In the spring In 2001, when I was just 18, I embarked on a multi-year career as an online porn model and camgirl, giving paying clients access to my naked body in the form of photo sets and weekly cam shows that were broadcast in the members’ areas of my paysites. By today’s standards, my work was ridiculously low-fi. Most of what I sent out into the world was just soft-core stills. Even my cam shows only offered viewers the chance to watch an image update every 15 seconds or so, which basically gave access to a slow-moving digital flip book. Over the course of three and a half years, I’ve only shot two videos – and one of them was completely silent thanks to a defective microphone.
And yet people paid to see me naked. They joined the websites I modeled for. They paid me directly for private shows played on a custom link available to them and them alone. It seemed that nudity was enough to overcome any shortcomings in production value: the images could be bad, or blurry, or low-resolution, but as long as there were tits to look at, I had a marketable product.
That also seems to be the takeaway of the people in the AI porn camp. As image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E have gotten better at creating lifelike photos of people who don’t exist, some have heralded the beginning of the end for sex workers. Real People Porn? That was last year. On Twitter, a user named Alex Valaitis went viral after tweeting an AI-generated image of four women alongside Explanation that by 2025, “over half of the best OnlyFans accounts will be AI-generated models secretly run by men.” Another user echoed the sentiment and tweeted “It’s SO Over” featuring a gallery of four AI-generated photos of women in skimpy bikinis.
Aware observers have noticed that many AI porn fans seem to miss obvious issues with the images they’re sharing, including misshapen hands, bikini tops that defy the laws of physics, and teeth that don’t look entirely human. But even if or when AI manages to overcome this hurdle and consistently produce realistic erotic images that rival what you would find on top models’ OnlyFans accounts, the champions of AI porn will find that they can overly optimistic about the medium’s potential.
That is not to say that nobody will ever enjoy AI porn. After all, there are people who buy RealDolls, seemingly unfazed by the love dolls’ firm refusal to ever leave the Uncanny Valley. Men enthusiastically posting pictures of AI modelsUndeterred by their wobbly teeth and other bizarre AI narratives, they probably aren’t feigning their enthusiasm for these fake women. For people who don’t want to pay for porn, or who feel more comfortable masturbating to an image of someone who doesn’t exist, AI erotica could be a useful niche with its ability to endlessly repeat images in no time.
But the argument that only some people enjoy AI porn, let alone pay for it, seems rare. The biggest proponents of AI-generated erotica seem convinced that it will take precedence over images produced by human sex workers, to the point of completely dominating the industry. They seem confident that the only thing someone is looking for when searching for porn is a cluster of pixels roughly shaped like a naked human being. But my own experience in sex work suggests otherwise – and today’s OnlyFans top models don’t seem overly concerned that an AI script might come to their source of income.
