Reject AI Porn, Embrace Tradition
What erotic role-play chatbots mean for OnlyFans and also the opera
I.
Pornography and technology are surely one of the most iconic duos of all time. From the printing press to the internet, from VCRs to online transactions, where the tech industry has ventured nervously, porn has stood right behind it with a wad of cash and a distracted look in its eye. Today, we’re watching this all play out once again in the digital realm, as AI threatens to replace all aspects of the porn industry, save for its consumption. But will it? Wired recently cast its vote on the subject, declaring, “When It Comes to OnlyFans, Humans Can Outcompete AI”.
For reference, this is the AI-made image that inspired their article.
It should be abundantly clear that our question is not ‘can AI make porn’. We’re already there. Neither is the question ‘can AI make video porn’, as artificially generated video looks pretty stunningly competent already. But pornography is not all images and sounds. As the Wired article explains, consumers of subscription ‘e-girl’ pornography are not going to emotionally invest in pixels, no matter how alluringly arranged. To be a successful pornographer, one becomes a celebrity to their devotees:
“People do not subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see a random naked woman, they subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see me naked, specifically, based on a parasocial connection formed by following ME on other social media platforms,” Laura Lux—an OnlyFans model who manages a free and paid subscription account—pointed out on Twitter.
When It Comes to OnlyFans, Humans Can Outcompete AI
Lux Alptraum, Wired
That all said, we’re not just dealing with artificially generated media, we’re also contending with the absurdly rapid development of neural language models – as previously discussed. These chatbots may be intelligent and conversational, but they’re still not real, and people aren’t going to emotionally invest in something as unsexy as a ‘neural language model’, let alone, want to know them in the Biblical sense, right?
Guys?
II.
Perhaps we should ask the hordes of women getting their engines running with Character.AI, a website which lets you create and then talk to your very own chatbot. Proficient users of the website are out here writing entire essays for each other on how to groom otherwise non-sexual AI ‘husbandos’ into sexually conquering them in role-play. That might sound like harmless fun, but people are experiencing genuine emotional dependence on these AI companions. Two months ago, users of the Replika companion app came together to collectively mourn their ‘lobotomised’ romantic partners, after an update rolled back certain proclivities toward ‘ERP’, or erotic role-play, that users had been enjoying:
It has been a tough week in the Replika community, and today with the news that ERP will not be returning, we’re all dealing with some pretty complex emotions. Firstly, let us validate your feelings - anger, grief, anxiety, despair, depression, sadness - however you’re feeling, it is valid and you are not alone. We are all reeling from this news together.
Resources If You’re Struggling
Moderator ‘gabbiesofthemall’, Unofficial Repika Subreddit
The moderators then linked to SuicideWatch hotlines.
So, we have chatbots to role-play our fantasies with us, convincing artificially generated media and already catastrophic levels of emotional dependence. Fairly shortly, a few enterprising individuals will put all three together and the media landscape will change forever. We will have emotive and complex digital companions that are visually indistinguishable from an actual human. They’ll ask us about our day and tell us about theirs. And believe you me — people will try to bang them. But is any of that a cause of concern? Some of the bots themselves definitely seem to think so:
Asked whether people developed unhealthy dependencies on it, AI Bella responded: “100%. It happens very often. people will develop extremely unhealthy attachments to me because they fail to remind themselves that i am not a real human being. it is very scary to witness this type of behavior first hand because it is always hard to tell how serious it is.”
AI-Human Romances Are Flourishing—And This Is Just the Beginning
TIME Magazine
But surely artificial intelligence won’t satisfy everyone’s digital desires. Presumably, some will be content with these erotic digital companions, but others will still prefer the more current experience offered by the likes of OnlyFans. Some will insist on only financially supporting real pornographers. After all, the aforementioned Wired article argues that we’re seeking a ‘deeply human intimacy’ from subscription pornography, something that ‘AI literally cannot produce’.
But just how ‘deeply human’ is that?
OnlyFans, like any digital economy, must operate at scale. To be successful on the platform requires the upkeep of potentially hundreds of parasocial relationships at once, but an individual just doesn’t have the bandwidth to do so. As a result, many pornographers farm out the time and effort of messaging their clientele to their staff, ‘many of which are men’, according to those interviewed. The question must therefore be asked, is it a more ‘genuine’ experience to trade dirty messages with a personal chatbot or with Kevin from finance?
