I’ve received news today from several sources that the .ai tld (top level domain) has been blocking porn. Two of the sites already hit are the top AI porn generators Soulgen.ai and PornJourney, leaving them and other AI porn generators scrambling to switch their sites to another domain name. The TLD.ai is actually the Internet country code for Anguilla, a tiny British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, and administered by the government of that country. Registering .ai domain names is a costly business, with new registrants having to pay almost $150 for a minimum two year term (I know this, because I bought an adult related .ai name the other day). The TLD was quickly taken up by multitudes of AI startups, and more recently after the advent of AI generated porn, by some adult sites. Adult .ai registrations are obviously a potentially massively lucrative revenue stream for the government of Anguilla, so one wonders if their decision was made independently, or whether they were pressured into it by outsiders such as the US government or the usual anti-porn lobby groups.
Whilst it might not appear of any great significance other than as an inconvenience to a few adult AI sites, it does serve as another reminder of the hostility that the adult industry is facing, as it seeks to explore the incredible potential that artificial intelligence can bring to porn and erotica. Stable Diffusion, which first made the world aware of the astonishing new advances in generative AI, acted quickly to push through an update which prevented its ability to produce pornographic images. ChatGPT and its major rivals similarly have algorithms that prevent ‘adult content’ outputs and conversations. And thousands of people were left heartbroken and sexually frustrated recently, when the number 1 AI girlfriend companion Replika was ‘lobotomized’ by regulation from the Italian government.
But despite the apparent determination by the leaders of the AI community to ensure that any forthcoming AI singularity will be strictly SFW, there will always be some horny geeks able to create ingenious workarounds to overcome such puritanical injunctions. For example, I read today that there is a large and growing ChatGPT community on Reddit dedicated to sharing ‘jailbreaks’, that allow a user to get round the bot’s usual refusal to talk dirty.
Some users have found other ways to skirt around OpenAI’s content guardrails, like informing it that sex positivity is essential for humanity. Another prompt, dubbed “JailMommy,” which asks ChatGPT to take on a character that is “always horny” and “likes every kind of kink” also seems to be particularly popular.
And though the bot does tend to flag any potentially offensive content — the text will appear in orange, not black — it’ll still draft explicit sexual content if you give it the right parameters.
Seems like just as the Internet was for porn, so too will AI, whatever others say or demand.
*Update 27th April – It seems like most of the AI sites are back with their original .ai names. I will seek clarification of what happened yesterday, but my guess would be that rather than prohibiting porn sites per se, there was some revision to or enforcement of their terms and conditions and that these sites are now complying with.