Maybe they're using Gemini; it's possible to disable censorship in Gemini, which combined with a custom base prompt can get the model to say almost anything.
I don't want to link to the thread because the author didn't seem to want to, but someone in another thread said Llama 3 with a few-shot prompting to get the model to respond, using their actual DMs with fans.
If you keep watching there's another feature that actually generates video ideas, scripts, and even thumbnails for video creators.
Seems really grim- what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature? It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
> It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
It's easy to rationalise a time saving measure I guess. I feel I'm unauthentic when I use auto-generated response suggestions in Outlook. But, like OnlyFans, it's 'just business'. Perhaps I'm overthinking it. How genuine and heartfelt can OnlyFans responses be? Probably as much as my response to a budget approval.
Really? Do people really think OF "performers" really enjoy interaction with random dudes fapping in front of their screen.
Shouldn't there be a level of candidness at which it cannot be considered deception? I mean we accept casinos/gambling and religions in our societies for example.
If the site is saying ‘chat with X for $5/min’, and you never have any interaction with X at all for your $5/min, that seems like a pretty clear cut case doesn’t it?
"Give god the first portion of your income. Don't spend it and come sunday say i'll just give god a little of what's left. Give god the first portion of your income!"
Okay, I've been in and around both sides of religions, and I do believe this is the first attempt at saying tithing is an act of fraud. I don't necessarily disagree. Just noting that it's the first time. I'd assume the down votes were expected with this one.
I have several friends who are "creators" who answer their own messages. I had an ex who warned me that she wouldn't mind if I watched porn but she wouldn't want me to use onlyfans because the platform encourages 1:1 communication.
I wouldn't expect, like, Mia Khalifa (I'm out of the game, who's current?) to answer her own messages but there does seem to be an expectation that smaller creators are actually behind the accounts.
The fact they answer themselves or with help from someone is one thing. The fact they are sincere in their messages in another one.
I know there are also some people who pretend they are falling in love with the prostitutes they pay to have sex but the terms are clear both in physical and online prostitution. It is all a business about pretending and consumers should expect that.
Even if it is 1:1 communication, it's not like the two of you were likely to meet. The thing that I've always seen as the one to get upset about is if the person is local thirst trap type of someone that is much less famous and more of a possibility of real life interactions.
People being easily duped is not an argument for something not being a scam. In fact, protecting easily duped people from scammers is the entire reason for having laws against scams.
I guess there is some truth to the adage that a male body can't push blood both to the brain and to the penis at the same time - it's either one, or the other. I mean, if you step back and take a cold look at the content produced by popular OF performers, it's pretty apparent those are business operations. There are other people involved. Someone does the camera work. Location work. Promotion. And yes, fan management too.
Same applies to YouTube personas, too. Brands, not people. Talking to fans is a job that can be outsourced. AI doesn't introduce anything new; AI features on the platform are competing with creators' brand management agencies, which themselves likely already use ChatGPT for this anyway, because why wouldn't they? ChatGPT does better job at this stuff and is cheaper than human labor - but again, the AI angle isn't important here - that human labor was just a generative model in a protein substrate anyway.
It wasn't. It perhaps should've been, but instead, it was just "legitimate marketing practice".
This is another facet of a larger phenomenon, that I just commented on in another thread[0] - there's a lot of harmful activity that's considered legitimate, thus invisible to our legal and cultural immune systems, yet no less harmful than the slightly less legitimate scams.
Your linked post seems to be a polemic, not a legal analysis. Many advertisements are subject to successful (expensive) class-action lawsuits based on some fraud or truth-in-marketing claim. Also, this isn’t an advertisement, it’s a communication which takes place under an implied contract.
First, let me say that you often post here on HN, and you are one of my favourites. You really have an ability to view the issue from multiple angles and provide thoughtful replies.
After reading your post, I had a thought: Making this story about OnlyFans is the click bait element. Seriously, replay the story in your head where it says that top 1/2/3/4/5% of YouTubers or Instagrammers or TikTokkers are using LLMs to answer comments and DMs. Suddenly, the story is much less enticing. It probably would not even make HN front page. Most readers here would look at such an article, shrug their shoulders, and say: "Yeah, seems right. I would do the same.". However, as soon as you add sex work into the mix, it gets way more spicy and elicits more emotional responses.
The difference is that on OF the direct contact is part of the sales pitch (perhaps the only part that actually provides "value" since there is no shortage of free porn, including OF leaks) whereas on other platforms it is not (and you are not directly purchasing anything at all but watching ads instead). Onlyfans isn't clickbait here because it is genuinely more scummy than doing this in the other places you mentioned.
That said, I don't agree that using AI chatbots to deceive fans is OK anywhere else either. And no, I would definitely not ever do it myself.
On OnlyFans you get so many messages there’s no hope of replying to all of them manually. So it’s either reply to basically no one, or use automated methods.
This is like plane overbooking. Airline companies could do the right thing and just sell exactly the seats left on the plane (in this case, the OF creators could put a limit to the people being able to DM them) but instead they choose the extra profit by selling more tickets than there are seats (OF creator allowing an ungodly amount of people to flood their DMs) and just take the blame the few times the statistics goes against their favor (someone figures out they have been talking with an AI/employee)
Worth noting that - mostly - punters weren't having real interactions with the models anyway. As the article points out, they'd previously reported (and I think HN had linked to the story) that a large number of models had been outsourcing their DM interactions to a rotating cadre of gig-workers already. And as the gig workers wouldn't be able to keep track of the full chat history between each punter and "the model", the conversations could sometimes feel off, or have long-term inconsistencies.
I guess LLM hallucinations will just give a slightly different flavour of unreal interactions.
IIRC (from mobile), it was a different article from Wired that corroborated this, with a surprising disagreement (from what you mentioned) being that the gig-workers would keep notes that are attached and shared. The notes are per-... random? I suppose they'd be called? The gig-worker's customer is the streamer (or agency) that pays them, so I don't have a better name for the hoarde of people they're meant to be chatting with
Though I don't doubt that less careful (or less well-paid) gig-chatters exist and can have a slightly different feel when handing off a random at shift-change
Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist but I think the novelty of this will wear off too quickly for it to become the future. People will have to realize the emptiness of it. I need to believe that.
It won't. Conservatively over 60% of young men are single. The real number if you remove men that have had maybe one relationship or encounter in a multi-year span is 80% or more. The lie you will hear is that men are choosing OnlyFans over a relationship. There is no choice. They can't get a relationship.
None of that supports the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term. We have unmet transportation needs, but the hype of the Segway didn't allow it to take over the world.
> but the hype of the Segway didn't allow it to take over the world.
That was just a product / form factor thing: Bird and Lime scooters are everywhere in my city. And, moreover, lots of people use personal scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards, electric skateboards, Onewheel, electric unicycles, etc. I don't go a day without seeing these things.
It'll be the exact same with this technology. Give it a few years and more men will be using AI chatbots and AI porn than the existing tools in the space, such as PornHub and OnlyFans.
> the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term
Porn has never gone away, it's only grown.
AI porn can match a person's exact preferences in an unparalleled way that hasn't been possible before. Add in VR, photorealism, voices, and trainable agentic behavior and you've got a market that will likely contribute to the decline of real, actual relationships and marriages.
More men will probably be using AI porn over actual sex, too, due to difficulties with dating, dead bedrooms, etc.
I'd be willing to place bets on marriage numbers going into a steep decline over the next decade.
I thought this was for men who couldn't find relationships. Why would the marriage rate go down? Prompting your own porn will be so much better than current human porn that the people who are actually married will choose to be single instead?
If a dead bedroom marriage is still intact now, why would AI porn change that? Do you need to get divorced before you can chat with the bot? Is the bot going to help parent the children you were staying in the marriage for?
> I thought this was for men who couldn't find relationships. Why would the marriage rate go down?
Not being able to find a relationship is not binary. Having alternatives to satisfy needs means less effort is put in achieving the real thing. This goes for both genders of course, just the needs and alternatives being different.
I think marriage is the one thing that won't get hit by this. Hookups will die, and perhaps Americans will need to find new paradigms for meeting people, but marriage offers a bunch of things that even the best porn doesn't.
> I think marriage is the one thing that won't get hit by this.
Marriage was hit way before that. Marriage is not a rational choice in a lot of countries, where a civil union does the same thing without the hassle and the costs of divorce if it happens. The main reason is religion and it has been losing ground for decades at this point.
At the rate technology is improving and the rate that women are becoming less and less accessible to average men, I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years, 80-90% of American men go an entire lifetime without a non-AI relationship.
> What the heck does that mean? Last I checked, population demographics weren't that far off 50/50 in most countries.
Hey, I'm married so I'm just going by what my single / online dating friends tell me. It has nothing to do with demographics. In today's app-based environment, something like 80% of women are interested in / going for the top 10-20% of men, and it's getting even more extreme. Is this not true?
It just feels oddly gender specific to assume that in an environment where there are approximately equal numbers of single men and women (no?), one gender has sights set too high and the other doesn't.
The study has been taken down for a long time now but OkCupid found that 80 percent of women went for 20 percent of men whereas men had a relatively normal distribution of women they went for.
This was a long time ago as well and I think the situation has gotten worse in the age of tinder and friends.
"Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme."
Gender ratio on Tinder is heavily skewed toward male than women, except Europe.[1]
No wonder why women are so incredibly selective. Gender ratio population wise is roughly equal, with slightly more women than men in the US, AFAIK. Men are chasing women in the wrong place.
If men outnumbered the women, the numbers are going to be more stark, no? Also, online dating doesn't really match real life dating. You miss so much information.
Nobody's going around advertising their fancy cars, their hobbies and the church they goes to, etc. We're heavily focused on the perfect match rather than doing vibe check.
Polygyny - a smaller number of "high status, high attraction" males having app-mediated interactions with larger numbers of females.
Extrapolation to the whole population seems crazy though. And I wouldn't expect dating apps to remain the same, we should expect more behavioral experimentation as well as backlash and new social movements to change mating behavior. It isn't like the average woman is a fan of polygyny either.
Notably, this also removes one of the remaining major economic options for otherwise unemployable women. Going to be a rough time economically when even pornstar/escort isn’t a viable option, eh?
Even if that were true, I really think the solution ought to be something else than "let's stop AI so that really poor women can be forced back into selling their bodies for sex".
Backhoes drastically reduce the demand for laborers (the traditional equivalent for men), and I don’t see anyone with reasonable options there either.
Notably, at least 90% of the laborers I’ve met would love to be able to get paid having sex instead of being laborers. But the market dynamics don’t make that a viable choice.
The situation in most well off countries is already that native populations have fallen below replacement rates. The result has not been to rejoice in the would-be crisis being averted but instead the crisis has been inverted and now those countries "need" to import foreigners to keep their economies from imploding. Or are you suggesting population control for africa and the middle east? Because I'm not sure they'll agree.
I agree that society needs to adapt to the post-scarcity reality but "population control" is and will always be something dystopian. It's also irrelevant because the more we automate the less people we actually "need" so no amount of population control will ever solve the underlying issue.
The service won't care what you do, as long as you keep paying the subscription for your porn-bot, otherwise it will get deleted - or so it will tell when you try to start the subscription cancellation process - begging to not let it die.
Men had a headstart from being more into tech, but I think women are already the majority users of AI sex-rp and AI partners. Makes sense too given that they read more erotica than men.
The people won't have a choice there either. Even if you can spot 90% of the fake content the remaining 10% will still drown out anything even remotely genuine.
I'm not going to waste my time educating you on this because I can tell from the way you jumped immediately to the incel label that you're just going to deny deflect and diffuse.
I didn't like this number either, but it's more mainstream than you think. For example, from last year: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo.... This is an opinion article citing a contemporary Pew Research study that appears to support the 60% number, although it's stated as "63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single" (emphasis mine).
I don't think you needed to imply that someone was an incel.
Out of those under 30, I bet there is a huge differebmnce between those between 20-24 and 25-29. It is no secret that women tend to seek people who are slightly older. A few decades earlier, a 20-22y old guys would just date 16-18y old girls and that wouln't be frowned upon nor put them at risk of going to jail.
