AI is the death of porn

I have a friend, let’s call her Ellie, who has a diverting side hustle: she sells erotic images of herself online: nude, semi-nude, basically nude but in roller-skates and smoking Cohiba cigars. That kind of thing. She does this on a site many people will know: OnlyFans, which has become the site for women (and it is mainly young women) who want to make money from exhibiting themselves for the sexual arousal of online subscribers.

Ellie knows that some people might find her part-time job indecent or ill-advised, she doesn’t remotely care. As she says, it’s her body, her choice. It’s all adults, she has no kids or employers to be shamed or scandalised and, besides, half the modern world is sexting nudes for free whereas she is making nice ‘prosecco money’, as she puts it. Win win.

Unfortunately the next time I meet Ellie for a glass of Italian fizz, I will have to give her some bad news. The days of easy wins are nearly over. Not because she is suddenly becoming less desirable (she is mid-career, as these things go), but because AI is coming for human erotica and ‘real’ porn. To replace it. From the most vanilla of Only Fans milfs to the glossy productions by pools in LA to the kinky stuff on the edge of legality. It is all doomed by the robots.

To realise this, you just have to go online and search terms like ‘AI porn’. Whatever way you browse – I advise doing this in privacy – your screen will be flooded with dozens, hundreds, thousands of images of young women (and some older women, and some absurdly muscled men) in all kinds of poses, locations, scenarios, clothes, or no clothes. All of these desirable big-eyed Eurasian women in tiny pink skirts and no underwear, all of these lavishly endowed cowboys taking a surprising afternoon shower in Disneyland, will be imaginary. They do not exist. They have been invented by Artificial Intelligence, sourced from the collective visual memory of mankind and whipped into fabulous new meringues of allure.

This is not a complete innovation, of course. AI has been creating ‘fake people’ for a while. What is new is the absolute verisimilitude and believability of these images. The best of them are now impossible to differentiate from real humans. The AI fake people are no longer living in Uncanny Valley, where something strange about them – a third leg, a wonky eye, a glitch in the matrix – gives the game away, they are walking amongst us, undetected. Indeed some pundits are wondering if sites like OnlyFans have already been infiltrated by Hotties Who Are Not Real.

What’s more, the AI is getting better and better at this, on a daily basis. Instance: until a few weeks ago visual AI had great trouble reproducing human hands (rather like human artists of the past; hands are hard to get right). Often you’d be looking at an image, and wondering if it was real, then you’d see the seventh finger and think, ‘Ah no’. And you called the hounds of desire to heel.

Suddenly, some of the robots seem to have got the hang of hands. They have also mastered every other bodypart. They are especially good at perfect, nubile breasts the size of beachballs, which would not exist in real life, but seem extremely popular online. Because some people apparently like breasts bigger than nature can actually provide.

And there, if I may put it this way, is the rub. This is why AI is going to kill off real Porn. AI porn – especially as moving images arrive, and they are just months away – is going to be vastly more interesting, enticing and various than workaday real erotica, which is hampered by so many human constraints.

For example, AI will be able to create bespoke porn, specifically tailored for the fetishes and kinks of every individual consumer. If you want to see a short freckly redhead girl with a face like Jennifer Lawrence having vigorous three way sex in a hot air balloon over Preston, AI can and will provide exactly that, as you relax at home. If you want to see your much missed ex-boyfriend being expeditiously tromboned in a Roman sauna, you will give AI a photo of your ex, and it will create the rest. Sit back and enjoy with a dirty martini.

The advantages of AI porn over real porn, when you consider it, are so huge they should be terrifying anyone in the industry. AI will create its own porn stars, who will never age, who will not need a salary, who cannot get ill, suffer impotence, get a coke habit. These porn stars will be given personalities, voices, quirks. They will personally talk to you, the consumer, like a girlfriend, boyfriend, drunken airline pilot, furry pet, whatever you wish. They will do whatever act you want them to do, with any thing, person, object, mustelid, and in any gravitational field. 

Going back to my friend Ellie, you can see why this dooms her enjoyable little career. She must have subscribers who, when watching her photos and vids, think, ‘that’s great, but I wish she had bigger nipples’, or ‘if only she was three inches taller’, or ‘I wish she could do all this spanking in an igloo, with a famous polar explorer of the past.’ AI will now move in and make its own Ellie, and ship her off to Greenland for her nipple-expanded adventures. It will replace Ellie, and make new Ellies who are ever-so-slightly better suited to fans of Ellie.

For the wider world, this also has momentous consequences. Many will cheer the death of the actual porn industry, with all its bleakness and exploitation. Pixels cannot be trafficked, abused, or raped. At the same time, we have to prepare ourselves for a flood of images which explore the darkest, strangest depths of human sexuality: stuff which would be entirely illegal if it involved real people. We will create laws to push back the tide, but I reckon these laws will likely fail. If internet porn was like opium, then AI porn will be like heroin. Many will get helplessly addicted.

After that, AI will come for the movies. Just you watch.