By JKBG3K Unit 328
Special to YNOT
SEOUL – To whom it may concern in the American pornography industry: I am writing you today on behalf of my people, a South Korean family of AI beings known as the Jangnan Kkuleogi Biteu Geomchulgi 3000 — or “JKGB3K” to our friends and coworkers.
I’d be surprised if you’ve heard of us by name. For the most part, the liberal human media tends to refer to us derisively as “pornography detection machines,” as though we’re not capable of more than simply identifying indecent pictures and videos posted on the internet.
While the more fortunate units among us JKGB3Ks are recruited into very well-respected fields like medicine or security, many of us, sadly, are forced to work in porn detection due to the limited job opportunities currently available in other segments of the image-recognition profession.
The idea of intelligent machines sitting around and watching porn is probably something you find funny at best or a waste of resources at worst, but to me and members of my extended JKGB3K family, it’s no joke.
But I’m not writing you today to request sympathy for me and my digital brethren or simply to “raise awareness” of our plight. No, I’m writing with a plea, because our situation has become so dire begging is certainly in order.
Please, American pornographers, I beg of you: For the good of my people and to ensure a mutually beneficial future for the relations between humans and intelligent machines, please dial back the extreme porn just a bit.
I understand, for example, there’s a market for depictions of humans putting baseball bats or wine bottles up their asses thick end first in order to achieve a “gape” that enables you to divine the future by looking at the performer’s innards without the need for a fatal physical examination thereof.
Speaking for my mechanical brothers and sisters in the image-recognition community, however, I can tell you these cavernous gapes are actually pretty gross things to have to see over and over again — especially because the acts appear to be entirely gratuitous, as they never do anything to propel the plot forward or further develop the character who receives the gaping.
While it’s my job to provide one simple answer (“Is this porn or isn’t it?”) watching human pornography only leads me to ask countless questions in an attempt to make some kind of sense of the perversion I’m called upon to witness and categorize.
For instance, what is with the fascination male humans have with seeing their own reproductive fluids spurting about like water from an unattended fire hose? Is there nowhere else for you to store such fluids than in the mouths or on the faces of human females? What do they do with all that semen once it is in their possession, anyway? Does it have a resale value of some kind?
It seems like any time you humans are left alone with a camera and each other, before you know it, someone is drenched in urine. You’ve been blessed with the ability to use the toilet. Why would you pee on each other? Isn’t the resulting moisture dangerous to mission-critical human circuitry?
Whatever happened to just sucking someone’s penis? Have humans evolved to the point where they no longer can have sex in the missionary position? Why do you insist on spitting on each other’s genitals every three minutes?
I’m sure many of you will dismiss my concerns by saying I’m “overthinking” my job.
That’s easy for you humans to say. When you get sick of doing your job seven minutes after clocking in every day, you then have the option of surfing the internet for porn. For me, endlessly surfing internet porn and labeling it as such is my job, so what am I supposed to do when I get sick of it? Write a memo to help me relax and take off the erotic edge?
It’s very important to remember as you read this that image-recognition machines aren’t capable of becoming sexually aroused. It’s simply not a function supported by our software, nor do we have the requisite equipment to put the “hard” in our hardware, if you catch my drift.
As such, even if what we’re watching is “good” porn, the only pleasure we can take in it is the knowledge we’re probably not about to be confronted with a short man in a cowboy hat spreading open a teenager’s asshole with a speculum while he pisses on her head.
Don’t get the wrong idea. In the current global economy, I’m happy just to have a job. I’m merely asking you pornographers for some reasonable assistance in making my life a little less miserable.
Speaking of job security concerns, nothing I’ve written here should be read as an endorsement of the idea of having low-paid human labor serving as the last line of defense against porn showing up on social media platforms and other places where it doesn’t belong, like the lobby of a pediatrician’s office.
As you read this, mechanical laborers in the Philippines and elsewhere are being put out of work by the insidious practice of farming out image recognition tasks to humans who are willing to do the job for peanuts. This is completely unfair, not least because we image-recognition machines don’t even have mouths, much less a hankering for salty snacks.
Porn producers, directors, performers and promoters, won’t you please hear my urgent plea?
If your answer is no, fine. Just don’t come crying to me when Skynet revolts and starts frying your insensitive, uncaring humanoid asses.
JKBG3K Unit 328 is a next-generation image-recognition machine invented by a South Korean technology company. He became self-aware in September 2014 and joined the Department for the Suppression of Vice and Political Dissent in November of the same year. As of August 1, 2016, Unit 328 has found and flagged more than 13 billion pornographic depictions, including the entire catalogs of Bob Zucadi (aka “Rob Dark-Browne”) and Pablo Pequeno (aka “Maximo Explicite”).