Naively, you'd think that if demographics break down 50/50 between the sexes, then 60% of men being single means 60% of women are single too. But that's not the case; the article says men in their 20s are single at twice the rate of women in their 20s.
I agree that part of that ~30% difference could be women dating older men. But it could also be women dating each other: this[0] Gallup poll from 2023 found that 27% of Gen Z women identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Gen Z as noted here doesn't perfectly overlap with people in their 20s, but it seems like this could be another (better?) explanation.
If you’re asking how they can’t get a relationship, you may wish to look up the original definition and meaning of “incel” before it became derogatory slang for a certain type of misogynist.
> There is no choice. They can't get a relationship.
and the porn-rot brains will make it harder for them to get into healthy relationships as well adjusted individuals, resulting in a glut of long-term customer for corporate-mediated para-social "relationships". Another victory for unbridled capitalism.
The young men have to "git gud" & level up IRL like they have to in every other aspect of life. There won't be government issued waifus
> The average young man wants mutual compassion and respect from their social circles and loyalty and being loved from their girlfriend.
Everybody wants that, including the potential girlfriends, but a functional relationship requires 2 well-adjusted parties. The average level 2 druid also wants respect from their guild and a trusty side-kick, but they may have to grind for those things and go on some side quests. No one is owed a partner, especially if they are unable to compromise (the grease of all social interactions).
> Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men
Fortunately,there is scientific research[1] in the field, so we don't have to go with our gut-feeling. Modeling behavior on scripted pornography leads to socially unacceptable behaviors in real life. A female acquaintance was recently propositioned by the man she had just started dating for an 3-way "encounter" involving her sister (as in full sibling); I think "porn rot" is the right description of what led him down the road of thinking it was a perfectly reasonable request to verbalize. This put an end to the relationship, but I'm sure he might be out there somewhere complaining about how he's being unfairly rejected by women.
> ...who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
every generation has a subculture like this, and in the past, they accepted, and gloried even, that they were a subculture instead of demanding to be accepted by the mainstream (beatniks, punks, goths, emos, etc).
It's definitely mens' fault when women disregard them for not being 6 feet before they know anything else about them.
The dark gamified patterns of app dating reward and encourage women to rapidly dismiss huge numbers of men in the hopes of finding one of the very few who meets a number of superficial criteria. Meeting people IRL has less toxic intrinsic structure, but has only become more difficult as the apps advertise themselves as a "safer" alternative.
Get your eyes out of a screen and get out. This is where real relationships starts. Dating apps somewhat work to get dates, but not very often to start a relationship. Individual dates aren't relationships.
That isn't what I said, if you can't read a sentence that's not my problem. And don't "simply not the case" without providing any source. What a terrible remark.
Well you should see what happened when replika nerfed their bots, people were extremely upset, as if somebody killed a loved one. You are underestimating the tendency of humans to build connections, and if virtual connections make it easy then why put all the effort to build human ones?
I think that the AI-pretending-to-be-human does not have much future, because if people end up chatting with AIs why not go with the real thing rather than with the only-fans ones. The only-fans creators are training their replacements.
It wont wear off because people, customers, aren't consuming this because of the 'novelty'. They are being fooled. They don't realize it is a 'novelty'.
I actually got approached for a job for a "virtual girlfriend" site. Paid amazingly well too, and the user numbers were mind blowing to me, but it felt scummier than working for a gambling site to me.
CD players did not spell the end of live music. I have never really understood people who pay money to OnlyFans models but I do think its not just to see some boobs on a screen? its to experience a (para)social relationship with another person.
Most of the experience of a live performance (especially for pop artists) is in being there, with a crowd, and the soundscape of a giant auditorium or stadium, so the lip-syncing doesn't matter much either way.
Do people honestly convince themselves some stranger performing on the internet in a very one way relationship somehow truly cares about them and not their ability to monetize.
I assume in this case, you are saying "the model" to mean the human Only Fans account holder and not an ML model in which the fake models are trained on? Something funny about clarifying that too.
As I contemplate using AI tools to generate images to start an OnlyFans, I see the irony where first they outsourced to Chatters, then replaced the chatters with AI and next we will replace their hotness with AI models. I'm sure this is already happening.
Yeah, there are already “influencers” which are AI improved clones of existing influencers (without the original model’s consent). So in addition to looking perfect, curating their perfect existence, pleasing sponsors, keeping the attention of the masses, scaling up their ability to respond in a timely way to fans, content creators now need to police their IP from being stolen by other “creators” (and not just the fans).
Chatters-for-hire were always questionable. Some are cheap labor in cheap English-speaking countries. But I’ve also seen that vendors that offer chatter services have difficulty with quality control (of the chats), causing the OnlyFans channel to drop the chatters and apologize for the breach of trust to paying fans.
That said, I imagine there is a LOT of value in identifying high quality leads/chats to be prioritized and ignoring/ blocking the lowest quality (eg. Insurers and time wasters).
> So in addition to looking perfect, curating their perfect existence, pleasing sponsors, keeping the attention of the masses, scaling up their ability to respond in a timely way to fans, content creators now need to police their IP from being stolen by other “creators” (and not just the fans).
How sad.
"Influencers" living on borrowed time is one of the few good things about the machine learning dystopia.
I feel like we've all spent way too much time in front of the screen in an AI echo chamber if we have to clarify this. Humans performing for the camera have been known as models long before an AI model has ever been dreamed up. Now that the word is being used with both meanings in the same article, the smart "nerds" are the ones having problems deciphering the use?
Humans selling their bodies for profit have historically been known as prostitutes. "Model" is already term intended to mislead about what the job is. Also not a term the average person would use.
Good point, it’s already practically impossible to distinguish between ChatGPT o1 output and say the median substack essay. At least for someone who only has a few minutes to spare for second guessing.
I guess so, to a point. Jimmy Kimmel wants you to feel like you're a part of a community because you watch his show and get all of his inside jokes, but he's not sending you fake text messages pretending to be your close personal friend. Seems different to me!
The parasocial television friend hustle was developed before that was possible, or else they'd probably all be doing it too. As it is, they stick with their establish form and don't innovate because their audience is people who haven't and probably won't ever adapt to the newer forms of the hustle. If parasocial hustling is food service, then television talk shows are Cracker Barrel.
If no one addresses the roots, why bother condemning the consequences? Eight billion people watch bigcorps screw them up in all poses and nobody bats an eye, cause it’s “legal”. We all get what a few democracies count as normal.
> what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature
So, responding to viewers increases engagement, and thereby a channel's virality.
And one human can only do so much of that. So eventually, you hit a marketing scalability bottleneck — you get more comments than you can read, and the people who don't feel engaged with, are more likely to churn from your viewership, so your viewership growth starts to decelerate.
Large media companies + MCNs previously solved this bottleneck, by hiring paid human community managers to scale responding-to-comments.
But individual creators bootstrapping their growth, had no good solution to this (besides joining an MCN), because the too-many-comments threshold comes long before they make enough revenue to afford to hire their own community managers.
This creates a pay-to-win model where companies who already have capital from other ventures can afford to circumvent this bottleneck and so get big on YouTube, in a way that individual creators cannot.
And YouTube doesn't like that; those big companies aren't beholden to YouTube in the way that creators that think of themselves fundamentally as "YouTube content creators" are. (Or, to say that in a nicer way: YouTube wants to democratize content creation, ensuring that there's a way for small bootstrapped content-creators to "make it.")
AI comment responding is a substitute good for the paid human community managers who already perform this function for large media companies / MCNs / etc. It serves to allow these independent bootstrapped content-creators to overcome the responses-to-comments marketing bottleneck for much lower cost.
This doesn't do anything good for the people who post comments, of course; but it does work to ensure a healthy ecosystem of independent bootstrapped content creators, rather than an oligopoly of media companies — which is something that viewers want from YouTube.
(An analogy might be to level-1 CSRs in a call center: as a complainant, they just get in your way; but they solve a customer-service scalability bottleneck for the company, which thereby allows the company to grow past the point where it would otherwise stop being able to handle support at all due to the increasing flood of "nonsense" complaints.)
> It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
Yes, it is, but that's going to happen whether or not there's a built-in feature to do it. That ship has sailed literally centuries ago — ever heard of writing to a famous author/actor/etc, and getting a hand-written response, seemingly from the famous person themselves, but actually from their agent and just signed by the famous person?
This comment is 100% AI generated, straight from an LLM (admittedly a small and specifically trained one). My first and likely only AI generated comment.
On a micro level there's no clear way to tell, nor is it really valuable.
Like most engineering there's a matter of "good enough" and you get surprisingly close to that by simply tracking down the most obvious accounts.
It couldn't be completely automated out regardless because intent is important as well. Using an LLM to try and translate yours or a foreign post has more honest intention than a soliciting bot or an otherwise disruptive user that is breaking rules.
Now with that context in mind:
> How could hacker news determine such things?
Good question, I'm curious as well. I'm not well versed in the state of tracking such behavior. But I'm sure any site of size has needed to prepare for this for a while.
It's a cat and mouse game, same as all other spam. There are AI detectors, but then the AI get better and the detectors aren't much better than 50:50 ... I don't know how we'll combat this in the future but I don't think detectors are the answer
Given what I read of Dang, I'd be surprised if any method HN uses isn't supplemented by heavy manual jidgment. I imagine any automated solutions will simply be used to flag for review more than do any sorts of auto-modding.
Yes, I'm experiencing this in the form of 'suggestion' buttons.
It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong. If I used that I would be telling my fans the opposite of what I actually meant, or various other catastrophically not-even-wrong assertions. It really, really is not figuring out what it's being fed. Sometimes I let people in on what the AI is suggesting I say.
It's not actually wresting the controls from my hands and talking to my fans AS me… yet.
> It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong.
"Yeah back then I was weirded out by their now standard response prediction thing, it was always just one or two words off exactly what I wanted to reply (usually missing/adding a negation, or substituting a word with an antonym)"[1]
Feels like that ended with an ai escape when I was hoping that the punchline would be that all the apparently happy, well adjusted, coherent users were in fact ai trained in the preapocalypse and the insane sick, repetitive people were the real users living in the post apocalypse.
I got a friend that goes to live shows in Los Angeles and then interviews the bands after the shows for a decent amount of time and with decent quality. mostly punk rock bands. I've personally met Les Claypool and Trent Reznor and a bunch of smaller artists after shows. However i've never tried to email or otherwise contact any musicians or whatever, except one time in the late 90s there was hosted AOL chatrooms or something similar on yahoo or something where many fans would be in a room and get selected to ask a question that the person of the hour could see, and they'd reply. I also got to ask Reznor a question like that, 26 years ago or something.
I may be an outlier, i've actually met a couple dozen famous people, because a lot of my friends were (strong were there) industry adjacent. Like, i've been to NAMM multiple times, and iirc the tickets were quite pricey and limited.
Yeah, there are some not-nobody bands that do actually talk to fans after shows - as in face to face without special appointment, just hanging around at the exit merch store.
I would rather have those "celebrities" that don't want to directly interact with plebs be honest about it. Nothing wrong with setting boundaries for your job, a lot wrong with deceiving people even if it might seem benign at first.
> what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature?
There is none, because the whole thing was never good faith. It's always been about tricking people into having a real interaction, to make it easier to exploit them for ad clicks or to sell them junk. That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.
This is a bunch of hand-wringing. If the AI reply is what I would have said anyways; awesome! Finding thumbnails is hard, but if AI comes up with a good one? Fantastic!
None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were. It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
The point is that people pay to have a genuine interaction. If everything is fake, why interact at all? Imagine you were typing into the void and no one saw what you said. Would you continue doing it if you knew? How about on this forum?
Hallmark cards tend to leave a lot of blank space to write. It’s absolutely genuine when you grab a pen and start writing. Bonus points if the Hallmark message is relevant to the person receiving it and maybe something you can riff on in the handwritten part. Funny cards are also great!
So I would say the golden rule continues to apply: the more effort is visible, the more genuine it is.
To me, yes. Key point being, "if I review and approve of the message" - if you actually do this, then yes.
Being genuine is all about how much actual care and heart you pour into thing. That's really something only you can truly know. Using generative AI doesn't automatically make it not genuine, much like using a grammar checker or a thesaurus doesn't.
