Pedro Silva, the fictitious name of a 22-year-old Brazilian, still does not know if he is enjoying sexting (exchange of messages with sexual content). On the one hand, he really likes the appearance of her interlocutor and the interest she shows in the conversation. On the other hand, he feels there is a lack of authenticity. And he is not wrong: the woman he talks to is not real. She was created by himself in an artificial intelligence program for an adult content website.
What Silva initially described as a “disturbing” experience has become a subgenre of porn that is growing in popularity. These are chatbots, like the virtual assistants that can be found, for example, on the travel websites of large corporations, which simulate and replicate off-color dialogues. Programs such as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, initially designed to generate the images that the user requests in writing (“draw me a dog dressed in a suit”), have been modified to create adult content, including videos. Pornography generated by artificial intelligence is spreading at record speed, creating increasingly realistic characters and raising almost philosophical questions about human sexuality and our relationship with pornography.
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Easy access to the tools to develop these programs, fueled by the curiosity generated by ChatGPT, has attracted some who see in them the opportunity to apply them to adult entertainment. Most AI companies share their code to encourage programmers to create their own programs, which has quickly led to uncensored clones of these software.
John Smith, also the fictitious name of a 28-year-old engineer in the United States, moderates the Discord Unstable Diffusion community, a free version of Stable Diffusion, AI image production software. Smith suffers afantasía, a condition that prevents him from seeing and creating images with his mind—even though he can see them in real life—and he was relieved to know that there were programs that allowed them to be generated from text. He refers to his computer as his “prosthetic imagination.” Although such software is not explicitly intended for porn, Smith acknowledges that his attempts to use it for that purpose were almost immediate. Unstable Diffusion officially launched in August 2022, the same month as Stable Diffusion, although it was launched later due to issues with the crowdfunding campaign. “Everyone knew it would end up being used for porn; the question was when,” says Smith.
It wasn’t easy at first, but the user community took it as a challenge. “It was a race to make genitals that didn’t look like soup,” she jokes. Smith explains that at first it depended on luck: “It was like combining porn with a slot machine. I would press the button to see if the next image was realistic and it would excite me.” He is proud to have been one of the first to achieve a recognizable image of a subgenre of hentai, anime porn. In July, the platform’s CEO stated that they generate more than 500,000 images a day. Smith has personally contributed to over a thousand, coming from the requests channel on Discord.
Taylor Swift was one of the first celebrities to fall victim to the evil uses of artificial intelligence: artificially created pornographic images of her flooded the internet in January. Amy Sussman (Getty Images)
Jack Peters, pseudonym of a 32-year-old American IT expert, is also a member of the community. His first foray into AI-generated porn was through a free app on his cell phone, but he only achieved realistic content by discovering more powerful programs. “When I started, I didn’t understand the prompts well [comandos en los que se basa la IA para generar contenido]”, Explain. In her first attempt to create images of naked women, she only obtained “gruesome amalgams of flesh,” but she recognized the potential of these tools to generate quality images.
“From the first attempts I was hooked, despite how horrible they looked,” says Peters. Specializing in producing digital art or anime images, he initially found it difficult to generate anything realistic. Instead, he claims that any fantasy can now be created without much effort. “With tools like ControlNet, you can position a doll however you want, and the model will generate a person with that exact pose.”
What began as a personal tool for Smith and Peters has become a thriving business. On Instagram it is increasingly common to find profiles of virtual characters with little clothing and in provocative poses. Although the platform already has influencers created by AI such as Lil Miquela o Shudu (in 2022 there were 35 verified accounts of characters created by artificial intelligence), a growing presence of sexual accounts of this type is observed. An example is Emily Pellegrini, with more than 279,000 followers. The check @gorkamalewhich features male characters, has almost 37,000 interested users.
These figures find refuge mainly in Fanvue, a competitor of OnlyFans that accepts creations made using artificial intelligence. The terms of use establish, in any case, that the content must pass a test to evaluate compliance with the rules and make it clear that it does not represent anyone real. On Patreon, fans support their favorite AI character by purchasing erotic photo packs.
