"The AI Porn Boom Came Early—and Finished Fast"

It’s not often that a mainstream tech site addresses the state of the AI porn industry quite so directly as PCMag did last week, so I thought it was worth commenting upon. Not because it’s a good article in any way – it appears incoherent and largely false. But it does highlight something interesting and that does seem to be true. The AI porn boom has not finished (despite the misleading title), however, the initial craze for pornstar and OnlyFans models to clone themselves as AI girlfriends that fans could interact with, has certainly faded.

Indeed, this is virtually the only part of the article it gets right. Snapchat influencer Caryn Marjorie was probably the first ‘celebrity’ to be cloned as an AI influencer at Caryn.ai. When her chatbot launched in May 2023, Caryn was boasting that within a week she was earning so much from simps eager to pay to talk to her AI clone that she was on schedule to be earning $5 million a month. She quickly became so notorious that she claimed she was receiving numerous death threats. Those lofty financial expectations didn’t materialize as the competition exploded. Not so much from other influencers and pornstars offering AI chatbot clones-of which there were indeed many as the PCMag article notes-but from an increasing number of AI companion and erotic roleplay services featuring countless fictional AI characters for NSFW chat, as well as giving users the ability to generate their own tailormade companion.

The article begins by taking the reader back to the biggest annual adult industry bash at the start of this year (the AVN awards). It relates how the audience would boo when adverts for an AI influencer cloning site (Joi.ai) would appear.

In January, 45,000 adult industry workers gathered at the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas for their biggest event of the year, the 2026 Adult Video News (AVN) Awards Show. Between announcements for the winners of categories like Best Anal Sex Scene, industry sponsors ran advertisements on a big screen. One ad featured AI-generated versions of four prominent porn performers; Nina Elle was portrayed as a fairy perched on a giant photorealistic penis.

The crowd booed.

The ad was for Joi.ai, a website where everyday people can talk to AI-generated “digital duplicates” of their favorite adult content creators. In the audience was Texas Patti, a German porn actor often cast as a MILF, who had signed up to be a brand ambassador for the site after it launched at AVN in 2024. “It was a shitshow,” Patti recalls. “Like, ‘Boo, fuck you! We don’t need you!’ The whole audience was super against it.”

The piece then goes on to correctly summarize how a number of Joi.ai competitors have fallen by the wayside, but glosses over the fact that joi.ai itself appears to be doing pretty well (evidenced by the fact that it could pay for a large number of adverts playing at the AVN awards). And ultimately, it tries to bring in the cliched and reassuring take that porn consumers will “always prefer the real thing”. In fact, a more realistic conclusion to draw is that pornstars – real or cloned – are finding it difficult to compete with the ever more realistic and interactive AI companion services (one site-AiAllure-last week announced the introduction of live video chat with gesture recognition). The beauty of a fictional or self-generated AI companion is that you are limited only by your own imagination and desires, not by the choices of a porn studio…or for that matter a pornstar.

This latter point was even highlighted in the article, in quoting from the well-known adult actress Lexa Luna and her aversion to doing anal sex scenes not only in real life, but in allowing her AI clone to do so.

Others, like porn actor Lexi Luna, found the process of creating an accurate AI double challenging.“I probably have some of the strictest limits in porn,” she tells me in September. She doesn’t do anal scenes, so neither could her AI. Her fans know she previously worked as a teacher, so her AI must use proper grammar.

The messy article that begins with a misleading title thus ends with a false but comforting conclusion. The truth is that AI porn is doing very well and continues to grow and advance every day. Recently, leading AI figures have been speaking of a AI tsunami that is about to hit, and for which society is completely unprepared for. Although speaking principally about predicted massive job losses as AI replaces almost all white-collar work, the same is about to happen to the porn industry. It’s clear that real adult performers, refusing to do anal and insisting on duck filler lips and forearms inked like a brick layer’s, can increasingly no longer compete with