“Semen and Semantics: Understanding Porn with Language Embeddings” by future_detective

Summary

Porn content has gotten more extreme over time. Here's the average title for the first full year of Pornhub's existence, 2008:

• "Hot blonde girl gets fucked"

and here's the average title for 2023:

• "FAMILYXXX - "I Cant Resist My Stepsis Big Juicy Ass" (Mila Monet)"

Why did this change happen? We can understand porn's progression by converting titles to language embeddings. I downloaded Internet Archive snapshots of "pornhub.com" from 2008 - 2023 and analyzed the embeddings of the titles on the main page.

I found three distinct eras of titling: 2008-2009, 2010-2016, 2017-present. The current trend, since 2017, is characterized mainly by an emphasis on incest and other sexual violence.

Titles are generally representative of actual video content, and provide a reasonable heuristic for measuring actual content change, though some SEO effects exist.

The conclusion is a slightly ominous one: we are close to semantic bedrock [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Summary

(01:32) Data and Methods

(03:17) Title Accuracy

(04:32) Calculating Yearly Centroids

(04:57) Centroid Similarity

(05:32) Centroid Clusters

(06:22) Centroid Titles

(08:57) Keyword Trends

(11:30) t-SNE Clusters

(11:55) Haircolor

(12:22) Pornstar Names

(12:50) Violence

(13:14) Women

(13:36) Men

(14:02) Racial

(14:25) Manufacturing

(15:02) Benign

(15:29) Sexual Violence

(16:58) Conclusions

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First published:

May 19th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mcZYoRQWpneyM4yWp/semen-and-semantics-understanding-porn-with-language

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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