Inside the booming AI-generated porn industry

Scrolling through the homepage of the likes of made.porn is a familiar experience to anyone who’s ever visited an adult site. Women – mostly white and slender, and always with giant boobs – pose in various states of undress, sometimes engaged in sex acts, sometimes not, sometimes covered in cum, sometimes not. Look closer, though, and there’s something uncanny about the photos. Disjointed body parts manifest like Fifa glitches (a disembodied dick here, an extra hand there); facial features blend clumsily into one another; the same image appears over and over, each time sporting a new, slightly freakish, head.

In the world of AI-generated porn, these aren’t especially notable mistakes. Other tries have more in common with Cronenberg’s oeuvre than Riley Reid’s back catalogue (which isn’t to diminish the grotesque sexiness of body horror). They’re also not the best on offer.

Last year, a handful of sophisticated text-to-image models – most famously OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney – launched, making an artist, of sorts, out of anyone with a computer. Now you can envision any scenario, no matter how bizarre, type it out, and these generators will, sometimes relatively realistically, bring it to life. I’ll give you one guess as to what many people typed in first.

Although all of these generators have NSFW content filters (when you input ‘naked woman’ into Stable Diffusion, for example, it simply generates a black box), users have consistently searched for ways to get around them. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t have to search for long, and, as of recent months, they don’t even have to search particularly hard. Type ‘AI porn generator’ into Google, and a whole host of options present themselves. Some of the most famous sites, including Unstable Diffusion and PornPen, launched in August 2022, just weeks after their SFW counterparts.

Now, certain corners of the internet are inundated with these explicit images of women who don’t exist, as well as detailed advice on how to create – and improve – them. Unstable Diffusion’s Discord has over 400,000 members, while Reddit’s r/AIpornhub and r/sdnsfw – which is dedicated to NSFW images mostly generated by a hacked version of Stable Diffusion – each have over 100,000. It can be a lucrative business, too. To access Porn Pen’s ‘pro mode’, which gives you faster, unlimited, and higher quality generations, it’ll set you back $15 (£12) a month. Last month, Futurism reported that the site had almost 7,000 members, suggesting that PornPen is bringing in over a million dollars per year.

So, what are all these people using it for? PornPen’s anonymous founder told Futurism that people simply “want to look at porn and customise it to their tastes”. That may be so, particularly if they’re generating fetishes that are impossible in real life, like monster girls or giantesses. For others, it’s a novelty, and for non-paying users, it might just be a way of accessing an endless supply of free pornographic images. For some, though, it’s a money-making scheme.

In recent months, sites like Reddit and BlackHatWorld, a digital marketing forum and marketplace, have seen an uptick in men asking for advice about launching AI models on subscription platforms like OnlyFans and Fansly. If they try and fail – which they mostly do, due to verification processes that require photo ID – these men return to the forums with a new question. “I’m looking for alternatives to OnlyFans that will allow me to verify the account with my ID (an old, bald, real man),” one person posted in BlackHatWorld last month. “The goal is to post and monetise adult content generated with AI models (beautiful blonde women who don’t exist).” At the time of writing, nobody has replied to the post, but that’s not to say viable alternatives aren’t out there.

In fact, Sam, a pseudonymous student in his 20s, has apparently found one (he won’t tell me what it is, though, because “it’s a goldmine and I’d rather other people not know about it”). A regular poster on BlackHatWorld, Sam is the creator of a multitude of AI-generated models, all women, whom he employs as adult content creators. When we speak via Telegram, he’s understandably very cagey. He doesn’t specify how many models he has, but claims that each of them are averaging around $200 (approx £160) per day.

When he first created his models – using a mix of AI generators and his own coding skills – he attempted to set up accounts for them on OnlyFans and Fansly. Initially, he tried declaring that the models were AI-generated. “We’d verified our OnlyFans account using a real person and said in the bio that it was AI, but apparently it went against their terms of service,” he explains. It didn’t work out when he tried to pretend the model was real, either. “We tried hiring a real girl, but our AI model didn’t look like her at all, so when re-verification arose, we were fucked.”

OnlyFans didn’t respond to my request for comment, but in an email statement, Fansly confirmed its policy on AI-generated accounts: “Creators cannot impersonate any individual or entity, real or fictional, without explicit consent. If your content falls under these categories, it could be removed upon a compliance review.” It seems some slip through the net, though, as a quick search brings up a handful of, admittedly unpopular, accounts of AI-generated women. While some of these are home to multiple models, others just feature content of the same woman, like a traditional, human account.

