Hackers go hard: Is AI porn about to take over?
The possibilities of GenAI porn for consumers, gooners, and industry insiders.
Side quest alert: I’ve just got back from the Porn Film Festival Vienna (PFFV). For four days I enjoyed galettes in an Art Nouveau cafe; sipped instant coffee on a rooftop terrace with my phone on Do Not Disturb; walked through the fuck-off, 400 acre gardens of a Habsburg Family palace; and watched hours of experimental porn.
The porn in question? A full-length Maria Beatty film complete with high priestess orgies, period sex and spoken word performed by Lydia Lunch; a short exploring Catholic trauma via the dildo-ification of religious material; and an NSFW Sims mod centred around NSFW guided meditation (that’s just the short list of my faves).
Alongside what tallied up to literally hours’ worth of porn, there were lectures and workshops, including one all about the future of AI in the porn industry. As I am in my flop era, I could not attend – I arrived in Austria late the night before and was so discombobulated from travelling that I didn’t make it into the city centre until after the workshop had begun.
However, I was more than a little intrigued. After all, as a writer, my doom-scrolling routine includes reading LinkedIn post after LinkedIn post discussing the existential threat of ChatGPT to my industry. Through some Googling I uncovered the facilitator of the workshop-that-got-away: Stefan Yazzie Herbert, a creative director, artist and sex positive activist, as well as a member of the design team at PFFV. I knew I had to speak to him and discover more about how, exactly, the forces of AI are impacting erotic content.
Speaking over Zoom – him in Vienna, me back in London – what he had to say surprised me. AI has been used in the porn industry for quite some time, just not in the ways the average person might expect. “If you think about it, there are millions and millions of videos on tubesites – millions and millions of titles,” he explains. “The scenarios are often the same thing, you know, ‘Redhead gets pounded by double cock’, but somehow all the titles are unique. That’s where AI is used.”
And it’s not just name generation, AI is used for other background tasks such as thumbnail creation. There’s also AI employed to do video content analysis – you know, so you can scroll through a handily annotated video timeline that lets you know just where that reverse cowgirl scene is. Another emerging space being infiltrated by AI are the chats between OnlyFans creators and their fans, an activity which is often outsourced and which is increasingly becoming automated, to mixed results. “AI can fuck it up and if someone realises it’s AI and not the creator, your customer is gone,” he explains.
For the time being, Yazzie Herbert doesn’t see generative AI replacing traditional porn. “In mainstream media, it's much more common for GenAI to be threatening the livelihoods of artists and, increasingly, a lot of influencer jobs are now being done by AI influencers. That's not really the case in porn.” This, he explains, is due to porn viewing habits: longer clips, which are often consumed in a non-linear way. Viewers skip through a video and only specific scenes are watched – what is seen and what isn’t, depends on the viewer’s personal preference and how horny they are while watching. AI on the other hand: “is really bad at generating things that are longer than, like, 10 to 20 seconds”.
Rather than replacing real performers within porn, GenAI is currently being used to thrash out new and distinct genres. “For example, there’s the Gone Wild scene, where people take existing image-generation tools like Dall-E and try to trick them into making naked pictures,” he explains. “It depends on the update, or when the tool was made – sometimes the tools will show nudity or specific acts, but other times they’ll kind of beat about the bush and it can create something really funny.”
Beyond that there are AI-generated erotic images that he terms “generic schlock” – mostly white, conventionally attractive women doing “the pin-up pose” – or ‘hyper porn’. Nope, not really anything to do with hyperpop, ‘hyper porn’ relates to the weird and wacky world of hyperbolically augmented erotic imagery. Or, as Yazzie Herbert puts it: “The butts are bigger than butts can be, the women have five tits, and the sexual level is turned up to 100, which is what porn already does.”
There are, of course, ethical concerns when it comes to AI and porn, among the best known being deep fakes and piracy – situations where sexual images featuring a person’s likeness are made and distributed. For example, a fake image of a naked celebrity may circulate online, or an OnlyFans creator might see an account crop up which rips off their content and uses their likeness for financial gain. Both are horrible situations, ones which are obvious abuses of consent and which can have profound emotional and financial ramifications.
In these instances, Yazzie Herbert encourages accountability from erotic content platforms (so that pirated accounts can be deleted) as well as networks which host AI models (so that nude images of specific individuals cannot be generated without their consent). “With regulation, de-platforming and good rules, you can get these issues somewhat in order,” he explains. It is, however, an imperfect solution. “It’s Pandora’s Box, the technology exists and we can’t put it back.”