"At the core of every story we want to tell is a person," says Lee Gentry, founder of Night Visions, a firm that provides custom AI content to adult entertainers and agencies that run OnlyFans accounts. "We've been focusing very, very carefully on persisting the human form and getting that as accurate as possible."
Throughout recorded history, human beings have used emerging technologies to depict both sexual interactions and nude bodies—usually women. Shortly after the invention of movies, stag films were produced and traded in an underground market. Later, films with fleshed-out storylines would be shown in theaters, including the notorious porno-chic picture Deep Throat. VHS was quickly adopted by lower-budget adult film producers. DVD and widespread internet access further lowered barriers to both distribution and consumption of sexual content.
Historically, most of these films were made by men, for men—women directors and producers such as Ann Perry and Candida Royalle were outliers. But more recently, women have been able to take control of the distribution of their own images. Most of the erotic images and videos made today are made by the subjects themselves and distributed directly to consumers via clip sites and fan sites such as OnlyFans.
As you read this, adult performers are racing to stay ahead of the emerging technology—which includes Sora, a model with the ability to generate minute-long videos—by creating their own chatbots and on-demand image services.
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When I started performing in adult films in the mid-2000s, there was a focus on authenticity and availability. Consumers not only wanted to know that our orgasms were real; they wanted to know our personalities—something social media made possible. Real-time feedback from subscribers (or followers, or "friends," depending on the platform) told us which facets of our selves got the most traction. We, along with most users of social media—especially those who would go on to become influencers—began to lead with our most likable parts.
But where Hollywood and recording celebrities were offered verification on social media such as Twitter and Instagram, adult industry personalities were often left to fend for ourselves. This opened the door to a flood of imposters.
More than once in the early 2010s, fans came up to me at conventions to thank me for spending hours conversing with them over Facebook about their problems. They were grateful for my time and advice. It had meant so much to them. But I didn't have a Facebook account—and even if I did, I was far too busy for that. There was no way I could have done my job, had any kind of life outside of work, and spent those hours with the people who felt the need to unload their secrets and struggles into a chat window with a porn star.
But that's what users of fan sites expect today: an immediate response to messages, regardless of time of day. That, plus the work of creating custom content, pay-site content for mass distribution, and safe-for-work social media promotion, is often too much for a single creator.
Night Visions, Gentry says, is "positioning ourselves as a kind of a consensual form of concept capture." His company generates still images, based on text input, of the various content creators and adult performers who are signed up with the service. Due to the size of the company (four team members and a few contractors and advisers) this means a manual know-your-customer process that Gentry does himself.
As in professional porn studios, consent is key. Content creators coming from a background in the adult studio system, though, are keenly aware that bad actors can and will take our images and reuse them for anything from populating the more unsavory tube sites to scamming fans into sending money for fake dates or gift cards. Many of these issues are international, which makes it nearly impossible to put a stop to such practices. It's a game of Whac-A-Mole where your brand integrity and someone else's life savings are on the line.
An individual producing deepfakes may not even realize he's crossed a line. Imagine a customer who wants to see, as Gentry suggested in his demo during our conversation, a creator named Violet in a wedding dress on a beach. This customer wants to see it right now, and is willing to pay a premium. But he's in a specific kind of mood, and he isn't hearing back from Violet. Regardless, she'd need time to find the wardrobe and locate a photographer. The customer might—without considering the rights of the creator—have an AI photo generator make it for him. He might even post his creation on a forum. His desire is sated, he thinks nothing of his actions, and the creator whose likeness is used gets nothing.
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The line between public figure and private person is already blurry in the age of social media. "Ultimately the question of whether someone is a public figure is going to be case by case," says attorney Simon Pulman. "The argument that would be made is that any kind of content creator—whether they're on YouTube or TikTok—by putting yourself into the public sphere, you are probably a public figure in some respect."
