Demonstrations of Sora, which is OpenAI’s new text-to-video generator, were released online last week, and quickly met with the same worldwide astonishment we saw a little more than a year ago in response to text-to-image generators, and ChatGPT. It represents the same kind of seemingly sudden and gigantic leap forward in the capabilities of AI, that took most of us completely by surprise. Of course, the first question that I and no doubt my readers want to be answered, and hell probably most of the male population too, is how soon until we get this quality for an AI porn video generator? Other questions follow close behind. The biggest, in my opinion, is – will governments even allow us to have a NSFW version of Sora?
The Current State Of NSFW AI Video Generation
A handful of the top AI porn generators currently offer ‘animations’. Mostly these are just very brief gif-style animations in which the subject moves a little, or the background shifts as though the camera was moving. However, one of the sites that claimed to have the first ‘AI porn video generator’ – SexyAI – appears to have a little bit more than the others. Although the animations that their generator produces are not that much better, what is impressive is that at least you can ‘guide the action’ to a small extent. For example, you can enter the prompt – ‘dancing blonde girl’, and you will (usually) get a brief animation of a dancing blonde girl. However, not only is it still limited, but rather hit and miss as well. For example, when prompting it to create a female who is ‘lifting up’ her top or her skirt, it usually gives just a general lifting motion, as in the animation produced by it below, or will even generates a woman lifting weights in a gym.
How Soon Until The First Sora Like AI Porn Video Generators?
Sora will not be an open source AI, just as ChatGPT isn’t open source. And just as ChatGPT cannot be used for NSFW purposes (leaving aside ‘jailbreaks’), neither will Sora. In fact, Sora is currently only available to a limited number of researchers, for the very reason that OpenAI want to be certain that it cannot be used for any unwanted purposes. Sora is expected to be released commercially at some point later this year.
Whether or not Sora itself can be ‘made open source’, it obviously demontrates a massive breakthrough in AI video generation, and open source rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Gemini AI will surely catch up before too long. And when that happens, we will start to see cloned versions. Most of the top AI porn generators are cloned versions of Stable Diffusion. So theoretically, the amazing examples of Sora we’ve been gawping at over the last few days, could be matched by a NSFW AI video generator within a year.
However, things are unlikely to be that simple. First of all, video generation of the quality of Sora is likely to take up a huge amount of resources, that perhaps only a big tech company could afford. A redditor at r/StableDiffusion, who sounds pretty educated upon the matter, expressed it like this :
The compute resources needed to create such 1 minute videos has to be totally nuts. It must be a cluster of GPUs with hundreds of GBs of VRAM working in tandem. (Even though they haven’t published anything about how it actually works, I dare to say it’s not just a video diffusion model but probably many things connected, there’s very likely a vision LLM coordinating the whole thing, refining it.) I don’t think we can have such thing running locally. At least not for 4-5 years. I think we need graphics cards with at least 128GB VRAM becoming commodity for that to happen, and then probably one would be not enough to run a “lite” version of this.
So while open source models such as Stable Diffusion were quickly democratized and used for all sorts of NSFW uses, it’s unlikely to be the case for the AI tech behind Sora. Think about how frequently the top AI porn generators come back with ‘server overloaded’ messages, even for paid members, and think how much worse it would be for true video generation.
And it’s not just the immense resources needed for each video generation that will be a problem, it’s the fact that the AI video generator model will need to be trained upon countless porn videos, which similarly will require a humungous amount of resources.
One estimate I’ve been given is that a single Sora quality adult video (one minute in length) would cost perhaps $200 to create. At that price, it’s hard to see how a NSFW AI video generator could be profitable. Its use will likely be limited to pay sites selling short AI videos depicting real models, perhaps in scenarios and sex positions that are not possible in reality. Popular OnlyFans creators may do the same.
Perhaps a site like Pornhub.com might be able to pull it off, and use its wealth and vast content library and train and host the first true AI porn video generator. Up until now, most of the leading NSFW AI image-making tools have been the work of solo developers, or small teams, usually with no prior connection to the adult industry (DeepFake.com owned by the veteran Steve Lightspeed is a notable exception). Porn video generators may reverse this trend, and the biggest porn sites and studios may take over. In fact, there was speculation last year that the buy out of Pornhub by an investment firm may have been driven by the profit potential of AI porn.
Potential Legal And Regulatory Challenges
We’ve seen a steadily building backlash against AI porn, or even growing hysteria, over merely still images. Demands for strict regulation have grown to a crescendo after deepfake porn images of Taylor Swift went viral on X/Twitter. Imagine if they had not been pics, but Sora quality hardcore pornographic videos? Similarly, governments and law enforcements will understandably be alarmed at the prospect that such photorealistic video generator tech could soon be used to pump out illegal material. They are likely to want to have this legislation in place before the first real porn video generators appear online. And as they are unlikely to appear in the next 1 to 2 years, for the reasons outlined above, they will have the opportunity to do so.
In fact, such legislation may be here sooner than you think. According to a recent article at ‘Axios Detroit‘, Democratic state lawmakers in Michigan are planning to ‘ban AI porn’. State Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou is the lead sponsor of a package that would heavily regulate not just deepfake porn, but any explicit AI material. She told Axios – “We’ve been drafting a bill, putting regulations on any type of explicit images created by AI, and it should be ready within the next few weeks for us to introduce.“. Perhaps it’s just a badly worded article, and that the State Representative was referring only to the creation of explicit AI deepfake images. But on the face of it, it would appear she has in mind more than simply making it illegal to share deepfake porn.
So I’m pretty pessimistic about the future of erotic AI video generators. It seems to me unlikely that governments are going to content themselves with the legal approach that is currently being adopted – criminalizing the sharing of non-consensual deepfake AI porn, as well as extending existing virtual CP laws to cover AI-generated material. At the very least, AI porn making tools will likely face strict regulation everywhere in the next year or two, and together with the exorbitant costs of running a video generator, it will likely be some time before a NSFW Sora will become a license to print money, and certainly not for the independent developers who currently dominate the AI porn market.