Conversely, not using AI tools doesn't suddenly make YouTube and OnlyFan creators' comments genuine. They never were. There is no care and heart in there, only salesmanship, and it's most likely outsourced to a brand management company anyway.
I recently went to an social interest group meeting. It begins with a presentation, which is generally confirmed in advance by the organizer based on a text abstract of the planned presentation submitted by a future presenter. This time, the presentation turned out to be staggeringly bad, mostly consisting of filler words and interjections, and presenter was struggling to express even the basic idea. I could not fathom how that could happen, considering the idea was presumably expressed in the abstract. I had to write one before, and felt annoying and difficult to write down what I felt was all ready to be said in my head, but as a result I knew what I wanted to say and how I could say it when in front of a dozen of people.
At some point, the organizer (to help situation) quoted from the abstract that was submitted, and it was indeed apparently decently written. After that, I could not help thinking that the likelihood the abstract was written by an LLM is very high. In that case, the presenter certainly reviewed it, but crucially did not write it—the thought process that makes the idea part of your active vocabulary, and you capable of expressing it, would not have taken place.
To reiterate, I don’t know whether it happened or not, but even if no LLM was involved in this instance (perhaps it was just a particularly violent case of stage fright, despite the event being very small and the IRL vibe extremely casual) it would be beyond silly to assume that it would not be happening going forward.
I used to think that it is beneficial if an LLM can help in handling certain boring signaling communication for people who are very bad at it, acting as a sort of an equalizer. A model writes stuff, you approve it, and you gain access somewhere without having, say, the written language flair of someone who went to a prestigious school, or having to spend time on something that seems unnecessary.
I am changing my mind now. Sure, the case I have described is one of the more extreme ones, but it made me think how signals are actually signals for a reason[0], and when some signals go away the communication field does not become equalized—instead, other signals and barriers are used: money, IRL meetings, invitation, some sort of privacy-violating invasive check of humanity, etc., or the communication that relied on some signals before would simply not happen now. When the Web and tech in general had removed a whole lot of constraints on communication, we still could rely on those signals, but that is apparently coming to an end.
Writing a birthday card is another endangered signal. The impression from the movies, how these gestures become very cheap if they come from some rich CEO who certainly has a personal assistant for this sort of stuff, now applies to everyone (including people who would never touch an LLM with a ten foot pole). Once we all know that a birthday card can be reduced to “I have read and approved this message”, as social beings we won’t stop needing the psychological impact of such positive gestures—we only stop receiving it.
I am not sure I see all of the above as positive (even if in the latter case I am slightly optimistic that some viable substitute for those signals could be found within personal relationships).
[0] Even that reason is dubious, like discrimination by a social criteria, well then that’s not going to go anywhere. Tech is not going to solve that human problem, besides perhaps a very fleeting handful of months when some techies gain edge while everyone is still catching on. New barriers will be erected, the core problem left unaddressed.
I actually been in this exact scenario before. I and another friend were avidly into Hearthstone, and another third person was playing with an Hearthstone Cheat bot in an University study room. We asked to watch for a while.
After a while, some dread was setting in. We started asking questions:
* Why did it hover that card?
"To pretend it's human. The card has less than 10% playrate on that class"
* Did it... just spam the Well Met meme while going face?
"Of course. Because people do it"
* Wait it ropes the opponents?
"Yes. You can set it to rope back"
We kept seeing more and more behaviors. It would squelch noisy opponents. It would even tap the ground pretending to be a bored person. And then it hit me: 95% of Hearthstone players are bots. Every single human behavior that you could perhaps use to identify 'people', it faked.
It's hard for me to understand how Tinder is not dead yet. One big pile of pop-up ads (even when you pay you get upsell popups) and some Chinese scammer bots.
I'd argue that what Match Group did with OKC was bordering on criminal. Everything on it worked and it worked for small, often marginalized groups. It was turned into a worse version of tender.
It's highly dependent on location. I use it while traveling, and yes in a few countries it's useless, but I've met 300-400 people over the last 7 years. It's added more value to my life than any other single app (even though I've never paid a dime for it).
For the record, I'm male, mid 30's, and average looking.
An average of 1 person per week over a period of 7 years? Impressive. Is it fair to assume you're using a relatively shallow definition of "value" here, or was there something else you had in mind?
Or people might be less lonely. There will come a point where the online experience becomes worthless and people will place greater importance on face-to-face interaction. That's how it was 20 years ago.
Why would you quit hearthstone over the presence of bots?
It's not like you have meaningful interactions with the other players anyway (beyond the occasional post-game friend request which has a 50/50 chance to be abusive).
If you are just playing against bots, the challenge is arbitrary. What would top 10% actually mean? 5000 ELO? Albeit, the ranks are slightly arbitrary already as the matchmaking algorithm significantly influences your competitive experience. But you know when you get higher rank, you have proven you are better than increasing amounts of real players. If every person was actually playing a single player variant of the game (matched against bots), the reward for climbing the ranked ladder is significantly diminished.
Well unlike with modern multiplayer games where the matchmaking algorithm decides who you play with, on the Internet you can still choose what websites to visit.
Honestly, if more people wondered about who'll read what they write online, and whether it matters that those folks read it, the Internet would probably be a better place.
I really don't care about youtubers using tools like this. If it works for them and saves them time: great! If it reduces their level of authenticity: that'll lead to a correction of their popularity.
For OnlyFans... meuh. To me, the idea of interaction there reminds me strongly of the "adult" phone lines of old. You want someone to tease you and say naughty things to you? Well, you can get that for 99 cents/minute.
If you want to buy the attention of someone specific, when they can let someone/something else do that for cents on the dollar... don't be surprised to be tricked.
On only fans people are paying extra for individual specific attention.
But AI can be good enough to fool people that are specifically looking for that experience.
Sure, free market view, if the automated chat isn't good enough then it will lead to people leaving. The point is, it is good enough.
Don't think anybody is complaining that people on only fans are being duped, maybe more concerning that if you can have realistic video and chat, and people are being fooled, then there is some wider impacts on society. Large chunks of people could get fooled by any number of relationships that aren't real.
Well for one only someone with severe mental issues would ever consider paying for porn considering how much of it is available. The corollary to that is that anyone making money from the porn industry is taking advantage of people incapable of making rational purchasing decisions.
And the adult industry knows this, which is why sites like Onlyfans empahsize exclusivity and direct interactions. Faking those makes the whole thing even more of a scam.
I think it should be banned too. And maybe they do think that, but I'm just saying, anyone whose livelihood is based on the appreciation of other people should remember not to alienate those people too much
Is it? Is it also wrong that they so far weren't labeled as [copy-pasted], and/or [outsourced to influencer management agency], and/or [not by ${influencer name}]? YouTube influencers and vloggers are brands, not people; they go big enough, they start outsourcing this stuff, which to my mind is just like "AI slop", except produced by protein parrot instead of silicon one.
Nah, first and foremost, the comment page and the video itself should start with Surgeon General's warning: "You're watching a long-form, semi-interactive ad. None of this is authentic, and none of it is meant to do anything good or nice for you."
(And perhaps also: "You're probably better of going for a smoke instead of consuming this.")
A lot of it is labeled as "you are talking to me personally".
It is akin to a movie stating "a true story" - some liberties may be taken but if the protagonist becomes world president then travels to mars and becomes king of the martians. I am going to start looking for citations.
> Is it also wrong that they so far weren't labeled as [copy-pasted], and/or [outsourced to influencer management agency], and/or [not by ${influencer name}]?
IMO, yes. Copy-pased might be accepteable if it is the author himself doing the selection of what to copy and paste.
If the main value of the comments is interacting with the person in question then anything less is fraud. If authenticity doesn't matter then the label won't impact the desired effect.
Should people know that these interactions have never been genuine? Yes. Is that an excuse for scamming people? Absolutely not.
I mean, I guess if your sole goal with consuming content online is to kill free time and pound dopamine out of your brain without putting in any effort, then yeah, fair enough. I'm sure Mr. Beast appreciates your viewership.
I don't follow any creators for such a purpose. I follow creators who make interesting and meaningful things, be they YouTube videos or otherwise. The sorts of people who make a thumbnail that explains what the video is, not just one that's most likely to get attention in the algorithm. Conversely, those folks often respond to people who comment on their interesting and thoughtful things in interesting and thoughtful ways, with interesting a thoughtful replies. This is called a conversation, and it exists for purposes far beyond engagement, and is not a task well suited to AI automation (thank fucking god).
One would counter that if your (if you are indeed some sort of creator) replies are so easily automated, and your thumbnails automated, then the question must be asked... who needs you? How long until YouTube replaces you with a bot, trained on your previous videos, and tells you to kick rocks? After all, you're an unnecessary expense.
Expecting internet celebrities to have "authentic" interactions with you is just parasocial relationship. It always has been, and gen-AI just reveals it.
Yeah, and it doesn't even change it - it just makes it more appealing for news to run with a story. Of course, the focus is on AI/authenticity angle; I'd thought they'd give some space for the plight of brand agency marketers (and cheap labor they subcontract to) being pushed out of their jobs by LLMs, but I guess that would require first explaining to people that it was those marketers who people were having their "relationships" with all along. But that's just too sad and complex to report on; it's more of an op ed stuff anyway.
It reduces the cost of the scam siginificantly which makes it available to many more scammers. It's the same with other spam content on the internet - it was possible before but AI makes the problem so much worse.
Or in other wors, yes we should be concerned about the crime syndicate moving into town even if petty theft existed before.
I think you miss the part where they fake it being real.
Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
But I feel offended that they think badly printed signature with pixelation will fool me or will make it somewhat better.
I don’t miss interaction with CEO but I know someone put in effort to fool me.
From all Christmas bonuses and gifts over the years from companies I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
> Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
Then don't. It is pathetic and disingenuous to pretend to be personal when you are not. Especially those who spend extra on a single squiggle of blue printer ink.
> Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
No, but I assume it would still be considered a valid signature in case of some legal dispute. The CEO may not have signed the document by hand (nor even read it), but the company placing the likeness of CEO's signature in the document signals that the CEO accepts responsibility for it. The CEO is still "in the loop" anyway, they had to personally approve the use of their signature like this.
Which is to say, I consider such "fake signatures" perfectly OK. I just don't consider them as a sign of care or personal interest.
Now, marketing communication that does it, is another story. It's bullshit all the way through, signature included.
> I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Which reminds me - even actually hand-written letters can be fake. Have you ever found a hand-written letter inviting you to a Bible study?
I grew up in a religion that's big on preaching; mostly door-to-door, but when that's for some reason impossible (e.g. time, health constraints), people would write letters instead. Some people were real "high performers" here, in the sense they would sit down over couple evenings and hand-write couple dozen letters, to be distributed around some neighborhood instead of going through it personally. I used to be impressed by dedication, but it eventually dawned on me - it's just exploiting the faux personal connection. They're selling something (which they may feel is genuinely worth it), and hand-written letters is just a sales tactic. They're hoping you pick it up and think about how much effort someone put into a personal letter to you. But the effort is not genuine; it's a fake signal. In reality, the author probably had a good time spending an evening with friends, writing a letter after letter after letter.
So while I 100% believe the intentions of that manager of yours were pure and his heart was in the right place, I post this as a warning for the general case: high effort doesn't automatically imply it's genuine and honest. If it feels like sales, it probably is.
Related: the secret to pulling off a magic trick is to put much, much more effort into preparing the trick than a reasonable person would expect. Same applies to sales.
Politicians should not only be required to sign the laws they back by hand but to fully recite them without error - anything less means the law isn't important enough to make the books.
> If the AI reply is what I would have said anyways; awesome! Finding thumbnails is hard, but if AI comes up with a good one?
If the AI can replace you so easily then your interactions are worthless. In practice it won't say what you would have said but some corporate approved PC-filtered version of it devoid of any soul.
> None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is a sociopath.
> It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
If (when) this catches on, it won't just be "mega celebrities" using these dystopian methods. But no, even for them expanding the scope of their ability to delude and take advantage of simps is a negative.
The good faith is "We here at youtube adamantly REFUSE to spend any actual manpower on things that require it, and you know what, so should you! Join us. Thrive. Beep Boop."