The U.S. government, true to form, has been slow to tackle the issue. January saw the introduction in Congress of H.R. 6943, which references a Department of Homeland Security report from 2020 describing more than 100,000 nonconsensual deepfake nudes. The adult workers whose bodies were used for these deepfakes are not mentioned. "Are adult performers going to get the same protections as others?" asks Pulman. "They should, but we all know how certain things are viewed by certain parts of the country."
The adult industry does utilize Takedown Piracy (a subscription service used widely by adult film producers which can digitally fingerprint AI-generated videos, search the internet for them, and send Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices) and the more altruistic Operation Minerva (which serves victims of "revenge porn" and deepfakes by giving them lower cost access to that same anti-piracy technology). But creating an authorized option is often the best way for adult entertainers to avoid such exploitation.
In May 2023, Forever Voices launched the AI companions of the Twitch streamer Amouranth and the adult star Melissa Stratton. This is around the time Eva Oh started receiving inquiries from AI companies looking to offer various synthetic versions of herself. In mid-August, I received my own inquiry from Forever Voices. After a messy incident in which the founder of Forever Voices was arrested on suspicion of arson, the company folded, and the Amouranth and Stratton links no longer work. Oh's deal and mine both fell through before our synthetic clones launched. Adult superstar Riley Reid's Clona, launched in October, is slowly bringing creators onboard; a total of three are using it at this time.
When I spoke with Eva Oh, she played me a voice message from her own synthetic clone, which she designed with the help of a third party who wants adult creators to be able to take AI technology into their own hands. Even in the five months since I heard my own voice from the test file I'd been sent by Forever Voices, the technology has improved. Oh's clone emphasizes words, and pauses—as though it is thinking—in the same way Oh pauses to think on her podcast #teakink. Oh intends to use her clone to scale her ability to mentor both other people in the trade and those outside who are interested in expanding their sexual knowledge, and she plans to keep its scope PG to PG-13 so she can access marketing tools that are unavailable to R- and X-rated products. Her digital double is there, in effect, for the type of people who reached out to a fake Facebook account to speak with an adult star.
Oh says the people who message her are varied. "It might be a 50/50 split between people wanting to do sex work better or from nothing, and people totally not interested in doing the job at all, and just trying to find other ways to live their lives."
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Sex workers, due to the constant practice of marketing ourselves, may be better suited than most to create personal artificial intelligences. Creators of AI clones must ask themselves, "Who am I? Who do I want to present? What little compartment of mine do I want to sell?" This is something adult creators were doing long before the internet took off.
They're also more used to working with and around blurred lines between their real personality and their online persona. About her own AI, Oh says, "It's not me anymore, but yet it exists. What am I going to start to think is me? And what am I going to start to do with that?"
Where Hollywood stars have historically been thought of as playing characters in films, and only began to casually divulge their personal lives much later—while audiences maintained separation between their roles in film and TV and the actors as human beings—adult workers have historically been thought to be the fantasies we inhabit on screen or in session. When I played Melodie Gore's roommate in Vivid Alt's 2007 release Man's Ruin, I received messages years later inquiring about what it had been like to live together.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard had a handful of comments on pornography in Simulacra and Simulation, including: "Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno which is fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level.)" He could have expanded those thoughts into an entire book. We exist at the cutting edge of both technology and the spiraling rabbit hole of representations Baudrillard described.
For Oh, full charge of her AI representation is less a form of ownership than a form of creation. During our call, she spoke of her AI as something separate from herself that she will lose control over, sounding oddly like a mother speaking about her children.
While Oh is focused at this moment on creating the chatbot, she knows her next step—video—and has higher hopes for what she might be able to do with the technology: art. Oh has been imagining an installation set in a dystopian world, where, much like in 1982's Stephen Sayadian film Café Flesh, human interaction has fallen by the wayside. As the emcee in Sayadian's cafe says, "Hey, what the heck folks, this is art, this is entertainment." In Oh's vision, what we can call the hyperhuman—the human seeking to engage directly with other humans—is not only an outlier but something that may become startlingly rare as AI technology becomes more ubiquitous.
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