The development of technology, especially artificial intelligence, has brought about a major transformation in various industries, including the porn industry. With the advancement of technology, it has become possible to produce pornographic content based on animation or 3D models that use artificial intelligence to simulate and interact in a very realistic way.
Artificial intelligence is showing remarkable progress in generating photo-realistic images and videos that make models look almost identical. This poses a new challenge for porn stars, as technology can produce realistic sexual content without the need for real people to participate in the production process.
This development raises questions about the future of porn stars and the continuity of their careers. New technology threatens the jobs of many people in this industry, and questions are raised about ethics and labor rights in this new context. Furthermore, potential deception by creating content showing violence, rape, paedophilia or well-known figures.
“Dream Girls” break into the pornographic film industry
At an AVN event last year, Stephen Jones said his peers looked at him “like he was crazy” when he talked about the opportunities of artificial intelligence: “No one was interested,” The Washington Post reported.
Jones is the owner and operator of a group of pornographic websites. He got into the business in 1999 with a website dedicated to college student shoots. Within seven years, he was married with two children, running a portfolio of more than 30 porn sites and earning half a million dollars a month.
Then fate turned again for Jones, as his love of technology made him an early believer in the ability of artificial intelligence to change the world forever. He said that while watching the public’s reaction to the release of chatbots such as GBT Chat and others in recent years, Jones felt an excitement he had not known since he got his first computer as a teenager.
Jones said he called his old business partner, and the two immediately spent about $550,000. Jones worked on building an image generator that was trained on packages of freely available pornographic images, as well as thousands of nude images from Jones’ private collection.
This allows users to create what Jones calls a “dream girl,” by providing a description of the character’s appearance, pose, and location. The goal is to recreate a visualization from the user’s imagination.
According to the newspaper, Jones has expanded his user base to 500,000 people, many of whom pay to generate more images than the five allocated to free accounts per day.
He added that the site’s “distinguished users” produce pornographic material supported by artificial intelligence for 10 hours a day.
Ultimately, Jones sees the technology becoming interactive, with users giving instructions to lifelike robotic “actors.”
It is too early to call Jones’ project a success, according to the newspaper. He said that he is now breaking even, and all revenues go toward improving artificial intelligence.
As its customer base grows, so will the enormous computational cost of generating images. He pointed out that so far, his users have produced more than 1.6 million images, stressing that the step of making video clips is among his next calculations.
Jones is reportedly facing lawsuits from copyright holders, who claim that generative models are being trained on copyrighted content, and these lawsuits could lead to the use of free images being blocked.