With the latter – whether it’s an adult creator or an AI Instagram influencer – it’s often unclear whether fans, mostly men, know that they’re interacting with a computer-generated person. Many of these accounts do declare that they’re AI-generated, but that doesn’t stop disgruntled followers from crying ‘scam’ when they finally read the bio.

Having said that, Sam doesn’t declare that his models are artificially generated by a dude, and that, when followers talk to them, they’re actually talking to a team of paid chatters. Still, when I ask if he thinks people believe that the models are real, he says: “They’re men and they’re horny. Of course they believe the girl is real.” What sells it, he adds, is the videos he’s created. Sam’s models and photos are fictional, but to make the accounts more believable, he buys videos of real-life adult creators and then deepfakes in his AI models’ heads. He says his partner sources the videos from contacts in the adult industry, who know that their faces will be cut from the footage, but doesn’t specify whether they know exactly what the videos are being used for.

Whether it applies to this particular case or not, sex workers having their content stolen for deepfakes is, sadly, nothing new – and yet there’s little legislation to protect them. Speaking to Dazed last year, adult creator Tanya Tate said: “It’s literally our bodies at work. Deepfakes dehumanise sex workers – they trivialise us to nothing more than a puppet.”

Despite this, and the fact that he’s deceiving his followers, Sam says he doesn’t have any ethical concerns about what he’s doing. “Fake adult creators are here to stay,” he asserts. “I just have the first mover advantage, which I’m pretty sure will be gone in a couple of months. There’s demand in the market and we’re not the only supply; we’re not even the superior supply. Real girls still have an advantage, with videos and complex poses.”

Sam’s right that real adult creators still have the advantage – and they always will. It’s not just about videos and complex poses, either. A machine can never reproduce actual sensuality, nor can it offer the human connection that a lot of people seek these creators out for. That’s why, despite their niche popularity, it’s unfathomable to think of a world in which virtual girlfriends, sex robots, and sex doll brothels replace actual human-to-human intimacy.

That’s not to say AI doesn’t have a place in the online sex industry; in fact, adult creators have long enhanced their photos and videos with AI filters (as have most social media users, à la Bold Glamour), and AI assistants for chatting are likely to be widely adopted on subscription sites. The recent developments just open up more opportunities for creators, including to fulfil even the most fantastical, or grotesque, fetishes.

“They’re men and they’re horny. Of course they believe the girl is real” 

But adult accounts generated by AI should still be controlled by genuine sex workers. That’s because, even if the generated porn is fake, the generator was still trained on images and videos of real sex workers, all scraped non-consensually from vast internet content. As pseudonymous sex worker and peer organiser Frankie points out, it’s more than a little icky, then, if “tech bros are profiting off these giant databases of sex worker output”, and reaping the rewards of online sex work with none of the real-world consequences that come with it. (Although, as Mastercard just updated its policy for adult content to include deepfakes, and Meta extended its ban on adult content to include AI, they may still face financial discrimination, and their models might be subjected to social media censorship and deplatforming, just like human sex workers.)

While Frankie’s not keen to recommend using these AI generators – “more from a political position than advising people on their hustle,” she explains – she does believe that sex workers adopting the tools and thus “profiting off stuff trained on them” can only be a good thing.

One person doing just that is Sika Moon. Based in Berlin, she’s been working as an adult creator on the likes of OnlyFans, Fansly, and ManyVids since 2018, earning on average €40,000 (approx £34k) a month. At first, she loved it, but eventually she started to find the work laborious and repetitive. “Running the platforms, chatting to fans, making new photos and videos for all platforms and social media every day is a 16-hour-day, seven-days-a-week job,” she explains. “After five years of really good earnings, I decided it’s enough and stopped before completely burning out.”

Then, in May, she discovered the potential of AI. “It was an art project at first, and I just posted photos on Instagram,” she explains. “But seeing my fast growth and the support of my fans, I set Sika up as an adult model on platforms like Patreon and Fanvue.” Now, Sika has nearly 200,000 Instagram followers, and a few hundred on Patreon and Fanvue respectively. Her earnings aren’t as high as they were before, but, as she points out, she’s only been doing it for four months.

