Does the future of porn lie in artificial intelligence?

For about a year now, the so-called text-to-image templates, namely tools capable of generating any kind of image - even the most bizarre ones - through simple text input and artificial intelligence, have definitely taken hold. The best known and most widely used are Dall-e 2 by OpenAI (the company that also runs ChatGPT), Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. All these applications, predictably, have powerful filters to prevent users from making sexually explicit content - typing 'naked woman' on Stable Diffusion, for instance, generates a black box. But of course, as Internet Rule 34 states, «if something exists in real life, or is made up, there will be a pornographic depiction of it.» It is therefore not surprising that shortly after the emergence of text-to-image tools, as many platforms sprang up that are able to generate pornographic images with AI. PornPen is one of the best-known sites, as its Make section contains different tags guiding users through the creation of a desired image. The phenomenon is enjoying great success: Reddit channels such as 'r/AIpornhub' and 'r/sdnsfw' now have 100,000 members each, who share their creations and give each other tips on how to improve these types of images.

The moral limits of AI in the porn industry

«Many users have stated that they enjoy PornPen because they know people aren't exploited». PornPen's founder told technology magazine Futurism. While this statement is formally true, because those people do not in fact exist, the artificial intelligence that generates them is trained on images and videos of live sex workers, often taken from other portals without their consent. Speaking to Dazed, porn actress Tanya Tate said that «deepfakes dehumanise sex workers: they trivialise us to nothing more than a puppet». This does not mean that artificial intelligence does not have a place in the mainstream porn industry: it is, for example, already being exploited by productions to make small improvements to real photos and videos, while in the future bots will probably be adopted by those adult sites that already allow a chatting experience.

If well thought out, recent developments in artificial intelligence could also give sex workers more opportunities, including the possibility of satisfying the most unusual and imaginative fantasies of users by generating photographic content with text-to-image templates. The same goes for fetishes that are impossible to recreate in real life - PornPen allows cyborgs, for example. «People want to look at porn and they want to customize it to their tastes», the platform's founder recalled. Dazed reports that what seems to be the latest innovation in the porn industry has already become very profitable. PornPen, for instance, offers its users a paid version, with which they can generate images faster and of higher quality - the platform is said to already have around 7,000 subscribers, for a revenue of over a million dollars a year. In recent months, forums such as Reddit or BlackHatWorld have seen an increase in users asking for advice on how to exploit the potential of artificial intelligence applied to porn, with the aim of publishing generated adult content on OnlyFans and Fansly in order to monetise it.

The problem of deepfakes in the porn industry

The fact remains that this technology is only in its infancy, and although the images are improving in quality and becoming more realistic, videos made entirely with AI are not yet possible. A few years ago, an application to digitally replace a person's face in a video was very popular on Reddit, especially since users had started to exploit it to make fake pornographic clips using the faces of famous actresses and other entertainment personalities. Among the most popular fake videos was one that used Cara Delevigne's face and another with Katy Perry's on the body of two porn actresses, a phenomenon that raised several debates about the difficulties faced by famous women nowadays - even before AI came along, many had suffered from the illicit dissemination of their videos and private images online.

It is probably only a matter of time before pornographic videos generated entirely with artificial intelligence arrive. As AI tools become more sophisticated, regulations will have to be put in place to counteract deepfakes and distinguish artificial from non-consensual content. In general, the debate around PornPen and similar platforms is part of a broader discussion on the increasing number of tools that enable the creation of realistic-looking yet fake content. Whereas until not so long ago generating fake clips required considerable graphic skills, today the same and sometimes even better results can be achieved with almost fully automatic systems that do not require any special know-how.