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The tech bros trying to make a feminist case for AI porn

Much more of this to come I fear:

Developers of the new businesses claim they represent an improvement on web-cam businesses, where real women undress on camera and talk to men, because they remove the potential for the exploitation seen in parts of the industry. They also argue that AI performers do not get ill, do not need to have days off, do not get exhausted at the end of a shift, or feel humiliated by the demands made by clients.

“Do you prefer your porn with a lot of abuse and human trafficking, or would you rather talk to an AI?” Steve Jones, who runs an AI porn site, asked. “We hear about human trafficking, girls being forced to be on camera 10 hours a day. You’ll never have a human trafficked AI girl. You’ll never have a girl who is forced or coerced into a sex scene that she’s so humiliated by, that she ends up killing herself. AI doesn’t get humiliated, it’s not going to kill itself.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/06/rise-of-ai-girlfriends-adult-dating-websites

The market for this is in a febrile state:

There has been a rush of new businesses joining the sector in the past year. “AI products are appearing like mushrooms. It’s super dynamic right now – they appear, they burn out and they’re replaced by another 10,” Alina Mitt, of Joi AI, a site specialising in “ai-lationships”, said. “You need to be brave and strong to stay in this market. It’s like a bloody war.”

I suspect this is where the real ‘innovation’ will happen in terms of LLMs coming to prompt users, both as a consequence of being out of sight and the intense competition. How can the communicative and persuasive affordances of LLMs be leveraged to keep users engaged and willing to pay more? This is still an open question but I suspect it figures with a greater intensity in the lives of product managers in these 10 firms than it does for large corporate AI labs.

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