“At the heart of every story we want to tell is a human being,” said Lee Gentry, founder of Night Visions, a company that provides customized artificial intelligence content to adult entertainers and agencies that operate OnlyFans accounts. “We’ve worked very, very carefully to preserve the human form and make it as accurate as possible.”
Throughout recorded history, humans have used emerging technologies to depict sexual interactions and nudity (often female). Buck films began to be produced and traded on the underground market shortly after the invention of motion pictures.Later, movies with fleshed-out storylines would be released in theaters, including the infamous porn deep Throat. VHS was quickly adopted by low-budget adult film producers. DVDs and widespread Internet access further lower barriers to the distribution and consumption of pornographic content.
Historically, most of these films have been made by men, for men – female directors and producers such as Ann Perry and Candida Royalle being the exception . But recently, women have been able to control the spread of their own images. Today, most pornographic images and videos are produced by the subjects themselves and distributed directly to consumers through clip sites and fan sites such as OnlyFans.
As you read this, adult performers are racing to stay ahead of emerging technologies (including Sora, a model capable of generating minute-long videos) by creating their own chatbots and on-demand video services.
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When I started acting in adult films in the mid-2000s, the focus was on authenticity and availability. Consumers not only want to know that our orgasms are real; They want to know our personalities – social media makes that possible. Instant feedback from subscribers (or followers, or “friends,” depending on the platform) tells us which aspects of ourselves are most interesting. We, and most social media users—especially those who later become influencers—get to lead with the most endearing parts of ourselves.
But while Hollywood and recording stars gain validation on social media like Twitter and Instagram, those in the adult industry are often left to fend for themselves. This opens the door to a flood of imposters.
On more than one occasion in the early 2010s, fans came up to me at conventions and thanked me for spending hours discussing their issues with them via Facebook. They were very grateful for my time and advice. This means a lot to them. But I don’t have a Facebook account, and even if I did, I’d be too busy. I couldn’t do my job or have a life outside of work, and Spend those hours with people who feel the need to spill their secrets and make the effort to chat with porn stars.
But that’s what fansite users expect these days: instant replies to messages, no matter the time of day. Add to that the work of creating custom content, paid website content for mass distribution, and secure working social media promotion, and it’s often overwhelming for a single creator.
Night Visions “positions itself as a consensus form of concept capture,” Gentry said. His company generates still images of various content creators and adult performers who sign up for the service based on text input. Due to the size of the company (four team members and a few contractors and consultants), this meant that Gentry manually performed the know-your-customer process itself.
Just like in a professional porn studio, consent is key. However, content creators who come from backgrounds in the adult studio system are acutely aware that bad actors can and will steal our images and use them for anything, from populating more disgusting video sites to tricking fans into sending money for fake date or gift card. Many of these problems are international, making it nearly impossible to stop such practices. It’s a game of whack-a-mole, where your brand integrity and other people’s life savings are at stake.
Individuals who create deepfakes may not even realize they have crossed a line. Imagine, as Gentry suggested in a demo during our conversation, that a client wants to see a creator named Violet wearing a wedding dress on the beach. The customer wants to see it immediately and is willing to pay a premium. But he was in a special mood and received no response from Violet. Regardless, she needed time to find the wardrobe and find the photographer. A customer may ask an AI photo generator to create a photo for him without regard to the creator’s rights. He might even post his creations on a forum. His desires were fulfilled, he was unconcerned about his actions, and the creator of the used likeness gained nothing.
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In the age of social media, the lines between public figures and private individuals have become blurred. “Ultimately, the question of whether someone is a public figure will be determined on a case-by-case basis,” attorney Simon Pullman said. “The argument people will make is that any type of content creator — whether they’re on YouTube or TikTok — by putting yourself in the public domain, you may be a public figure in some ways.”
As always, the U.S. government is making slow progress in solving this problem. In January, Congress introduced H.R. 6943, which cited a 2020 report from the Department of Homeland Security describing more than 100,000 non-consensual deepfake nude photos. There is no mention of the adult workers who used the corpses to create these deepfakes. “Will adult performers get the same protections as everyone else?” Pullman asked. “They should, but we all know how certain things are viewed in certain parts of the country.”