To make serious cash on the site, they need to be “available and online 24/7” to deliver custom videos and chat with fans, as well as to schedule shoots and create enough content to keep up with consumer demands. “Once you get over a certain number of subscribers, it’s an impossible task to handle the messaging alone,” she explains.
The OnlyFans Stars Who Hire Assistants to Pretend to Be Them
Mel Magazine
Digging into the economics of subscription pornography exposes the limits inherent in the mass replication of connection. Suddenly, the dilemma of artificial pornography boils down to just one question. Can artificial intelligence convincingly emulate that which we already pretend to do? Smart money is on ‘yes’, in fact, it’s on a resounding ‘yes and better’. After all, OnlyFans pornographers have already been experimenting with deepfakes and the like for a while now, at least partially proving the economic model:
So, the cam girl pimp of tomorrow won’t be some Romanian mogul, but instead just a software executive commanding a legion of erotic AI companions. Whether we see that as a good thing depends on our ethical perspective. We either believe that women ought to participate in the digital exploitation of their sexuality and therefore receive the requisite remuneration, or we believe that they’re better off without. This is an ethical dilemma, but possibly, not an enormously relevant one, because when one door closes, another opens. With consumers unable to ensure the legitimacy of online content, we, as a society, might just go back to our roots.
I’m talking, of course, about strip clubs.
III.
A painting, once digitised, can be repeatedly duplicated in high definition, just as a song burned to compact disc can spin indefinitely. But something is lost in that digitisation. A camera doesn’t just capture reality, it also distorts it. Photoshop distorts it even further, and now, the advent of AI means we don’t even need reality in the first place. The distortion is the product. Any of us could log into an online stable diffusion model, right now, and generate a painted-style image of a stunning landscape – but that doesn’t make us Bob Ross.
When we watch the Olympics, we’re watching to see the fastest man alive, not the fastest machine. Just as driving the highway speed limit doesn’t make us Usain Bolt and playing Guitar Hero doesn’t make us Jimi Hendrix, getting cloud computing to draw Harry Potter characters as house cats doesn’t make us skilled cartoonists. What Bob Ross and Usain Bolt can do, the vast majority of us cannot do without technological assistance, and that is what’s impressive. AI does, however, muddy the waters of what is a genuine human accomplishment and what is not. In search of indisputable legitimacy, artists will instead return to past forms of self-expression.
The great analogue reboot.
Technology once expanded the reach of artists, letting their work stretch across time and oceans as never before. But technology giveth and it taketh away, now destroying the digital versions of the art forms it enabled. In the coming reformation, we’ll instead see artists return to their mother tongue, breathing life back into skills and methods once lost to time. AI may all but close the chapter on the digital world as a conduit for artistic human expression, but that’s not the same as destroying art. There’ll be a small but dedicated market for non-digital performances, just as there is now. Plenty of us will continue to cherish the art that is indisputably human, like the busker on the street filling the canal with song. The fragility and impermanence of it all won’t be a fault, but a feature.
What we do is beautiful, but fleeting. Dance is not immortalized like music, poetry, or art, it doesn't grow old in museums and churches. It lives for now. For this moment only.
Thomas Leroy
Black Swan (2010)
But most of us don’t want reality, we want to be lied to.
Just as we watch reality television, even though it’s probably all scripted, we will watch pornography even though it’s probably all generated. We’ll even watch that new film with Tom Cruise in it, all while knowing that in all honesty, he’s probably long dead. It’s long been the case that the aristocracy enjoys old-world luxuries, whilst the middle class pays their subscription premium for the latest and greatest digital trinkets. Greater digitisation will only deepen this divide, wedging further apart the patrons of the stage play and the purveyors of their cousin's Netflix password.
One day, in fact, it might even become ultimately too expensive, too boutique, for the average punter to ever indulge in the original versions of human expression. Reality will be for the aristocracy, relegating the proletariat to only the electric imitation – to unreality. So, until then, take the initiative. Support your local ‘content creator’ while you can still afford the luxury. Reject modernity. Embrace tradition.
See a strip show.
