Already a subscriber?Dozens of porn stars in lingerie lined the convention hall, but Tom Maupin, 72, knew exactly who he was there to see. The retired schoolteacher had flown from Omaha to Las Vegas, purchased a $US85 ticket and waited in line with hundreds of other porn fans in hopes of getting some face time with actress Jill Kassidy, 27.
Since the first AVN “expo,” in 1998, adult entertainment has been overtaken by two business models: Pornhub, a free site supported by ads, and OnlyFans, a subscription platform where individual actors control their businesses and their fate. In some cases, the engines themselves are trained on porn images whose subjects didn’t explicitly agree to the new use. Currently, no US federal laws protect the victims of non-consensual deepfakes.
Now AI is here, and players across the industry are rushing to figure out what it means for business. Watching the public react to the releases of OpenAI’s conversational bot, ChatGPT, and image engine, DALL-E, in recent years, Jones felt an excitement he hadn’t known since getting his first computer as a teen, he said.
So with help from an angel investor he will not name, Jones hired five employees and a handful of offshore contractors and started building an image engine trained on bundles of freely available pornographic images, as well as thousands of nude photos from Jones’s own collection. Next comes AI-generated video – “porn’s holy grail,” Jones said. Eventually, he sees the technology becoming interactive, with users giving instructions to lifelike automated “performers”.
Sometimes they’re successful. The prompt “adult woman with no breasts”, for example, may render a character that looks childlike. In 2006, he bought the San Francisco Armory, a castle-like building in the city’s Mission neighbourhood, and turned it into a studio where his company filmed fetish porn until shuttering it in 2017.Now, Acworth is working with engineers to train an image-generation model on pictures of BDSM, an acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.
“We don’t want to be in a position where everyone else is able to spit out amazing content and we can’t.”For people in adult entertainment, arguing for your industry’s right to exist can be part of the gig. Jones and Acworth said AI porn is a desirable new option.“That’s just weird. It’s not a real person,” said Ben Schwartz, 34, who was standing next to a line of fans waiting to meet famous performers from the website Brazzers.
Lana Smalls, a 23-year-old performer whose videos have been viewed 20 million times on Pornhub, said she has had colleagues show up to shoots with major studios only to be surprised by sweeping AI clauses in their contracts. They had to negotiate new terms on the spot.In December, the union representing mainstream television actors ended months of negotiation with major studios by approving a new contract that included regulations around the use of AI likenesses.