Sika Moon isn’t based on the real person who operates her (though the IRL Sika does make one appearance on her Instagram; she’s also experimenting with a new AI, Shylar Moon, who’s based on her real photos). Rather, she’s created using a mix of Stable Diffusion, Photoshop, and beauty apps like FaceApp. Her photos are often made in collaboration with a programmer called Patrick from Frankfurt, who runs the 158k-strong Instagram account @ai.build.art, and sells his skills via Patreon for a monthly fee of £8.50. At the time of writing, he has 150 subscribers, and appears to be popular with many of the big AI-generated adult creators. For example, Gina Stewart, the “world’s hottest grandma”, who utilises AI to bring back her younger self, of sorts, regularly uses Patrick’s services, and even worked with him on her recent cover for the AI edition of Autobabes magazine. Sika Moon also features in the issue.

Still, the technology is in its infancy, and even if photos are improving, realistic AI videos aren’t possible yet. So instead, kind of like Sam, ‘Sika’ uses real videos of herself, friends of hers, or other models with permission, and then renders Sika’s face on the videos. All of this is part of the fun. “Creating content has suddenly become a creative process again,” she says. “My audience loves porn, but they now enjoy and appreciate the beauty of my art, too. Knowing I’m a real girl behind this may help.”

The latter feels key when it comes to AI porn’s potential success. Even if Sika’s content is largely computer generated, she’s the one chatting to subscribers, often in a sexual context. “Just posting photos won’t get you anywhere,” says Sika. “The internet’s full of photos. [These tech bros] don’t understand how to give their dreamgirls a character, how to make them feel real, nor how to connect with their subscribers.”

Without talking to a creator, though, and unless they reveal who they are, it’s impossible to know whether there’s a sex worker behind the hot AI girl’s account, or just some tech-savvy guy. As more of these creators crop up, a culture of suspicion is emerging – and it’s targeting sex workers themselves. “In the past, you might be accused of catfishing, but now that AI is capable of generating photos that pass as human, sex workers have been facing accusations of being fake,” says Liara Roux, sex worker, writer, and author of Whore of New York. In January, Roux found a 4chan thread that claimed a photo of her was AI-generated. The anonymous poster had circled portions of the image that ‘proved’ it was fake, and shared it with the caption: ‘Why are we arguing about this AI-generated whore?’ “I’m well-established, so there’s plenty of proof of my existence,” Roux tells me. “But, for newer sex workers, it’s more challenging.”

“The internet’s full of photos. [These tech bros] don’t understand how to give their dreamgirls a character, how to make them feel real, nor how to connect with their subscribers” – Sika Moon, adult creator

It’s hard to think of a solution that’ll curb this suspicion. More online censorship targeted at ‘fake’ AI-generated creators will only negatively impact sex workers. Besides, as it does for Sika, AI can offer new opportunities for adult creators, including anonymity and the fulfilment of impossible fantasies – not to mention that there’s demand for AI-specific porn – so a crackdown wouldn’t be the answer in the first place.

As AI tools become more sophisticated, though, regulations do need to be put in place to tackle deepfakes (in the UK, they’re allegedly coming in the Online Safety Bill) – but they need to differentiate between fictional and non-consensual content. Frankie, the sex worker and peer organiser, is also concerned that, like with FOSTA-SESTA in the US, new legislation may target platforms, as opposed to perpetrators of the latter. “It would be a real shame if legislation targeted sites like Rule 34, instead of a badly run generator, or for fan art to be caught up in this,” she says. “We’d be in a really bad place if sexy drawings of, say, Iron Man start to be criminalised.”

Really, though, the technology is so new that AI porn is still the wild west. Therefore, pontificating over how to identify the intent and authenticity behind AI-generated adult accounts is a fool’s game. For now, it falls on users to be media literate enough to not be tricked into thinking an AI model is a real woman, and, if they do want an AI model, to either be aware that they could be sexting some random guy, or to go to the effort to try and find a creator who’s clearly a sex worker.

In the end, real porn by real people will always come out as the winner. But, in this fantasy world created by sex workers, what’s real anyway? “AI might be compared to a McDonald’s chicken nugget, carefully engineered to trigger an intense response in the brain, whereas the experience of hiring a high-end sex worker might be more like going to a farm-to-table fine dining restaurant,” concludes Roux. “With each experience, there is a carefully calibrated performative aspect; the fine dining spot is simply better at affecting reality.”

Header image via @ai.build.art and @deannaritter98

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