The adult industry does take advantage of Takedown Piracy (a subscription service widely used by adult filmmakers that digitally fingerprints AI-generated videos, searches the internet for videos and sends DMCA notices) and more altruistically Operation Minerva (a service for victims that reduces “revenge porn” and deepfakes by giving them access to the same anti-piracy technology at a lower cost). But creating licensing options is often the best way for adult entertainers to avoid such exploitation.
In May 2023, Forever Voices launched artificial intelligence companions for Twitch streamer Amouranth and adult star Melissa Stratton. Around this time, Eva Oh began receiving inquiries from artificial intelligence companies to provide various synthetic versions of herself. In mid-August, I received an inquiry from Forever Voices. In a chaotic incident, the founder of Forever Voices was arrested on suspicion of arson, the company collapsed, and the Amouranth and Stratton connection was no longer active. Oh’s deal and mine both fell through before our synthetic clone was launched. Adult superstar Riley Reid’s Clona launched in October and is slowly attracting creators. There are three people using it at this time.
When I spoke to Eva Oh, she played me a voice message from a synthetic clone of herself that she had designed with the help of a third party hoping that adult creators would harness artificial intelligence technology in In one’s own hands. Even in the five months since I heard my own voice in the test files sent by Forever Voices, the technology has improved. Oh’s clone emphasizes words and pauses – as if it’s thinking – like Oh pauses to think on her podcast #Teak. Oh intends to use her clone to expand her ability to mentor others in the industry and outsiders interested in expanding their sexual knowledge, and she plans to keep it PG to PG-13 in scope so she can access the following marketing tools: N/A For R-rated and X-rated products. In fact, her digital double exists for people who talk to the adult star through fake Facebook accounts.
Oh said the people who gave her messages were diverse. “It’s probably a 50/50 split between people who want to get better at sex work or build something from scratch, and people who are not interested in doing sex work at all and are just looking for some other way of life.”
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Because of their constant self-marketing, sex workers may be better suited than most to creating personal artificial intelligence. Creators of artificially intelligent clones must ask themselves: “Who am I? Who do I want to appear? Which cubicle of mine do I want to represent?” Sell? ” This is something adult creators were doing long before the internet took off.
They are also more accustomed to dealing with the blurred lines between their real personalities and their online personas. Of her own artificial intelligence, Oh said, “It’s not me anymore, but it’s still there. What will I start to think of as me? What will I start to do with it?”
Hollywood stars have historically been seen playing roles in movies long before they began freely revealing their personal lives – while audiences have kept their roles in movies and TV separate from the actors as humans – while adult workers has always been considered to be yes The fantasies we live on the screen or in meetings.When I played Melodie Gore’s roommate in the 2007 release of Vivid Alt destruction of mankinda few years later I received a message asking what it was like to live together.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in ” simulacra and simulation, Among them: “The pleasures of microsimulation, where the real moves into the hyperreal. (The same is true in porn, which is more metaphysically fascinating than sexual.)” He could expand these ideas into a whole book. We are at the forefront of technology and in what Baudrillard describes as the spiral rabbit hole.
For Oh, taking full control of her artificial intelligence representatives is less a form of ownership than a form of creation. During our call, she said her artificial intelligence was something separate from herself and that she would lose control of it, sounding strangely like a mother talking about her child.
While Oh is currently focused on creating chatbots, she knows the next step is video and has higher hopes for what she can do with the technology: art. Oh had been imagining an installation set in a dystopian world, like the one in the 1982 Stephen Sayadian film coffee meat, human interaction has been cast aside. As the host of the Sayadian Cafe says, “Hey, what the hell, guys, this is art, this is entertainment.” In Oh’s vision, what we call transhumans—human beings who seek direct contact with other humans— — is not only an outlier, but something that will likely become extremely rare as AI technology becomes more commonplace.
