From foot fetishes to bare-chested women, online users are generating personalized porn
BlackTechLogy: Is photo generator software like Pixlr and ChatGPT being used more for work or play?
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I recall seeing him in the hallway on my way to class, but we never had classes together. I knew of him, but I didn’t know him. He had Aldis Hodge energy. My friends knew him as “the fine one,” but we had no clue who his friends were or whether he was dating anyone. He would pop up, reappear and disappear for days. The only reason we knew he hadn’t dropped out was because he was in our yearbooks.
So when I randomly saw him when I’d returned home for a college break and he asked for my number, I was pleasantly surprised. I shared it immediately, curious what this tall, dark and mysterious guy was like. But within one conversation, I realized I was better off checking him out from afar in high school. He wouldn’t stop talking about how much he liked to suck toes, and I just kept imagining his breath must smell like toenail polish. (I’m going to assume a man with teeth this white and straight only chose pedicured feet.)
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It was the first time I ever encountered a Black man who had a foot fetish, and I was completely weirded out — but mildly curious — about this idea. I never did get around to seeing what that was about. We both sorta lost interest in each other. No one did anything in particular. I was going to a college out of state, and he was doing his own thing at an in-state college.
And I hadn’t thought much about him until I watched the latest episode of “What Now? with Trevor Noah” featuring author Carter Sherman, who discussed how teenagers are losing their virginity later and relying far too much on pornography for the norms of sex. As a Geriatric Millennial, I’m just old enough to remember being in K-12 without smartphones and laptops but young enough to have had a laptop bag glued to my hip in college. Everybody my age had a funny story about watching porn on VHS tapes, and no one knew what TubeGalore was. Sending nudes would’ve been an insane thought — unless we wanted to mail a Polaroid or use 110 and 35 mm film.
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But the more Sherman talked, the more I wondered where in the world that high school crush got the idea to go to town on toes. Why was that even a thought in his mind? And why was he so determined to tell me about it as if that’d make me do cartwheels to his home?
Years later, I was in a relationship with a guy who would randomly massage my feet and give them a smooch, but it didn’t feel creepy. It was more of an afterthought for him.
To be fair, my high school alum clearly isn’t the only one with a foot fetish. According to Men’s Health, there are plenty more joining him, including:
5% of heterosexual women
18% of heterosexual men
11% of lesbian and bisexual women
21% of gay and bisexual men
And now this peculiar fetish is affecting artificial intelligence platforms, such as ChatGPT photo generator. After slamming my head into the side of a bathtub because I refused to put down a bathtub mat, I thought it would be a good idea to post about bathroom safety and useful tips for keeping bathtub mats cleaner longer. However, it took me almost 30 minutes of rewording my photo generator request before I could get ChatGPT to create this photograph (below).
While I was intrigued by the idea of making up all kinds of pedicure designs (and maybe manicure designs later), sexualizing feet never even entered my mind. But it didn’t take long for me to realize ChatGPT’s strict policy on creating body part images and the laundry load of bare-breasted women I kept seeing on my Pixlr AI Image Generator account proved otherwise. Instead of using photo generator software for creative work purposes, some online users are just creating their own spank banks — and it’s becoming a chore to figure out how to create otherwise tasteful AI images.