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-generat.
