What happens when it becomes impossible to tell whether a sexy photo is real or AI generated? Some have speculated that it could spell the end of sites like OnlyFans, and of thots in general selling their images online, as it would break the trust that such ‘creators’ depend on. Well it seems we may be fast approaching that stage, as according to a Rolling Stone magazine article this week, AI generated nudes are already being sold on Reddit, passed off as images of real women.
“F/19 feeling pretty today,” Claudia’s post reads. She’s got straight black bangs and giant blue-green eyes, with just the socially appropriate amount of cleavage sticking out of her grey tank top. With her alabaster skin, delicate features, and vaguely indie hairstyle, she looks exactly like someone the average Redditor would obsess over, and indeed, the comments on Claudia’s post on the subreddit r/faces are all variations of, “hot” and “you’re very gorgeous.” Except for one.
“For those who aren’t aware, I’m going to kill your fantasy,” the comment reads. “This is literally an AI creation, if you’ve worked with AI image models and making your own long enough, you can 10000% tell. Sorry to ruin the surprise, I guess.”
Claudia is, indeed, an AI-generated creation, who has posted her (AI-generated) lewd photos on other subreddits, including r/normalnudes and r/amihot. She’s the brainchild of two computer science students who tell Rolling Stone they essentially made up the account as a joke, after coming across a post on Reddit from a guy who made $500 catfishing users with photos of real women. They made about $100 selling her nudes until other redditors called out the account, though they continue to post lewds on other subreddits.
So admittedly, the fake thots (thbots?) were busted pretty quickly, and made only $100 before doing so, but they were selling to a rather tech savvy audience, and it was rather more a casual social ‘experiment’ than a real attempt to enrich themselves. So it does serve as a proof of concept – scammers can already make money selling sexy AI generated images, passing them off (and themselves) as hot women.
The next day, The Washington Post followed up with this story, and talked to an ‘adult diaper fetishist’ who is using Stable Diffusion to create AI images that serve his particular kink.
New technology has for years been pioneered through porn, and AI-image tools have not broken from that pattern. Thousands of accounts are now registered in discussion boards and chatrooms devoted to the creation and refinement of synthetic people, the majority of whom resemble girls and women — a rapid shift that could upend a multibillion-dollar industry, undermine demand for real-world models and actors and fuel deeper concerns about female objectification and exploitation.
A systems administrator at a hospital in the Midwest — who, like the other AI-porn creators and viewers interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity — said he has been using Stable Diffusion tools to create fetish photos of adult women in diapers, and that advances in image quality have made it so their fakeness doesn’t matter.
“The average person who’s looking at this stuff, I don’t think they care,” he said. “I don’t expect the person I’m looking at online to be the person they say they are. I’m not going to meet this person in real life. … At the end of the day, if they’re not real, who really cares?”
This is the big question that is still to be settled, and the one that will decide whether AI porn does completely upend the existing multi-billion dollar porn industry, and its real studios, and real actors and actresses, along with the likes of OnlyFans. Will the average porn viewer really care whether the person he is jerking off to is real or AI? Whenever I see this question being discussed, it seems that people are very polarized and certain as to whether the answer is yes or no, and its perhaps 60/40 that people will care and always prefer real images of real women. But the answer is actually not quite so black & white. To return to the question posed at the beginning of this article – we are entering a world in which nobody will know whether any adult image is real or AI, so whatever we prefer, all we will have left is our own projection.
Featured image courtesy of The Washington Post.
