I'm posting this from a throwaway. Note that on HN favorites are public, but upvotes are private.
Porn seems like it'll be one of the big areas of ai in the short term. There've been multiple threads and comments about AI + Onlyfans and AI + porn and AI girlfriends on HN recently (https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=36888038, https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=36920987, https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=36849066).
I've heard that porn is the industry that pushes new technology forward - VHS, bluray, highly scalable video serving.
I made a site compiling together some of the AI porn that I made with the help of some people on Discord over the past few months.
I don't think AI will get rid of onlyfans. People spend on onlyfans for more than just the images.
I do think people will have access to unlimited image and video porn at some point in the coming decade, which will definitely change the porn industry.
The site shows what's possible with AI porn today - images both sfw and nsfw, audio, text, and some moving images. There's even more possible than just what's on the page, with lots of people are playing around with making animated gifs that are nsfw, there'll be animated 3d nsfw avatars, and so on. So the site isn't comprehensive at all. But it's still quite interesting.
My main objection to this site is that the prime example, “Mindy”, definitely does not look like “a girl next door” but rather looks like a model or like someone with near-perfect body measurements. The latter is not what people understand by “girl next door”. It’s more like “my dream girl next door” for some boys and men.
I’m sure there’s a “market” for machine generated images of “girl next door” and “boy next door”, but this one is not it (as of yet). The other image sets on this site are too small to judge anything.
This is kind of interesting as a modern correction to the, uh, "overproduction of elites". I'm not sure it's any better or less likely to bite us in the ass than was, e.g. sending the second son off to a crusade or a monastery.
I kind of feel like we haven't even fully gotten around to figuring out what it meant when we hit "all the porn (made by humans) is available all the time to anyone who wants it," which is universes away from when I was a lad coming of age at the time.
Like, can I attribute at least some of my interest in tech in figuring out how to program the VCR to record HBO at 2am (then sneak down to get the tape out before everyone wakes up?)
Sure!
People/mostly women do actually make a living from images like this. They do it safely (presumably) from home. Looks AI is going to even put the webcam girls out of business.
Honestly, they're young and I think it's great they make money by partying, but it wouldn't be terrible if they had to find a new career path before they turn 30. And it wouldn't be a great loss to society if selling your body suddenly stopped being more lucrative than selling your mind.
That being said, as the OP stated, this won't replace camming. Because people pay for cam girls to have a sense of power. Overheard in my yard recently: two girls from this crew discussing a guy who wanted them to insert real vegetables into themselves. Which they rejected due to health concerns. And offered to buy silicone vegetables. The cam-man apparently didn't want that so they were discussing how much to charge him for putting themselves at risk of infection. That guy, whoever he is, won't be happy with an AI girlfriend.
I dated someone who did cam work. From what I remember there were people who just wanted to feel like they were in control, but most of her clients were mostly after the feeling of intimacy of doing something with another person and talking to them. You hear similar stories of from other sex workers.
This is called "topping from the bottom". They're paying her, therefore they're in charge, and expecting to get the emotional payout they've put her in the position of giving them.
My gf was a professional dominatrix for 10 years and a stripper before that. The vast majority of men who engage those services are (by their own claim) just looking for - as you put it - feelings of intimacy. But it's not really limited to that. Why? Because their notion of intimacy is bound with ownership. This is a very difficult thing for us men to acknowledge, but it's fundamentally true. I mean: I can't ever be really intimate - completely intimate - with a woman I don't own, or who doesn't own me. The boundaries of power and control are so closely tied with the boundaries of sexual intimacy that the mere interplay between the two systems gives rise to an entire category of labor, i.e. sex work; which is differentiated into simple physical jobs versus psychological ones like domineering. This is what fucking billionaires pay for. It's not to be put in their place by a lowly "sex worker" - it's to be put in their place with proof that they are no better than this girl off the street.
Cam work is humiliating because you can't assail the dude. It leads to wrong conclusions on both sides about, for instance, who's actually in charge.
I think camgirls will survive because the interaction with their audience is part of the appeal - there is a parasocial aspect to it.
Wasn’t there a news article that a teacher lost a job over it.
Isn't that Rule Number 34 of the Internet or some such rule?
Every technological advance is first used to distribute porn. No exceptions.