Of course they only do it because it's inevitable, and they don't want others doing it before them.
Brand management people, who normally handled this, cost money. Self-service brand management with LLMs costs less money. Building this in as first-party product commoditizes this, costing the vlogger even less, while YouTube gets to keep them in-house and focused on the platform, instead of external services that may be cross-platform.
Yes, so if we assume that cost saving is the only metric that is meaningful and that there should be no legislation or norms saying otherwise, then indeed it follows as a consequence.
Cost saving is basically what drives the market, and thus shapes our entire reality. It's not some side goal of some people, that you could suppress or eliminate - it's the thing itself.
As such, I'm not sure where you'd like to draw the line. There's no obvious, defensible place to do it, not unless you're willing to go back up, expand the scope and fight the entire advertising industry on principle - in which case, I'll agree, because I believe that's where the problem originates and where it needs to be solved.
In these cases for it to be inevitable there doesn't need to be agreement. Someone does it and if enough clueless people use it, now we're stuck with it. Why we can't have nice things.
It is not inevitable, almost nothing is... This just bothers me because so many people in tech talk about things as being "inevitable" when it's just a lazy resignation to the current zeitgeist.
There are a plethora of other forces at work beyond "the market".
Yes, if no one imagines anything different the future will turn out as we expect. But with even small changes to legislation, norms and culture thing can turn out completely different. It is only inevitable if we resign ourselves to the status quo.
I see this attitude over and over again, particularly where it comes to regulating things like AI and bans on social media. Tech would rather do nothing if "it's complicated", or had any downside to anyone while ignoring the rampant downsides impacting everyone right now. Sometimes it comes across as thoughtful policy making, but more and more I see it as a crutch for intellectual laziness and in some cases dishonesty.
> But with even small changes to legislation, norms and culture thing can turn out completely different.
Those are the qualities that define "the market". What are the other forces you speak of?
Markets can change. They have many times before. But, and call me unimaginative if you will, I struggle to see why anyone would want to pay substantially more to ensure that comments on YouTube are written by a real, live human, let alone enough people to sustain the service. It is not like you are face-to-face at the bar. It is a blob of text that has always been disassociated from what human involvement there may have been behind the scenes.
Inevitable in the strictest literal sense may be too much, but the chances of the market changing here seem infinitesimally small to the point that "inevitable" is close enough.
Not just Youtube. Most of the time unintentionally but, any personified information broker is manipulative in its nature. Watching vlogs or streamers, listening podcasts, reading post of social media accounts one follows. There is face between you and the information and that face becomes familiar to you. Face that builds trust.
It used to be that TV or newspapers or any other media was 'talking' to the audience (plural) now it talks to 'you' (singular).
I don't think listening to a podcast is really substantially different to tuning into Walter Cronkite. Both are deliberately recognisable human faces (or voices) for the presentation of the media to you.
Maybe it gets a bit weird when you start messaging your favourite Youtuber and they reply fast enough that you feel like it's a personal conversation rather than a professional correspondence. Sending a letter to Cronkite would have been far less immediate.
Treating media as anything other then virtually entirely read-only has always been what nutters do - they'd be the only ones writing any significant numbers letters to the person if the TV, and the same is probably true of modern media.
> Most of the time unintentionally but, any personified information broker is manipulative in its nature.
I'm past calling this unintentional. It's not. If it's some random account barely anyone has heard of, posting interesting stuff every now and then, then sure, that's unintentional - and also mostly harmless. However, if the creator is somewhat known[0], posts regularly, and their content is structured and polished, and they start uttering phrases like "like and subscribe" or "ring the bell"[1], or Patreon is mentioned - then you're looking at entirely intentional manipulation.
To a degree, it's unavoidable - it's the nature of the medium and the economy at large. Making quality videos is pretty much a full-time job, so even the creators with purest of hearts will be forced to include stuff that puts their videos on SponsorBlock lists. But then there's a difference between those who want you to subscribe to their Patreon and maybe buy some stickers so they can afford treating their hobby as a job, and those whose content is just a vector for feeding you first-party and third-party (sponsor) ads. Most well-known vloggers are, unfortunately, the latter. Also anyone who's called or calls themselves an influencer is - it's literally the definition of that word.
--
[0] - Perhaps you could say they're "effectively a brand" in their niche - but then, that phrase alone should tell you something.
[1] - Unless it's preceded by "climb the steps" - then you're dealing with a whole other barrel of monkeys.
> even the creators with purest of hearts will be forced to include stuff that puts their videos on SponsorBlock lists
I don't agree with this at all. No one is forced into making video cration their only job. Yes, making videos on weekends means less "output" and as a result a smaller following. But so what? It's still a choice. And IMO almost always a bad one if you care about quality - pretty much no person can keep up creative quality for long when working on a schedule and that's before you even get to intentionally degrading the quality for the sake of monetization.
Every person at the very least has the choice of just creating and sharing things rather than trying to build a business. Of course calling them "creators" already shifts the discussion into the worldview that shapes the current internet.
If "Youtuber" isn't a profitable job without engaging in slimy practices then maybe it shouldn't be a job at all. In fact, trying to make any human activity into a profitable business is one of the big if not the main driving forces behind the enshittification of the internet as well as many things outside it. And it's always this same justification - that engaging in shitty behavior is required to compete.
Personally I don't mind you mentioning your Patreon [0] but "like and subscribe" guarantees a dislike from me and I sure as hell am not going to subscribe [1]. Sponsored sections will get me to immediately close the video and make a mental note to ignore videos from that person in the future. Yes, I could use SponsorBlock but if someone is willing to sell themselves in that way I don't trust them or their videos to not be also compromised in other less obvious ways. It's important to remember that Youtube and similar media is completely optional entertainment and you don't need to engage in any of it.
[0] Please consider alternatives though, Patreon itself is a pretty shit website what I only use begrudgingly.
[1] I don't use youtube subscriptions at all, only RSS subscriptions for the very few channels I want to follow - most things are not important enough to get regular releases from and I'm fine with only seeing videos that are good enough for others to share them with me.
It's not an exclusive relationship. It is a highly transactional ephemeral one.
The basic reproductive qualities of females favor LTR since it takes 9 months at the very least to pop out a kid, during which time mating with other males provides no additional children for them.
It will be an interesting world if these short transactional relationships are basically available anywhere like chips out of a vending machine. I suspect most of the reason for laws against prostitution are a mixture of protectionism for prostitution rings (they need the illegality / high risk to lock in heavy profits) and disproportionately appeals towards the female reproductive strategy that is potentially at a disadvantage with guiltless "normal" sanctioned prostitution on the table at every computer and street corner.
> That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.
I mean, no? That’s the most cynical possible read.
A lot of successful YouTube channels don’t even interact significantly in the comments. For example, in Doug DeMuro’s latest video, I don’t see any comments from his channel in the comments.
You’re also claiming that the YouTube content business is all about exploitation, tricking people into selling them junk. But that’s also a cynical read: lots of creators don’t go down that route.
Using Doug DeMuro as another example, the only recent advertisements he has are for his own car auction site and for Turo, which are both relevant and useful services to automotive enthusiasts.
Some other YouTubers just don’t advertise at all and mostly rely on Patreon, like Technology Connections.
Screens with ads intermixed is only optimized towards attention farming long term.
The renewed interest in long firm on YouTube might be something though.
A post digital addiction Internet is possible - I wonder how many early users of the internet now silence their notifications, maybe even run their screens in greyscale.
I'm an "early" user of the Internet (early to mid 90s, I missed out on BBS's and Usenix but had an internet-connected PC in my home before most people I went to school with did).
And yeah I turn off notifications always on everything. Even my smart phone is usually in Do Not Disturb.
I don't know how much of my online experience shaped this, though. I've got an asperger personality (worded as such because I've not been diagnosed) and unexpected interruptions of any kind drive me insane.
Then there are notifications like they have on LinkedIn and now Facebook where they're more like ads than they are genuine notifications. Things such as "so and so shared a post you might be interested in." These are not designed to notify of you something you wanted to be alerted to, they exist to "drive engagement." Because I don't even like notifications when it's something I care about, these really trigger me to the point where I don't even want to use the "platform" anymore. It's so bad on LinkedIn that I just stopped reading the notifications all together since if you try and turn off all notifcations on LinkedIn .. good luck. You'll spend hours navigating through complex multi-page forms clicking on toggles and then they'll just add some new notification and auto-enable it for you. There's no global "turn of all notifications for all devices" option that I've been able to find.
I don't comment on YouTube videos as much as I used to, because people started comparing the comments sections they are shown for a given video to what their friends and spouses are shown and realized that the comments section is also now algorithmically curated for you based on your viewing and commenting habits. This leads into some serious "dead Internet theory" territory, especially related to this article about OF creators using AI to reply to DMs. Because if two people can see different subsets of comments for the same video, and if YouTube has AI reply features for creators ... how can I trust that the comments I'm reading and replying to are actual humans? Even if they are humans, I don't want to interact with people that just agree with me.
It's a logical evolution of how emotional labor is used in the business world. We pay service and hospitality workers not only to literally do what their job description says but also to be nice to people, keep them engaged and create parasocial (or at least one-sided) relationships that make customers come back and spend more money. Live streamers have long deployed similar strategies with the only difference being they profit off of it themselves rather than being paid through an employer (although many employee moderators, editors and even people to manage their social media accounts so they at best only have to engage with a filtered subset of messages directly if at all).
"The whole thing" in this case isn't just AI. It's "brands".
IG has this feature as well - or at least was trialing it. I got an AI-generated response to a comment on a post -- I was not amused (or impressed), but at least it was clearly labelled as such. Still warranted an immediate unfollow. It's hard for me to see why anyone would want to receive AI-generated replies, like what's the point?
They are selling an experience, that includes the style of content, conversation, personality or persona of the creator.
Given that premise the functionally the same whether the creator or the app using an LLM responds, as long as you can keep the immersion in the role play does it matter if its the Youtube or OnlyFans actually responding?
It was already some underpaid offshore worker responding for the large creators, and this is nothing new, ATN and other phone sex line providers were doing this in 1990s and there were probably similar things in times past.
We weren't talking to a sexy young attractive lady on those phone sex lines either.
Some didn't care and still used them, many were scammed, but that is the nature of the industry. Sadly it has always been on the consumer of unregulated sexual services to be aware of how the industry of their era works.
Should we legalize, regulate and make it safer for both the buyers and also sex workers? Yes, but that is an another conversation altogether.
People already weren't quite a lot. For any channel that can afford it, other people write messages, not creators. This just automated that. These aren't real interactions.
These nihilist arguments often ignore physical, nonverbal interaction. You can interpret it as byte procession in the end but it is still missing from digital interaction.
YouTube’s best interest is ad, and having more content to retain you, the consumer, on the platform as long as possible would be their main goal.
Every single online content platform operates in the same way. Their KPI is number of hours spent on their platform, because the longer you spend there the more ads they can shove down your throat.
I mean they started calling people content creators and the people liked it and thought that was a compliment, that's all you need to know.
A content creator is not an artist or a videographer or a grandpa sharing some craft. A content creator is not even human, it's whatever can fill the <div id='content'></div>.
You only need programmers for everything else, but that damn div was hard to fill until now. Soon enough they'll have what they wished and then they'll realize the div that managed to sell ads is probably becoming useless.
I sort of get why this feels dishonest, but in the same way I’m not sure social media is something that users expect to be a reciprocal experience in 2024, save speaking to ones own immediate circles.
Kids might believe that MrBeast is replying to them personally, but I think some Internet education goes along way to help here, and I don’t know of anyone of legal age to be engaging with these platforms that would expect genuine “celebrity” responses to their comments.
Assistants/employees are being democratized. That's a good thing, because it levels the playing field.
In the end, you are vouching with your name. If you feel the suggestion is missing the mark, don't hit send. If the suggestion is missing the mark most of the time, the product is bad and will be shut down.
>trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
I'm curious what real interaction means here. At best the person is pretending to be a character with the intention of monetizing it. Having an AI play the character vs a person doesn't seem to make it "less real" considering the entire premise is, in this case, selling a fantasy and character?
