No doubt such a law would lead to potential unintended restrictions on bona fide porn, erotic art, or even political satire (for example the infamous murial above of Presidents Putin and Trump kissing each other), unless very deftly worded. But lets not go into that here.

The major problem is that such a law could easily be circumvented, and thus would likely lead to an even blunter and broader legislation.

Everybody Has A Doppelganger

It’s often been said that however unique you feel, everybody in the world has a doppelganger – somebody who looks exactly like you. This was mostly considered a bit of a myth, a superstitious legend in fact.
Well it turns out it might really be true. Not in the sense that everybody has just one identical equivalent somewhere in the world, but that you certainly aren’t unique, and there will be many, perhaps lots of people who look uncannily similar to you. with the rise of smartphones, increasing travel, and social media, this is becoming more and more documented, and no doubt will further with the rise of facial recognition and image matching (more of that in a moment).

This creates an immediate problem in that it might be difficult to prove that the lifelike image was intended to be a representation of a particular individual. And if you can’t prove that, where would you draw the line. If everybody has a doppelganger, then it follows that every (truly) realistic sex doll or 3D avatar has a real life doppelganger (unless they were freakishly ‘enhanced’ such as huge breasts, in which case they wouldn’t be truly life like).

And of course, the representation might itself be enhanced. Maybe a man would like to have sex in virtual reality with his ex-girlfriend, but with bigger breasts. Would it still be a representation of a particular individual in this case? Again, where would the line be drawn?

It might be easy one would think to prove that a doll or avatar is based upon a real person, because in most cases a photo or other image would be needed to proved the model. The above (enhancement or subtle alteration) would still be problematic. Further, what if a talented artist makes the representation (or claims to), from memory? And no doubt it will become easier and easier in future for anyone to create images based on memories, or a picture in their mind, especially as brain reading tech becomes more advanced.

Facial Image Matching Leads To 3D Sex Avatars Of Ex-GFs And Crushes

Another way a ‘realistic likeness’ law could be circumvented is through face matching technology which already exists. There are an increasing number of porn sites online that allow you to upload a photo of anyone you like (a celeb, a pornstar, or an ex/girlfriend) and using AI will attempt to find a pornstar match – a pornstar who looks most like the individual in the uploaded photo.

The site above (PornstarByFace.com) claims to have around 4,000 girls in it’s database, including webcam girls as well as pornstars. But such a database could easily be many times bigger.

What if the pornstar matched to the photo of your ex-girlfriend looked, very, very like her? Close to a doppelganger? To create a sex doll or avatar based on that pornstar (so long as the pornstar consents) surely couldn’t fall foul of an enforceable ‘likeness law’. And what if you were to tweak the image of the matched pornstar to look even more like your ex?

Now imagine that at some point in the not too distant future, there will be near countless different ultra-realistic digital avatars in virtual sex worlds, or simply in ‘libraries’ waiting to become virtual sex avatars. Far, far more than the number of living pornstars. It’s almost certain you would find a very accurate match from among them.

Now you could make the uploading of a photo of a real person illegal, but there would be ways around that, such as simply entering physical descriptions, until you get closer and closer to an accurate match. Software could also measure your biometric responses, above all emotional, to a variety of images of females to work out a doppelganger of your ex.

You could ban such sites that offer these services themselves, but once the software is out there, it would be hard to prevent anyone from using it for themselves even with minimal tech savviness. In the end, the only effective solution would be to ban all image matching software.

Featured Doll images from YourDoll.com (which do not (to my knowledge) produce dolls based on ex-girlfriends).