AI ‘dream girls’ are coming for porn stars’ jobs
AI will change adult entertainment forever. The risks — for sex workers and the rest of us — are profound.
By Tatum HunterFebruary 25, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EST
LAS VEGAS — Dozens of porn stars in lingerie lined the convention hall, but Tom Maupin, 72, knew exactly who he was there to see. The retired schoolteacher had flown from Omaha to Las Vegas, purchased an $85 ticket and waited in line with hundreds of other porn fans in hopes of getting some face time with actress Jill Kassidy, 27.
They’d been chatting online for months, but it can be tough these days to tell whether the sexy talk you’re paying for comes from the performer herself or an AI chatbot, Maupin said on the show floor of AVN, the adult entertainment industry’s annual conference. He was looking forward to their first in-person meeting.
Maupin approached the table where Kassidy, who uses a stage name, was signing autographs, and the two exchanged a hug. They talked for 10 minutes before Kassidy turned to her next fan, who gifted her a vape pen, and Maupin wandered away. Did she remember Maupin from their online chats?
“It’s hard to keep people straight,” Kassidy replied, smiling. She took a hit of the vape.
For Maupin, the real humans behind porn are the entire draw, but some porn companies are willing to bet that he’s a dying breed. Since the first AVN “expo,” in 1998, adult entertainment has been overtaken by two business models: Pornhub, a free site supported by ads, and OnlyFans, a subscription platform where individual actors control their businesses and their fate. Now, a new shift is on the horizon: artificial intelligence models that spin up photorealistic images and videos that put viewers in the director’s chair, letting them create whatever porn they like.
Some site owners think it’s a privilege people will pay for, and they are racing to build custom AI models that — unlike the sanitized content on OpenAI’s video engine Sora — draw on a vast repository of porn images and videos.
This vision for the industry’s future raises a host of difficult questions: How do you compensate performers whose likenesses are used to create AI content? Will consumers like Maupin be excited by AI porn at all?
But the trickiest question may be how to prevent abuse. AI generators have technological boundaries, but they don’t have morals, and it’s relatively easy for users to trick them into creating content that depicts violence, rape, sex with children or a celebrity — or even a crush from work who never consented to appear. In some cases, the engines themselves are trained on porn images whose subjects didn’t explicitly agree to the new use. Currently, no federal laws protect the victims of nonconsensual deepfakes.
“AI can’t replace [adult] performers, and people who say that are misunderstanding what performers do,” said Heather Knox, director of operations at Elevated X, a software company that helps adult performers manage their online brands. “But this technology will catch on, and it will get abusive before it gets helpful.”
Bespoke porn on demand
Adult entertainment is a giant industry accounting for a substantial chunk of all internet traffic: Major porn sites get more monthly visitors and page views than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or Zoom, according to an academic analysispublished last year in the Journal of Sex Research. The industry is a habitual early adopter of new technology, including VHS, DVD and dot com. In the mid-2000s, porn companies set up massive sites where users could upload and watch free videos, and ad sales footed the bills. As the 2010s progressed, adult stars mastered social media marketing, and many migrated to subscription streaming platforms rather than chasing contracts with major studios.Now AI is here, and players across the industry are rushing to figure out what it means for business.
At last year’s AVN conference, Steven Jones said his peers looked at him “like he was crazy” when he talked about AI opportunities: “Nobody was interested.” This year, Jones said, he’s been “the belle of the ball.”
Jones is the owner and operator of a once-popular collection of porn websites. He entered the business in 1999 with a site dedicated to sexy snapshots of college students. He renamed himself “Lightspeed,” and, within seven years, the married father of two was operating a collection of more than 30 porn sites and making half a million dollars a month.
By 2013, it all fell apart. The self-described science-fiction nerd watched his revenue dry up after Pornhub — the tube site Jones refers to as the “evil empire” — started hosting free content. He ended up leaving the adult industry for a mainstream tech job.
Then the tides of fate turned again for Jones. His love for technology and shows like “Star Trek” made him an early believer in the power of artificial intelligence to change the world for good. Watching the public react to the releases of OpenAI’s conversational bot, ChatGPT, and image engine, DALL-E, in recent years, Jones felt an excitement he hadn’t known since getting his first computer as a teen, he said.
He called up his old business partner, and the two immediately spent about $550,000 securing the web domains for porn dot ai, deepfake dot com and deepfakes dot com, Jones said. “Lightspeed” was back.
But Jones’s plan to create consumer-friendly AI porn engines faced significant obstacles. The companies behind major image-generation models used technical boundaries to block “not safe for work” content and, without racy images to learn from, the models weren’t good at re-creating nude bodies or scenes.
One major model, Stable Diffusion, shares its code publicly, and some technologists have figured out how to edit the code to allow for sexual images. Particularly dedicated fans will come together on forums such as Reddit to share their nude creations, and some stand-alone deepfake creators make money churning out abusive nude images of people who didn’t consent to appear. But for non-techy laypeople wanting to experiment with a porn generator, the options were few.
So with help from an angel investor he will not name, Jones hired five employees and a handful of offshore contractors and started building an image engine trained on bundles of freely available pornographic images, as well as thousands of nude photos from Jones’s own collection. Users create what Jones calls a “dream girl,” prompting the AI with descriptions of the character’s appearance, pose and setting. The nudes don’t portray real people, he said. Rather, the goal is to re-create a fantasy from the user’s imagination.
The AI-generated images got better, their computerized sheen growing steadily less noticeable. Jones grew his user base to 500,000 people, many of whom pay to generate more images than the five per day allotted to free accounts, he said. The site’s “power users” generate AI porn for 10 hours a day, he said.
Jones described the site as an “artists’ community” where people can explore their sexualities and fantasies in a safe space. Unlike some corners of the traditional adult industry, no performers are being pressured, underpaid or placed in harm’s way, he said. And, critically, consumers don’t have to wait for their favorite OnlyFans performer to come online or trawl through Pornhub to find the content they like.
Next comes AI-generated video — “porn’s holy grail,” Jones said. Eventually, he sees the technology becoming interactive, with users giving instructions to lifelike automated “performers.” Within two years, he said, there will be “fully AI cam girls,” a reference to creators who make solo sex content.
