I recently came across a short but very interesting video on YouTube about the sudden explosion in AI generative porn, and what it could mean for society. Produced by the German state owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle, it talks to the anonymous developer behind PornPen.ai, which is the first, and as far as I know still the only free and simple tool for generating AI porn online. He makes several interesting claims. Most strikingly, he predicts that AI could be generating the real deal in full length porn videos within just five years…
I wouldn’t be surprised if you could generate a full porn video in high quality in 5-ish years. It might even be sooner than that.
Let’s take a moment to consider what that would mean. As PornPen.ai already does with images, you could simply select a number of tags defining your sexual preferences, such as ‘MILF’, ‘blonde’, combined with a storyline. For example, ‘Boss has sex with his secretary in the office after she seduces him with her long legs, includes footjob, blowjob, cum on her glasses.’ An AI could train itself to recognize what storylines and scenarios, actions, and of course characters, you prefer. Now imagine this in VR porn. With certain biometric sensors, it could even detect your state of arousal. From this it could not only learn exactly what turns you on, but it could change the direction of the video it is generating accordingly. Researchers have already successfully predicted and then created AI generated faces from an indidividual’s brainwaves alone.
Will all this replace porn videos with real actors and actresses? I suspect that when the quality is of a sufficiently high level, then it might – at least largely. Many will object that such AI generated porn will lack the personal touch, the real human element that men must need to get psychological satisfaction from their porn viewing. I reported here on a sex worker who made that sort of claim last week, to argue that AI porn does not threaten her job. However, this ignores that there is a psychological and real human element built into AI generated porn, in that the AI is trained using real porn videos and images. The way a girl in an AI porn video reacts as your sperm splatters her face, the way she sucks your cock, or rides it, will be ‘learnt’ from tens of thousands of real adult videos. And of course, it is this which will lead to the huge ethical questions, and a real foothold for anti-porn campaigners to strongly regulare or even ban outright AI generated porn. Indeed, the sex worker I posted on last week, argues for AI porn regulation or ban upon similar grounds.
Unfortunately for those of us who want the future of porn tech to be regulated sensibly and fairly, and not through kneejerk reactions or hysteria, the rise of AI porn has come at the very time that moral panics over deepfake porn are reaching a crescendo. The media has been full of articles on the ‘Twitch deepfake porn scandal‘ in the last week, with many unsurprisingly linking it to the recent developments in AI generated porn. If AI generated porn gets lumped with non-consensual Deepfake porn, then it doesn’t look good for its future.
The other interesting prediction that the pornpen.ai developer makes is that rather than displacing sex workers, AI porn may empower them – allowing them to ‘weave their own stories’, without ever having to even take any sexy photos or videos of themselves. This sounds very much like the future of the metaverse I have been predicting, which is already taking shape with ‘adult VTubers‘.
