I Was Wrong: AI Porn and the Future Of OnlyFans

Back in March, I saw everyone going full Chicken Little over generative art and whether or not fake, AI-generated nudes would take over Onlyfans. I said there wasn’t a reason to panic yet. 

Within the blink of an eye, “yet” was already here. 

There still is no reason to panic, as Machine Learning is still lagging behind human skills and sexiness. 

There have been, however, some interesting developments with AI tech and how some adult content creators have leveraged this new wave of technology to make some seriously impressive money.

A Quick Primer on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, but very few people seem to know what it actually is. 

First of all, it isn’t really AI. At least not in the way science fiction has portrayed it.

Programs like Midjourney and ChatGPT are not “intelligent” or “thinking”. They are all based on machine learning, which means the program is fed a set of data to train on and uses that information to give the user whatever they are asking for. 

For example, if you want a picture of Paul Giamatti riding a T-Rex through a medieval battle, then the text-to-image program will try to recall all of the info it has on every word of that request and makes its best guess.

Whatever you get will be close to what you wanted, but there will probably be weird bits of distortion and misshapen body parts like hands and teeth. 

The more information, the better. In this case, the information being fed to the machines is the whole goddamn internet. 

It is impressive, but there’s no reason to call John Connor or Morpheous for backup. There are limitations that keep the robots from taking over, like needing to understand the context and having the right information and parameters.

Take the recent case of a lawyer using ChatGPT in their court filings. They used the famous chatbot to file a motion using previous cases to back up their argument. The attorney ended up facing the wrath of the presiding judge when it turns out none of the cases cited were real. 

That is because ChatGPT is only updated through 2021 and doesn’t care about accuracy as much as it does about sounding like a person. It will make up official-sounding sources that may not relate to your work or even exist.

Remember that next time you want to rely on ChatGPT for research. 

Other limitations are imposed by the programmers and moderators, such as content filters. These are mostly a hurdle if you’re using a web-hosted program and not as much for people creating spicy AI art on their own computers.

We’ve had machine learning for a while, but the difference now is that everybody has access to cutting-edge technology instead of one or two computing companies. 

More and more people are learning how to train their own models for creating art, tools, workout plans, you name it. 

When you combine that tech, creativity, and horniness, you get where we are now.

Pics and it Didn’t Happen

Probably the most concerning aspect of all this AI/Stable Diffusion/Machine Learning craziness is not what it can do, but how fast it’s getting better at it. 

Back in March, I was sure that creating a whole-ass fake Onlyfans model to trick subscribers would be more trouble than it is worth. 

It would too difficult and time-consuming to have your best Onlyfans girls look the same over the course of hundreds of images, making realistic videos wasn’t viable, and faking a voice and personality that would fool the average person was not quite there yet.

It took, maybe, 2 seconds for all of that to be proven wrong. 

A Reddit post featuring a 19-year-old girl named Claudia started making the rounds and more than one user was willing to pay for her nudes. Even more users commented on how beautiful Claudia is.

It turns out Claudia is 100% fake and created by a team of anonymous programmers as a test. Some Redditors caught this, but not enough for the test to completely fail.

Could this be considered a scam? That’s a tough question, even for Claudia’s creators.

In a Rolling Stone article, the unnamed Redditors said “We don’t really know how to think about this, the person buying the pictures is happy with their purchase since they are looking for porn,” they say. “We never really said those are pictures of a real person, and buyers never really asked. They just assumed.”

Besides the light chicanery, there are other ethical issues to consider. 

Most people worry about deep fake video porn, but even fake-fake porn stars ride the line of consent. Remember, these AI models are trained on real people. 

Would it bother you to see an adult image and think “Those tits look mighty familiar…” or “Hey, that’s my dick. See that bend in the middle? Yeah, that’s my dick.”?

The ethical questions around new technology have been a field of study for as long as there’s been technology, so I don’t think I could give a better answer than the Claudia team. 

Either way, the fact that enough people bought their fiction, literally and figuratively, means there is a strong case for adult content creators to keep their eyes open to avoid losing business.

Alternatively, they could follow the example of a few absolute geniuses and use these tools to their advantage.

Beauty and the Bot

A service offered by many of the most popular Onlyfans creators is the Girlfriend Experience or GFE for short. People pay the Girlfriend Experience Onlyfans creators to live out a fantasy of actually being able to call the model you’ve been paying your romantic partner. 

The creator will text, send media, or even have a video call with you. This service takes lots of time, attention, and emotional intelligence to perform and deserves the higher price tag. 

Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old Snapchat star, used ChatGPT and other AI tools to create CarynAI, a voice-based virtual girlfriend that users can enjoy for $1 per minute.

According to Fortune Magazine, Marjorie made $71,610 in her first week alone. 

Oh, and that was just the beta testing phase. 

Marjorie collaborated with AI company Forever Voices to create her digi-double, training on 2,000 hours of Marjorie’s deleted Youtube videos. This gave the fictional Marjorie a believable voice and accurate personality.

Now Marjorie can offer GFE to any, or all of her, of her 1.8 million followers without lifting a pinky. 

I know. F*cking genius.

Marjorie is not alone in taking a page from the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her. Forever Voice helped another popular influencer reach out and touch their audience.

Kaitlyn Siragusa, aka Amouranth, is one of the most popular streamers/influencers in the world with over 6 million subscribers on Twitch alone. She has also recently jumped on the AI-GFE train, charging $36 per hour with her voice-based bot.

Again, this is all absolutely brilliant and these creators should get that paper, but the good times may end thanks to another tech-based cultural issue: parasocial relationships.

The Problem With Parasocial Relationships

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided friendship a fan has with a media personality. Content creators and influencers, no matter how NSFW their work may or may not be, have to deal with fans who behave like they know them and can cross personal boundaries. 

It goes without saying that women, like Siragusa and Marjorie, have to deal with a lot of toxic, even dangerous, fans who think they know the real them and may react violently if that fantasy is shattered. 

Does fans having a digital version of their obsession in their pocket hurt or help that problem? 

On one hand, the AI version might act as a shield where overly devoted fans can indulge themselves without bothering the real person on the other side of the screen. 

On the other, this is just pouring napalm on a fire. 

And what about the ethics of how you treat a digital person, especially one replicating a real person? Will Forever Voices or the creators themselves pull the plug when users start getting dark with the bot?

What happens if the bot goes down permanently? Will users who have built a connection to their AI-Amouranth suffer the mental and emotional pain that Replika users endured when their beloved bots were taken away?

That is the gigantic issue surrounding all of this. No one really knows how this new wave of democratized technology is going to affect things and how people will react.

To paraphrase Chaotician Dr. Ian Malcolm, we are so concerned with what we can do that we never stop to think if we should.

The Final F-ing Frontier

There is a lot of anxiety around machine learning and this widespread technology, and maybe there should be. 

The fact of the matter is that we have been here before, with every mindblowing advancement in computing and technology. Maybe this time is different, maybe not. The one thing that has been true every time is that those who do not adapt are the ones left behind. 

Whether you’re an Onlyfans model, a lawyer, or a Baptist preacher, there is something to learn from these adult content creators and their ingenuity. 

Porn has an exciting future ahead of it, and I for one can’t wait to see it unfold.