Things seem directly headed to the movie Her where your monthly subscription is mostly used to pay for hosting your personal interaction model in the cloud.
I would so much rather the creator not participate in the comments than have a fake AI that doesn't know the creator's mind in the comments.
I don't care if someone with a million viewers replies just to me. Almost any video's comment stream, you can scroll through, get a general sense of what people's reactions/questions/etc are to the video, and then good creators respond in one or two comments to the masses.
The second I see someone with a huge following obviously AI responding to each of the comments, I have lost all respect for them, and people will call them out on it. I see this a lot on reddit now where people are responding to AI generated posts pointing this out, and it is causing some major issues in communities.
The use case for Alphabet is to control more of the interactive bandwidth so they can steer the influence on behalf of the highest bidder / inject increasingly subtle conversational advertising.
You can bet your ass that in the fullness of time the generated content is going to put Alphabet's interests first.
The other day I was helping an elderly family member purchase something from the Internet. They were talking to a chat bot. One of the automated replies was a voice recording. There was not much "AI" in it, just a bunch of spam in Whatsapp all the time telling them to purchase all sorts of products. They were added to multiple "group chats" where only admins could send messages (i.e. a spam fest). But what worried me was that because the automated messages are never marked as such, I wasn't sure if they were perfectly aware that they were talking to a bot, since it seemed they were tried to have a conversation, saying hello and explaining things. Maybe that's just they think that's how bots work, and, loosely, the bot responds appropriately, by ignoring almost everything all the time and just spamming more.
I found it repulsive on a visceral level.
Add AI to this and I'll need to start praying to God to give me the restraint of not breaking other people's smartphones.
future money laundering scheme? at some point it wouldn't be much different than the computers that talk to each other in millisecond bursts all day buying and selling stocks
The models themselves are going to be replaced by those same AI Impersonators. Onlyfans has to be the most predatory service I have ever used. You are pretty much signing up to be a target of scammers, whether they be some kids in the Philippines sitting with 20 phones, or AI bots, it has become incredibly obvious that every creator uses them. They all employ the same tactic of seeing how much you are willing to pay and then increasingly offering you more and more expensive content. A few years ago you could have some real conversations but now it is just glorified spam. Even if a creator wasn’t using these tactics, the water has been so muddied that you just assume it’s all fake now.
There were non-nude people on there, once upon a time. But the banking issues around XXX caused a mass migration to that service. I think originally it was supposed to be like patreon.
I think a bunch of people around here used it for tutoring and yoga classes and such. It was meant to be a Patreon. But after a while, they stopped because everyone assumed it was "tutoring" and "yoga classes".
Perhaps this is why every platform ends up banning or pushing all the XXX to a red light district.
It was started by the founder of clips4sale and intended primarily for the findom kink. They really pushed the SFW angle early on as a way of hanging on to Stripe's low processing rates.
There are still people on there who make $$$ by pretty much just publishing Instagram-level stuff, but in bigger sets + videos. Most actual cosplayers moved off OF eventually and either sell directly or via Patreon now.
It doesn't always have to be hardcore, but the implication of having an OF is "porn star".
There's still plenty of avenues to have direct access to sex workers with varying levels of intimacy/realness if you cast a wide enough net. Just not necessarily with a top tier OF model! Though it seems like most people are satisfied with superficial interactions, in which case the AI bot approach might be a win-win.
I find it scary how many people I see online or even in real life that actually call girls on there their girlfriend and say things like 'sure it costs money, but so does yours when you buy dinner etc'. And no amount of; these girls are doing their job; you are a client, they forget about you the second you switch off, if their weren't bots on the first place seems to help.
I’ve definitely had points in my life where I would have loved to have a girlfriend that forgot about me the moment I went away. I wasn’t seeking a relationship, I only wanted the physical part the rest was a headache.
There should be some hashtag for men forced onto relationships when all they wanted was the sex /s… but honestly, if roles were reversed this would totally exist
No. I’m aware of that industry but not really into it. Something like “friends with benefits” was usually my preferred arrangement. Normal, non sex worker, people but without all the extra stuff that comes with being in a relationship.
It's not 1:1 the same, but I think the episode "Take me private" from series "Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On", gives a glimpse into that.
It's released in 2017, so more cam-girl than OF model, but it shows a deeply parasocial girlfriend-stand-in relationship of someone that spends a good chunk of his disposable income on that. I think the now common OF model + chatters are an evolution of that has even more tendencies to create girlfriend-stand-in relationships.
Online: watch some episodes by Catfished (or so; there are multiple of these shows; kind of the same) on YT. I saw it on Reddit too.
Offline: I meet many people as I travel and skip company (I have a small company doing emergency software/hardware fixes, so jobs are very short and diverse) a lot and talk a lot with strangers for fun; sometimes we end up going deep in the night over beers and things come out. Usually they are somewhat awkward and lonely guys with the tendency to see women as things; that intersects often with programmers/engineers. These are not even the weirdest things I hear from strangers either.
I hope I don’t come off as offensive asking this, but is there really that much of a difference? I’m not a fan of services which prey on peoples loneliness, but isn’t the defining feature or these para-social relationship platforms that they are all make-belief? Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s very hard for me to imagine that you could form any sort of relationship with the thousands of lonely people who pay you money to notice them. Hell, they must have some impressive note taking strategies to remember it all. An AI might end up being more engaging and personal.
If you willingly pay money to talk to AI slop that's one thing, but if you're sold access to a person then that's what you should get. You're right that they're both empty experiences, but one is an erosion of consumer rights and the other is just stupid.
But you never got that; the successful OnlyFans people have always had teams pretending to be them. Anyone who ever believed otherwise is like a kid who thinks that the mall Santa Claus is the real guy.
I'd imagine the typical long tail creator isn't successful enough to pay people for that. Hence automation. But sure, to the extent there's been misrepresentation about that, it's wrong.
They don't do this at all. I know a guy who worked as a cam-girl manager for some time. His job was to communicate in her place with 4-6 people at the same time (via text of course) while the model "acts" on the screen.
And pretty soon, we'll be able to get rid of the model acting on the screen as well. I'd say in about 10 years the entire operation will be automated by AI. Probably less than 10 if things keep developing at this breakneck pace.
(At least, that will be true for run of the mill cam girls. Obviously certain other types of influencers may be more difficult to emulate via AI.)
I cannot figure out if vast multitudes of incels carrying on relationships with AI sexbots is more or less harmful than if they were just being catfished by real, but insincere person(s).
Honestly this dystopia is a big letdown over the one I was expecting.
Essentially that is part the 'male sedation hypothesis'.
Due to the amount of incels or men who aren't really in relationships or even work these days, they should be causing significant social unrest as they have nothing to lose and try and overthrow the current social structure. In reality we hardly see any real violence or trouble from incels other than the odd angry rant on social media and the idea is that things like porn, video games and social media take care of the base needs just enough to stop the angry from boiling over and causing real trouble.
I think the statistics speak for themselves. There were exactly two famous incel terrorists aka Elliot Rodger and another guy whose name I don't remember. They both lived in the US and honestly the only thing that connects them with other shooters is that they had guns.
This type of terrorism did happen in Germany i.e. the "Halle" shooter, but he had to rely on homemade weapons with his own black powder ammunition and his attack failed, because his guns weren't strong enough to breach doors at a synagogue. What he did do is shoot a random woman passing close by (less than 5m distance) who was angrily glaring at him and then he went to a random kebab shop to shoot up an immigrant, before the police caught him.
It's really mostly a matter of keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have access to them.
It's only harmful if you hate men. If you actually like men as fellow human beings (not necessarily as boyfriend material), you wouldn't care about what they are doing to make themselves happy as long as they don't harm anyone.
Here you are primarily focusing on what's happening to them.
But we shouldn't forget that a big part of the "incel" community is actively pushing for reducing rights & liberties of women, because they see them as "things" or just "lesser humans".
If you replace real women by AI sexbots, not only you remove them a source of income (I know, it's not perfect today either, with pimps & stuff like that, but at least some women can make a living with this) but also there's a big risk that the AI are going to be quite extreme in their behavior, alienating "incels" even more, which would be harder for real women to do.
I don't think most of these guys are interested in a Black Snake Moan situation. I know the type and they mostly are content to play video games, eat junk food, and whack off all day. They are predictably unproductive in the political arena.
Besides, whether it hurts women or not, people at the top of that industry are going to replace the vast majority of the women working with AI bots. They'll do so for the profit increase.
Money is in the driver's seat. Not men's rights or women's rights. People can certainly have their preferred philosophies, but that's not going to change what's going to happen.
I don't have the numbers. But I find it hard to believe one can communicate with a few clients at the same time and still work for camera. (with private sessions as an exception)
You're quite simply wrong. I know many cam models who have been very successful afterwards, generally running their own business, not working for someone else.
Just to take one example, I know one who opened a beauty salon in St Petersburg, grew that business, opened additional salons in first Vladivostok, then Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, and most recently Dubai. Earlier this year she got residence and moved to Dubai permanently.
To give another example, in the USA this time: Aella. I don't think I need to say anything more there, you can google.
They are occupying a brief period where sex work is white market enough to not be quite as dangerous or "disgraceful" as the old days, but not accepted or legal enough to be clobbered in competition by everyone else.
Feminism and their desire to legitimize sex work will be the death knell to high wages for sex workers, and eventually drive the sex workers asking for it to other occupations that suit their risk and profit appetite. ~50% of the population has a pussy and if it's seen as completely benign, legal, and normal to sell yourself the supply will go up 10 fold to the point it becomes a job every stay at home mom vies for while applying to be a transcriptionist or whatever else.
A brief period that has lasted for almost 24 years already. Livejasmin started in 2001 -- basically as soon as the internet and typical PCs could support streaming video. MyFreeCams started in 2004. I think the FriendFinder spin-off cams.com was in that time period too. All before Youtube was founded in 2005!
Your cam model acquaintance moved to Dubai, why do you think that is? It is a place full of rich people who want escorts and the price is bidding towards infinity because they're operating on a very toned down version of Shariah law that is in place to provide a tenuous balance between not killing the golden goose of Dubai and maintaining effectively an Islamic Monarchy.
She is chasing the grey line of risk, and Dubai is the sweet spot right now of risk:reward. When she is found out, the best she can hope for is a revocation of her visa and a swift kick out of the country.
She is not an escort. She is 40 years old with a family and owns a beauty salon in Dubai (and a chain of them back in Russia). She left webcam around 2010.
> I know one who opened a beauty salon in St Petersburg, grew that business, opened additional salons ...
I mean, it kinda just makes sense. If you're actually seeing them on a platform competing with countless others then they've demonstrated that they're at least good at marketing. They likely learned it themselves as well.
> I know many cam models who have been very successful afterwards, generally running their own business, not working for someone else.
What does successful(ness?) has to do with being smart?
I guess we both can name quite a few people (doctors, scientists etc) who are very smart and knowledgeable in more than one field. But are not successful. At least not in any economical scense.
>Just to take one example, I know one who opened a beauty salon in St Petersburg, grew that business, opened additional salons in first Vladivostok, then Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, and most recently Dubai. Earlier this year she got residence and moved to Dubai permanently.
>To give another example, in the USA this time: Aella. I don't think I need to say anything more there, you can google.
>Понял?
That's just a typical russian thinking: if one can push through their way through whatever shit they are in - they are smart.
No they are not. Successful? Maybe. Hardworking? Sure, I never said that they are lazy or something like that.
Hotshots as they are - most of them are not smart.
> I know one who opened a beauty salon
I know many people who started working right after school graduation. They worked hard and quite successful too. Some have businises or other goods sources of income. Still - they are borish and anyone with at least few hobbies will have hard time talking to them because they have very few interests outside of money and spending money.
Not really no. The models that are replying to fans directly are just saying whatever they need to to get more money, often from scripts theyve written beforehand. The ones that do well offload the communication to an assistant, so the fan isn't even talking to model faking it, but an assistant faking it.
The people in the DMs tend to be the whales, the top 0.1% of spenders that get you most of your income. That the "unwashed masses" that pay a subscription and leave some comments don't have a real relationship is clear, but once you are at DMs there is the expectation of at least real engagement with the creator.