Jürgen Schmidt, the name used by one of Emily’s creators, explains that the model’s characteristics emerged from a consensus among the team members. “Her name is a kind of inside joke: we all like San Pellegrino water [popular agua con gas de los Alpes italianos]”, Explain. The model has 4,600 followers on Fanvue, where generated images of her naked are shared. Despite this, Ella Schmidt confesses that her creation does not excite her: “For me, the simple fact of knowing that it is not real makes it unnatural. But it doesn’t seem strange to me either. People use their imagination, that’s what has been happening for a long time with hentai.”
The co-creator states that they seek to perfect Emily as much as possible: “It’s a fun project; We want to see how far we can go,” he highlights. He sees no problem in the possibility of contributing to unattainable beauty standards and argues that these standards have already been established by women who exist in reality: “Social networks were already a false world, obsessed with perfection. “Emily is not much different from Kylie Jenner.” For him, artificial intelligence is the future of the industry: “It will be the best porn in history, even more so when it is combined with virtual reality technologies.” While he acknowledges inherent risks, such as addictive potential, Schmidt believes the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks. His optimistic prognosis suggests that thanks to AI it will be possible to put an end to the most harmful facets of the industry: “All the bad side of porn can be eliminated. In the future, no one can be forced to participate in it.”
In a similar format to ChatGPT (which does not allow adult content), other text generators explore intimate conversations with users, based on a character that may or may not have been created by the user. Brazilian Pedro Silva believes that these programs are still very primitive. “It doesn’t sound natural, sometimes it makes grammatical errors, it says things that don’t make sense or that aren’t even related to the previous sentence,” he explains.
Outside of the adult sphere, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company that brings together WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, is testing its own chatbots based on celebrities such as Kendall Jenner or rapper Snoop Dogg. Earlier this year, influencer Caryn Marjorie launched a virtual clone of herself, but she had to revise it when she noticed that users were starting to steer the conversation toward sexual topics.
What Marjorie was trying to avoid is exactly what porn actress Riley Reid is looking for, who has just launched her own platform, Clona, for any industry professional who wants to offer their followers the experience of talking to them. Reid’s company analyzes each client’s speech and creates a chatbot with the same way of expressing themselves, without censorship, aimed at an audience over 18 years of age. For $30 a month, unlimited conversations with adult film actresses are simulated.
Image generation programs have also made the problematic creation of deepfakes possible. The term defines any medium in which the protagonist’s face is replaced by another, including their movements, to represent people doing or saying things they have never done or said. In recent times, videos of celebrities (from former President Barack Obama to actor Tom Cruise) dancing or making statements that they have not made in real life have spread online.
La influencer Caryn Marjorie.Gregg DeGuire (FilmMagic)
A report from September 2019 It was already alarming: only 4% of these creations available on the Internet were not pornographic. In September of last year, a group of 26 minors were accused of using the same technology to digitally undress classmates, also minors, in the Spanish municipality of Almendralejo (Badajoz). Nina Jankowicz, the former director of the US Disinformation Governance Board, was also a victim of these programs in retaliation for her attempt to control fake news. Last January, Taylor Swift saw Twitter flooded with AI porn featuring her face and body.
Henry Ajder, an expert in ethics for artificial intelligence and author of the cited report, maintains that the popularization of deepfakes compromises the power of consent. “It is possible that all videos made with deepfakes do not have it,” he warns. As part of the study, Ajder infiltrated a group of producers of this type of videos and discovered that 60% generated non-consensual porn starring women who were part of their daily lives.
“I’m worried that non-consensual pornography will become the norm,” he laments. Ajder highlights the importance of criminalizing the lack of consent in these media, but believes that regulation will come from the consumer: “I hope that the majority of people do not want videos made without consent.” Members of Unstable Diffusion on Discord agree: they have a zero-tolerance policy on deepfakes and expel anyone who asks for help making them. Also, like most creators, they regulate their content and prohibit elements such as the appearance of minors or images of sexual violence. However, Ajder sees the evolution of this technology pessimistically. “What used to require very specialized tools is today available to everyone,” he laments.
The researcher explains that although deepfakes have become popular as conventional content, from the beginning they were conceived for sexual purposes. “These videos originated from a thread of [el foro] Reddit in which explicit content was requested from celebrities who had never done such a thing,” he explains. And she predicts a bleak future for famous women: “It will be virtually impossible to be a woman and public figure without there being porn with you as the protagonist.”
2024-03-02 09:43:09
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