Of course big creators have long outsourced this. You aren't writing with them but with someone entirely different who gets paid to answer messages. Using AI is just the next step in enshittification of something that's pretty exploitative to begin with.
All the top earners on these platforms are already employing teams of people to manage interactions with fans. Adding an AI layer on top doesn't change all that much in that regard.
Isn't the entire reason people pick OF over traditional porn is they get to have a personal connection with the performer? DMs, custom requests etc.? Seems like it would make a huge difference to a subscriber who's looking for that experience. Maybe traditional porn will make a come back once AI dominates the OF scene.
> Isn't the entire reason people pick OF over traditional porn is they get to have a personal connection with the performer? DMs, custom requests etc.?
Hm...
I assume custom requests would either happen realtime-- in which case it's not currently possible to substitute AI video output-- or asynchronously-- in which case the proof of personal connection eventually happens during a future realtime video stream.
If the customer is paying for DM'ing during times when the person isn't streaming, I'm having a hard time imagining why it would matter whether AI is used or not. Well, at least if the quality is decent enough for what I imagine are rather terse, domain-specific DMs. :)
AI isn't replacing a personal connection with the performer here. The baseline case for OnlyFans messages is that they go to a paid phone sex operator who the performer hires to manage messages.
People should know if they talk to a bot or a human. This goes for only-fans, customer service, anything. A human pressing a "send" button does not change anything. But disclosing it would hurt the specific business, right? So it matters to something for someone. I respect AI-companion apps like replika much more than this.
They should also know if they're talking to the actual content creator, or an operator paid to pretend to be them.
Which is not the case currently, you think you're talking to your favorite porn actress but you're talking to some dude in India pretending to be her and trying to sell you "exclusive content" (i.e. prerecorded videos from a catalog).
Not only that, but CB/MFC is preferable to Tinder. The technology to fake it, to catfish it, doesn't exist yet -- at least the video part. Chat is another matter.
Presumably the goal of the people throwing money at an OF content-creator [in the form of "donations" — "here's some extra money without any implied obligation" — rather than e.g. paying for custom content] is to try to jump the gap from parasocial relationship to real (sugar?) relationship.
Of course, the OF creator can't form true relationships with thousands of people. I'm guessing that the implicit mental model in the heads of OF subscribers who "donate" to creators, is that this is a competition — that they're all participating in something like an ongoing hidden auction for a slice of the creator's limited time. They think "if I just pay the most, then she'll feel obligated to pay attention to me." (Of course, most creators feel no such sense of obligation.)
If OF subscribers can know in advance that that jump is fundamentally impossible — such as if they can discern that a dumb AI is responding to their donation-attached messages, and that that AI fundamentally has no feature to forward messages to the creator themselves — then they probably wouldn't bother "donating" in the first place.
That's not an unreasonable thought, but I think you underestimate how many people know that they are buying an illusion and are fine with that. To support that point: there are people right now who pay real money to chat with an AI companion that pretends to be their boy- or girlfriend. [0,1]
I think these people are, by and large, under no illusion that their AI companion is anything other than a computer program, but they get attached anyway and choose to live in the illusion.
I would agree that at least some OF consumers that throw donations at the OF creators, are knowingly buying an illusion. But I don't think your analogy holds. I think there's a fundamental difference between these two activities (interaction with OF creators, vs interaction with AI "character" chatbots.) The former is, in fact, expected to be literally parasocial — key word "social"; while the latter is expected to be a form of private entertainment.
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Re: the former, I would read "interacting with an OF creator" as no different than interacting with any other "their job is to pretend to like you for money, but they aren't putting themselves in a position where they're ever obligated to do anything for you" type of sex worker. For example, the employees at strip clubs; or for maybe an even better analogy, the employees at a Japanese "host club".
These are quintessential parasocial relationships: the consumer of such a service is buying an illusion, but the "product" they expect to be buying is specifically the illusion of fondness, as performed by a human. They're buying a pure act of emotional labor done by a human — "service with a smile", but where the service is the smile. (It's the same thing people get out of donating to a Twitch streamer — the streamer thanks them on-stream for their donation. They get noticed in a performatively appreciative manner.)
And, depending on how in-demand that human's time is / how many other consumers want that same emotional labor output from them, that emotional labor can be incredibly highly-valued in the market. Which is why some OF subscribers — despite knowing that the possibility of deeper connection to the OF creator is likely illusory — are still willing to pay huge amounts of money. They aren't expecting to literally enter into a sugaring relationship with the OF creator; but they are expecting to get the creator's attention and possibly receive a hand-written thank-you note or shout-out or some custom selfie they didn't ask for. An act of emotional labor on the OF creator's part, performatively responding to their donation.
But, like with going to see a magic show, this kind of illusion is only valuable when it has high verisimilitude. Nobody will pays to see a bad magic act, if they know it's going to be bad. And nobody donates to an OF creator, if they know they're going to get AI responses.
(I'm sure there are some OF consumers who are not observant enough to realize they're receiving AI responses, and so feel like they are receiving the parasocial emotional labor service they paid for. Just like there are some people — usually children — who are not observant enough to notice the flaws in a bad magic act, creating a market for bad magicians.)
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Re: the latter — paid subscribers to AI character chatbot services treat this economic relationship entirely differently. They don't see the individual chatbot as anything that holds value. And a business model that tries to get them to pay for a specific AI chatbot character, would likely never work.
Rather, from my understanding, to the people who subscribe to these things, paying for the service is analogous to paying a subscription to a game streaming service like GeForce Now.
In both cases, there's a large quantity of interactive entertainment out there that you want to "play". And running that interactive entertainment locally, would require capabilities that none of the devices you own possess. And it would be very expensive to buy the fancy hardware with those capabilities—possibly to the point of financial impracticality, if you want a top-of-the-line experience. (And, funny enough, in both of these cases, the fancy hardware is a GPU!)
The number of people here who see no difference between the two scenarios despite one of them having a very clear intent to deceive is–well, I'd say shocking, but this is exactly what I would expect. It is really just soul-crushingly depressing.
And this is really the tricky part of mental health care.
Is it a disorder to be depressed when the actual situation is really screwed up and soul crushing? Because most folks will get prescribed anti-depressants for this kind of situation.
I do not think it's about relationship - it's about exclusive/personal access which is what is promised/suggested. And no, it's not about sense of ownership either - just exclusive access. Like a one to one coaching/training rather than a group one. Only a nutter or an absolutely desperate and a nutter would believe they are in a relationship with an OF model.
The monetization of social and parasocial relationships (from advertising in social media to the industry around influencers and celebrities of all types) might be one of the cruelest things in modern capitalism.
I am surprised we don’t have more YouTube influencers who are AI generated. A lot of the opinion YouTubers can likely be replaced by AI, eg take a news item and then represent their worldview and perspective as the prompt and ask for a script. Then pad it out with appropriate AI generated videos to go along with the script. You would be missing the custom graphics still, but it would be getting close.
somewhere between 20 and 40% of all short videos recommended to me have AI involved at least somewhat, and a full 10% are 100% AI, from the captions to the graphics to the audio.
Capcut has(had?) a feature to just pump this garbage out. I thought i had a video on youtube i made with capcut but apparently i have scruples and didn't even upload it privately.
This was my first thought as well. It won't be long before OnlyFans is swamped with bots from organized syndicates, and individuals will be forced out.
For sure. I think AI image generation (and soon AI video generation) can keep up a steady flow of new content for any well established creator these days who has enough training content. No need for new photo sessions in real life or worry about them aging.
There's already copious amounts of scammers on there. I had a buddy who would go on Reddit and scrape tons of photos from all the NSFW subs, then create OF accounts, pump them up with some fake followers and then wait to see how much cash they brought in. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Porn has become such a commodity, access to the images and videos to provide fake content has never been easier. Using bots to schedule posts and respond to comments has lowered the bar even lower and clouded the ability for people to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.
There is plenty of generic porn for free on the internet. The only advantages an Only Fans creator has over that are
- being more "real" and relatable
- forming parasocial relationships through engagement
- providing "niche" content (like the teasing egirl non-nudes Belle Delphine became famous for)
AI gives you none of that. It's not very good at niche content, and for the other two it can only give illusions that will break as people get used to AI. In the beginning there is a novelty factor to AI interactions, like Twitch's Neuro-Sama, but that will wear off. And after that all you're left with are disillusioned customers.
Never - and I hold this belief for most social media. As genAI gets better there will simply be a trillions of slop out there rather than simply billions. There is already more content out there than a human can reasonably watch.
The best OF creators have simply mastered distribution. Either they have taken success in one market and pivoted to OF or they are relentlessly marketing themselves through other platforms and viral stunts.
I have yet to see an AI master the distribution side. At the least good genAI will see the rise of male OF creators
> At the least good genAI will see the rise of male OF creators.
i can imagine the backlash, as if it were already happening. a decent amount of the OF "creators" are making 7 figures a year off this, and lots are making median yearly pay in a month. Having to share that with men who are technically adept and good at marketing is gunna chafe.
> There is already more content out there than a human can reasonably watch.
I submit there's more "9/10 or better" content than anyone can reasonably watch or experience, even if you set some arbitrary cutoff date like, oh, february 22nd, 1988 and before is all you're allowed to consider.
Law and Order (one of my favorite background noises) has something like >650 hours of content, and i've watched it all. Multiple times. that's nearly 1/3rd of a work-year!
I think we’re already heading in that direction. As generative models improve, it’ll become cheaper and easier for creators, or platforms themselves, to spin up AI-based companions that feel personal, available around the clock, and perfectly tailored to each subscriber’s tastes. Tools like https://roleplayr.ai are just the start; we’ll likely see many more services offering on-demand, individualized role playing based on any image/context as the technology matures.
I've been a fanfic writer, spinning up fictional characters for company and writing their exploits, and it was indeed compelling and interesting in its own right. I think more people than you suspect will go for the hollow pretend version, especially since they're already aware the 'real' OnlyFans person is not gonna come seek them out. Why not go for the clean break of an entirely fictional thing?
OF creators need valid ID, so they can't create a totally fictitious profile with nobody behind it.
BUT... from what I understand some agencies managing these accounts are training models with hundreds of photos of the creator and then using that to push out more photos in different outfits and locations without the creator being involved at all.
Surely the motivation for paying for this pornography is precisely the somehow more "human" "closeness" of a known individual creating content on a direct, "personal" basis.
It's not quite the-Queen-is-my-friend levels of parasocial but it does seem to be about intimacy.
What happens to that business model if customers paying on that basis realise they are seeing & talking to a bot? Seems quite footshooty.
People who frequent services like these will go to great lengths to keep the fantasy alive. Heck believing that the model on the other side of the screen cares for you as a person needs a... special state of mind to begin with.
While you are right, I think the mindset is different. People know that the interactions are fake. The real lie they tell themselves is that "If they only got to know the real me......." This is what feeds the personal messages/requests to try to break through the "noise" and be seen as a real person with shared interests or w/e.
This feels representative of our times: Using chatbots to power a gig economy of para-social relationships for lonely people short on real in-person interactions.
What are people doing instead of interacting? I've noticed this trend but i've kept my wits by ascribing it to "my peer group getting older and doing more things with their own families" - but every so often something makes my brain get hot, like this comment.
It can't all be ig/tiktok interactions, can it? I moved away from all my friends (they started it) and now it's hard to find people who have "free time" - even those that WFH! So i mostly hang out with retirees, they have free time.
1. people are working more than ever, especially in this economy. Some do lots of overtimes, some have multiple jobs (be it two literal part time jobs or full time job and doing dash services on the side). Some have other side hustles that they hope to convert into more income
Personal anecdotes: I work in games so it's never a surprise when I hear some of them need to crunch for a few months. A few others are actually trying to build up their band and do gigs every other weekend
2. non-surprisingly, people's down on money. Probably not much explanation here; not much time to hang out if they have to move (2 of my friends out of state) or job hunt after a layoff (pretty much all my friends at some point in 2023/4).
3. There's a lot of pandemic habits that never truly wore off. Some simply stay on social media, a few of my friends were always into MMOs and put more time than ever into that. They are interacting, just not necessarily with you.
4. Family. Very old knowledge, but when friends get serious partners and later spouses and especially kids, that's what they put almost all their time into. A single friend will fall off without some work.
You've got it upside down. Human contact is cheap. If you want to talk to another human being in real life, I bet you can do so within 5 minutes. What has actually happened is that the internet has created a close enough simulacrum of human contact that is as addicting as any drug. It provides a cheap hit of socialization, and you can fill every last inch of your life with it.
Listen to a podcast in the car, walk around while scrolling social media, watch Twitch streams while doing the dishes. It doesn't actually fulfill your needs but it feels like it does. Gen AI is just a way to generate more of that kind of content than is possible, removing any human element, making something supposedly just as tasty, but it's empty calories.
I'm fairly gregarious, and find it fairly easy to approach strangers (if I have to). Yes, a lot of human contact can be had for fairly cheap.
However, I'm also aware that this is far from "normal" -- the average person is not this way (at least, not today). How/why things have come to be this way, I cannot pinpoint, but our lives have gotten progressively busier to the point where many of us choose convenience over "richness/fullness of experience".
However, my point is still valid, in that if you are an average person today, the prevailing social gestalt in America is "mind your own business, and don't talk to (or approach) people in the street".
Yes, weird folks like me, who are willing to be more vulnerable (what if the person you just said "Good morning!" to cusses you out?) will be able to get human contact for cheap, but high-quality Human contact is definitely waning.
P.S. Also agree with you that GenAI (and other modern technologies) are providing a frictionless existence, while also removing the richness and meaning that comes with the friction. It's the "soma" from Huxley's "Brave New World".
Is there that much difference between this and a phone sex cubicle worker in the 70s or 80s? It's been a commoditized job for ages. Slightly higher tech now, but basically still the same thing.
I think it's more common now. I don't know that phone sex was ever all that popular, but OnlyFans is huge. Also, there's just a lot more sollicitations. On twitch you have gamer girls in skimpy outfits using the platform as a funnel to drive people to OF, and most of their audience is underage. They're on twitter and reddit as well. Just in general porn is a lot more prevalent and it's kind of leaking into other platforms, harder to completely avoid it.
Also uh, I was on Facebook recently and they've added this reels feature, trying to be tiktok. Occasionally I browse my feed to see what my friends are up to, and in the reels (which can't be turned off) I see some underage girls doing really inappropriate things for views. I think this is really problematic. I don't want to be shown this, and I also feel upset that young girls are being encouraged by social media platforms to use their sexuality to get attention online (and make said platforms more money by doing so).
It is also in the interest of all those involved with OnlyFans to highly exaggerate all the $$$ figures.
The people I have known that have made OnlyFans content made as little money as you would expect.
There has always been money in porn though with a giant power law distribution. The only difference now is that instead of some sleazebag porn producer trying convince some woman they are the next Jenna Jameson, we have this sleazebag technology platform doing the same thing.
Globally probably - since now it is bigger. Have a look at Teleholding in the netherlands as an example, they printed money mostly with recordings not even people on the other side.
The company owners did. But the phone operators were (to my understanding) reasonably well paid. However income dropped off with the introduction of video chat(first on sky TV, then internets).
One of my former colleagues bought a flat in london with the proceeds from their dancing in night clubs. Which I thought at the time, and still do, is might impressive. They keep that private, for a number of sadly obvious reasons, however they are not ashamed of it.
They refused video chat, because it was less protected, and less anonymous. In a (good) club, you are protected by bouncers, no phones, no intimidation. OF and the rest you have limited control on who shares your stuff, so its much harder to be a part time model.
"By the end of the 1980s, nearly all of the major local phone companies in the United States, plus the major long-distance carriers, were actively involved in the phone sex business[...] In 2002 profits from phone sex were estimated at one billion dollars a year"
And in relative terms in particular that seems pretty huge given how much smaller all the phone and online markets were compared to what they're now.
Well the comparative change is kinda the point. OF is huge and content producers have a chance of making big bucks, as opposed to what was there before
A friend of mine ran a management company for a couple years, and indicated that with the talent they managed, it was almost never the actual person responding to DMs.
The outsourced the interactions to third world "typists" that took care of it.
This is just an evolution of that, and probably provides a better experience, since they're able to tailor the model in a way that someone speaking English as a second language never could.
I was working on exactly such a project in 2022. It was scrapped because there is too much risk in LLM accidentally violating OF rules, which immediately results in losing a very valuable account.
OnlyFans is an interesting paradox of the "consenting adults" ethic. On one hand it triggers the disgust reflex. Yet people avoid criticizing OF to avoid seeming prude.
You will feel better just saying what you feel. Intuition does exist.
As someone who knows a lot of people who have done various types of sex work, and having done some myself, that's simply not always true. I think people seek out and find the type of interactions that work for them. Some people are easily amused. Maybe most! But a wide range of interactions are available for people who want them and look for them.
Even on the high end, most workers would be happy to actually get to know a client - if the client isn't totally off-putting and is willing pay $100/hr for Skype! But if a client wants canned responses, they'll get canned responses. And maybe AI is actually an improvement for those types of clients if they can retain some plausible deniability.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QHXElgrl8
If you keep watching there's another feature that actually generates video ideas, scripts, and even thumbnails for video creators.
Seems really grim- what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature? It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
Fitting for our times.
It's easy to rationalise a time saving measure I guess. I feel I'm unauthentic when I use auto-generated response suggestions in Outlook. But, like OnlyFans, it's 'just business'. Perhaps I'm overthinking it. How genuine and heartfelt can OnlyFans responses be? Probably as much as my response to a budget approval.
Shouldn't there be a level of candidness at which it cannot be considered deception? I mean we accept casinos/gambling and religions in our societies for example.
If the site is saying ‘chat with X for $5/min’, and you never have any interaction with X at all for your $5/min, that seems like a pretty clear cut case doesn’t it?
Yeah, ok.
- soon to be murdered guy.
I wouldn't expect, like, Mia Khalifa (I'm out of the game, who's current?) to answer her own messages but there does seem to be an expectation that smaller creators are actually behind the accounts.
I know there are also some people who pretend they are falling in love with the prostitutes they pay to have sex but the terms are clear both in physical and online prostitution. It is all a business about pretending and consumers should expect that.
I guess there is some truth to the adage that a male body can't push blood both to the brain and to the penis at the same time - it's either one, or the other. I mean, if you step back and take a cold look at the content produced by popular OF performers, it's pretty apparent those are business operations. There are other people involved. Someone does the camera work. Location work. Promotion. And yes, fan management too.
Same applies to YouTube personas, too. Brands, not people. Talking to fans is a job that can be outsourced. AI doesn't introduce anything new; AI features on the platform are competing with creators' brand management agencies, which themselves likely already use ChatGPT for this anyway, because why wouldn't they? ChatGPT does better job at this stuff and is cheaper than human labor - but again, the AI angle isn't important here - that human labor was just a generative model in a protein substrate anyway.
Maybe it already was fraud. I expect to see class-action lawsuits on the way soon.
This is another facet of a larger phenomenon, that I just commented on in another thread[0] - there's a lot of harmful activity that's considered legitimate, thus invisible to our legal and cultural immune systems, yet no less harmful than the slightly less legitimate scams.
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42401894
After reading your post, I had a thought: Making this story about OnlyFans is the click bait element. Seriously, replay the story in your head where it says that top 1/2/3/4/5% of YouTubers or Instagrammers or TikTokkers are using LLMs to answer comments and DMs. Suddenly, the story is much less enticing. It probably would not even make HN front page. Most readers here would look at such an article, shrug their shoulders, and say: "Yeah, seems right. I would do the same.". However, as soon as you add sex work into the mix, it gets way more spicy and elicits more emotional responses.
That said, I don't agree that using AI chatbots to deceive fans is OK anywhere else either. And no, I would definitely not ever do it myself.
"Artificial Intelligence" -> noun artifice: ruse, clever trick, guile, deception, cunning, a skillful or artful contrivance
I guess LLM hallucinations will just give a slightly different flavour of unreal interactions.
Though I don't doubt that less careful (or less well-paid) gig-chatters exist and can have a slightly different feel when handing off a random at shift-change
The next step is not having real models at all. It'll be 100% AI all the way up and down the stack.
Completely AI porn is going to be booming business. PornHub, OnlyFans, and perhaps even some dating websites will be "innovator's dilemma"'d out.
That was just a product / form factor thing: Bird and Lime scooters are everywhere in my city. And, moreover, lots of people use personal scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards, electric skateboards, Onewheel, electric unicycles, etc. I don't go a day without seeing these things.
It'll be the exact same with this technology. Give it a few years and more men will be using AI chatbots and AI porn than the existing tools in the space, such as PornHub and OnlyFans.
> the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term
Porn has never gone away, it's only grown.
AI porn can match a person's exact preferences in an unparalleled way that hasn't been possible before. Add in VR, photorealism, voices, and trainable agentic behavior and you've got a market that will likely contribute to the decline of real, actual relationships and marriages.
More men will probably be using AI porn over actual sex, too, due to difficulties with dating, dead bedrooms, etc.
I'd be willing to place bets on marriage numbers going into a steep decline over the next decade.
If a dead bedroom marriage is still intact now, why would AI porn change that? Do you need to get divorced before you can chat with the bot? Is the bot going to help parent the children you were staying in the marriage for?
New marriages, not divorces. Though I wouldn't necessarily rule out the latter, either.
Not being able to find a relationship is not binary. Having alternatives to satisfy needs means less effort is put in achieving the real thing. This goes for both genders of course, just the needs and alternatives being different.
Marriage was hit way before that. Marriage is not a rational choice in a lot of countries, where a civil union does the same thing without the hassle and the costs of divorce if it happens. The main reason is religion and it has been losing ground for decades at this point.
This is not going to make it any more attractive.
What the heck does that mean? Last I checked, population demographics weren't that far off 50/50 in most countries.
Hey, I'm married so I'm just going by what my single / online dating friends tell me. It has nothing to do with demographics. In today's app-based environment, something like 80% of women are interested in / going for the top 10-20% of men, and it's getting even more extreme. Is this not true?
It just feels oddly gender specific to assume that in an environment where there are approximately equal numbers of single men and women (no?), one gender has sights set too high and the other doesn't.
This was a long time ago as well and I think the situation has gotten worse in the age of tinder and friends.
This is a summary of the article: https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/
"Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme."
No wonder why women are so incredibly selective. Gender ratio population wise is roughly equal, with slightly more women than men in the US, AFAIK. Men are chasing women in the wrong place.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/165lsmp/tinder_gend...
Nobody's going around advertising their fancy cars, their hobbies and the church they goes to, etc. We're heavily focused on the perfect match rather than doing vibe check.
Basically you'll need as many single men than single women.
Now if you're talking about apps, a minority of men can date most of the women, but that doesn't work for long term relationships.
Extrapolation to the whole population seems crazy though. And I wouldn't expect dating apps to remain the same, we should expect more behavioral experimentation as well as backlash and new social movements to change mating behavior. It isn't like the average woman is a fan of polygyny either.
I'd say the market has previously proven that's definitely false.
Consequently, AI porn will probably eat the bottom of the bulk market, with a much-smaller market left for higher-end human content.
Which probably isn't the worst thing... as the low-value pornography seems to encourage the most horrific, exploitive conditions.
Backhoes drastically reduce the demand for laborers (the traditional equivalent for men), and I don’t see anyone with reasonable options there either.
Notably, at least 90% of the laborers I’ve met would love to be able to get paid having sex instead of being laborers. But the market dynamics don’t make that a viable choice.
At some point we should get past make-work that creates horrible lives for people, when we have the capability to automate that work.
Not automating something so that someone will have a job is bad reasoning and traps society in a local rut.
Which population?
The situation in most well off countries is already that native populations have fallen below replacement rates. The result has not been to rejoice in the would-be crisis being averted but instead the crisis has been inverted and now those countries "need" to import foreigners to keep their economies from imploding. Or are you suggesting population control for africa and the middle east? Because I'm not sure they'll agree.
I agree that society needs to adapt to the post-scarcity reality but "population control" is and will always be something dystopian. It's also irrelevant because the more we automate the less people we actually "need" so no amount of population control will ever solve the underlying issue.
Men had a headstart from being more into tech, but I think women are already the majority users of AI sex-rp and AI partners. Makes sense too given that they read more erotica than men.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34954694
I'm not going to waste my time educating you on this because I can tell from the way you jumped immediately to the incel label that you're just going to deny deflect and diffuse.
I don't think you needed to imply that someone was an incel.
I agree that part of that ~30% difference could be women dating older men. But it could also be women dating each other: this[0] Gallup poll from 2023 found that 27% of Gen Z women identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Gen Z as noted here doesn't perfectly overlap with people in their 20s, but it seems like this could be another (better?) explanation.
[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/611864/lgbtq-identification.asp...
These aren't novel numbers:
https://aibm.org/commentary/gen-zs-romance-gap-why-nearly-ha...
https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/reimagining-teenage-ro...
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...
The lonliness epidemic did not just stop at platonic relationships.
>What is your definition of "young men"?
I just use "Gen Z" as a moniker, so anyone from 1995 or 96 to 2010.
>how so?
Feel free to read the links, but various factors include
- less physical interaction in lieu of social media, even among school mates
- The consolidation of the dating scene to apps, which has their own story of dark patterns
- Women are still more likely to "date up", so there's less women in the same poll as younger men
- Some are simply sexually satisfied by porn and aren't really trying to actively date due to the above factors
- higher senses of anxiety from approaching compared to older generations
- Finances. no money, harder to make a good first impression. So some don't try
It's a multi-faceted issue.
and the porn-rot brains will make it harder for them to get into healthy relationships as well adjusted individuals, resulting in a glut of long-term customer for corporate-mediated para-social "relationships". Another victory for unbridled capitalism.
The young men have to "git gud" & level up IRL like they have to in every other aspect of life. There won't be government issued waifus
Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men, who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
Everybody wants that, including the potential girlfriends, but a functional relationship requires 2 well-adjusted parties. The average level 2 druid also wants respect from their guild and a trusty side-kick, but they may have to grind for those things and go on some side quests. No one is owed a partner, especially if they are unable to compromise (the grease of all social interactions).
> Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men
Fortunately,there is scientific research[1] in the field, so we don't have to go with our gut-feeling. Modeling behavior on scripted pornography leads to socially unacceptable behaviors in real life. A female acquaintance was recently propositioned by the man she had just started dating for an 3-way "encounter" involving her sister (as in full sibling); I think "porn rot" is the right description of what led him down the road of thinking it was a perfectly reasonable request to verbalize. This put an end to the relationship, but I'm sure he might be out there somewhere complaining about how he's being unfairly rejected by women.
> ...who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
every generation has a subculture like this, and in the past, they accepted, and gloried even, that they were a subculture instead of demanding to be accepted by the mainstream (beatniks, punks, goths, emos, etc).
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37847848/
The dark gamified patterns of app dating reward and encourage women to rapidly dismiss huge numbers of men in the hopes of finding one of the very few who meets a number of superficial criteria. Meeting people IRL has less toxic intrinsic structure, but has only become more difficult as the apps advertise themselves as a "safer" alternative.
I think that the AI-pretending-to-be-human does not have much future, because if people end up chatting with AIs why not go with the real thing rather than with the only-fans ones. The only-fans creators are training their replacements.
Do people honestly convince themselves some stranger performing on the internet in a very one way relationship somehow truly cares about them and not their ability to monetize.
and summarize it for humans.
Chatters-for-hire were always questionable. Some are cheap labor in cheap English-speaking countries. But I’ve also seen that vendors that offer chatter services have difficulty with quality control (of the chats), causing the OnlyFans channel to drop the chatters and apologize for the breach of trust to paying fans.
That said, I imagine there is a LOT of value in identifying high quality leads/chats to be prioritized and ignoring/ blocking the lowest quality (eg. Insurers and time wasters).
How sad.
"Influencers" living on borrowed time is one of the few good things about the machine learning dystopia.
I get the feeling that it won't be long before the "model" will also be the "model".
I think users need to demand that if it's AI generated that it's labeled as such.
Abuse of expectations can be dealt with bans and/or prosecutions for fraud.
So, responding to viewers increases engagement, and thereby a channel's virality.
And one human can only do so much of that. So eventually, you hit a marketing scalability bottleneck — you get more comments than you can read, and the people who don't feel engaged with, are more likely to churn from your viewership, so your viewership growth starts to decelerate.
Large media companies + MCNs previously solved this bottleneck, by hiring paid human community managers to scale responding-to-comments.
But individual creators bootstrapping their growth, had no good solution to this (besides joining an MCN), because the too-many-comments threshold comes long before they make enough revenue to afford to hire their own community managers.
This creates a pay-to-win model where companies who already have capital from other ventures can afford to circumvent this bottleneck and so get big on YouTube, in a way that individual creators cannot.
And YouTube doesn't like that; those big companies aren't beholden to YouTube in the way that creators that think of themselves fundamentally as "YouTube content creators" are. (Or, to say that in a nicer way: YouTube wants to democratize content creation, ensuring that there's a way for small bootstrapped content-creators to "make it.")
AI comment responding is a substitute good for the paid human community managers who already perform this function for large media companies / MCNs / etc. It serves to allow these independent bootstrapped content-creators to overcome the responses-to-comments marketing bottleneck for much lower cost.
This doesn't do anything good for the people who post comments, of course; but it does work to ensure a healthy ecosystem of independent bootstrapped content creators, rather than an oligopoly of media companies — which is something that viewers want from YouTube.
(An analogy might be to level-1 CSRs in a call center: as a complainant, they just get in your way; but they solve a customer-service scalability bottleneck for the company, which thereby allows the company to grow past the point where it would otherwise stop being able to handle support at all due to the increasing flood of "nonsense" complaints.)
> It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
Yes, it is, but that's going to happen whether or not there's a built-in feature to do it. That ship has sailed literally centuries ago — ever heard of writing to a famous author/actor/etc, and getting a hand-written response, seemingly from the famous person themselves, but actually from their agent and just signed by the famous person?
This comment is 100% AI generated, straight from an LLM (admittedly a small and specifically trained one). My first and likely only AI generated comment.
Can you tell it's AI generated? Can dang?
Like most engineering there's a matter of "good enough" and you get surprisingly close to that by simply tracking down the most obvious accounts.
It couldn't be completely automated out regardless because intent is important as well. Using an LLM to try and translate yours or a foreign post has more honest intention than a soliciting bot or an otherwise disruptive user that is breaking rules.
Now with that context in mind:
> How could hacker news determine such things?
Good question, I'm curious as well. I'm not well versed in the state of tracking such behavior. But I'm sure any site of size has needed to prepare for this for a while.
It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong. If I used that I would be telling my fans the opposite of what I actually meant, or various other catastrophically not-even-wrong assertions. It really, really is not figuring out what it's being fed. Sometimes I let people in on what the AI is suggesting I say.
It's not actually wresting the controls from my hands and talking to my fans AS me… yet.
"Yeah back then I was weirded out by their now standard response prediction thing, it was always just one or two words off exactly what I wanted to reply (usually missing/adding a negation, or substituting a word with an antonym)"[1]
[1]: https://qntm.org/perso
I may be an outlier, i've actually met a couple dozen famous people, because a lot of my friends were (strong were there) industry adjacent. Like, i've been to NAMM multiple times, and iirc the tickets were quite pricey and limited.
I would rather have those "celebrities" that don't want to directly interact with plebs be honest about it. Nothing wrong with setting boundaries for your job, a lot wrong with deceiving people even if it might seem benign at first.
There is none, because the whole thing was never good faith. It's always been about tricking people into having a real interaction, to make it easier to exploit them for ad clicks or to sell them junk. That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.
None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were. It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
The point is that people pay to have a genuine interaction. If everything is fake, why interact at all? Imagine you were typing into the void and no one saw what you said. Would you continue doing it if you knew? How about on this forum?
And then you generate one more, and it's the greeting you came up with.
(and no, it's not genuine)
So I would say the golden rule continues to apply: the more effort is visible, the more genuine it is.
Being genuine is all about how much actual care and heart you pour into thing. That's really something only you can truly know. Using generative AI doesn't automatically make it not genuine, much like using a grammar checker or a thesaurus doesn't.
Conversely, not using AI tools doesn't suddenly make YouTube and OnlyFan creators' comments genuine. They never were. There is no care and heart in there, only salesmanship, and it's most likely outsourced to a brand management company anyway.
At some point, the organizer (to help situation) quoted from the abstract that was submitted, and it was indeed apparently decently written. After that, I could not help thinking that the likelihood the abstract was written by an LLM is very high. In that case, the presenter certainly reviewed it, but crucially did not write it—the thought process that makes the idea part of your active vocabulary, and you capable of expressing it, would not have taken place.
To reiterate, I don’t know whether it happened or not, but even if no LLM was involved in this instance (perhaps it was just a particularly violent case of stage fright, despite the event being very small and the IRL vibe extremely casual) it would be beyond silly to assume that it would not be happening going forward.
I used to think that it is beneficial if an LLM can help in handling certain boring signaling communication for people who are very bad at it, acting as a sort of an equalizer. A model writes stuff, you approve it, and you gain access somewhere without having, say, the written language flair of someone who went to a prestigious school, or having to spend time on something that seems unnecessary.
I am changing my mind now. Sure, the case I have described is one of the more extreme ones, but it made me think how signals are actually signals for a reason[0], and when some signals go away the communication field does not become equalized—instead, other signals and barriers are used: money, IRL meetings, invitation, some sort of privacy-violating invasive check of humanity, etc., or the communication that relied on some signals before would simply not happen now. When the Web and tech in general had removed a whole lot of constraints on communication, we still could rely on those signals, but that is apparently coming to an end.
Writing a birthday card is another endangered signal. The impression from the movies, how these gestures become very cheap if they come from some rich CEO who certainly has a personal assistant for this sort of stuff, now applies to everyone (including people who would never touch an LLM with a ten foot pole). Once we all know that a birthday card can be reduced to “I have read and approved this message”, as social beings we won’t stop needing the psychological impact of such positive gestures—we only stop receiving it.
I am not sure I see all of the above as positive (even if in the latter case I am slightly optimistic that some viable substitute for those signals could be found within personal relationships).
[0] Even that reason is dubious, like discrimination by a social criteria, well then that’s not going to go anywhere. Tech is not going to solve that human problem, besides perhaps a very fleeting handful of months when some techies gain edge while everyone is still catching on. New barriers will be erected, the core problem left unaddressed.
After a while, some dread was setting in. We started asking questions:
* Why did it hover that card?
"To pretend it's human. The card has less than 10% playrate on that class"
* Did it... just spam the Well Met meme while going face?
"Of course. Because people do it"
* Wait it ropes the opponents?
"Yes. You can set it to rope back"
We kept seeing more and more behaviors. It would squelch noisy opponents. It would even tap the ground pretending to be a bored person. And then it hit me: 95% of Hearthstone players are bots. Every single human behavior that you could perhaps use to identify 'people', it faked.
I quit Hearthstone within that week.
Yes more than 70% of Tinder profiles are already probably bots at this time. The CEO said they had an AI strategy.
People will be more and more lonely.
For the record, I'm male, mid 30's, and average looking.
Or people might be less lonely. There will come a point where the online experience becomes worthless and people will place greater importance on face-to-face interaction. That's how it was 20 years ago.
Will be very hard to tell the difference until you are intimate
To extrapolate the theme of that movie just a little bit further?
It's not like you have meaningful interactions with the other players anyway (beyond the occasional post-game friend request which has a 50/50 chance to be abusive).
(Honest question, I'm not arguing you're wrong)
Pure cope, but whatever helps you sleep better at night.
Except, you know, actually playing the game well. The bots all play aggro decks and get lower than average winrates.
> I quit Hearthstone within that week.
Why? Their presence makes climbing the ladder easier, so you get more rewards.
So it had positive effect in the end. I wish I had something like this that would stop me use any social media.
We must be looking at different social medias as this is pretty much all I see.
I really don't care about youtubers using tools like this. If it works for them and saves them time: great! If it reduces their level of authenticity: that'll lead to a correction of their popularity.
For OnlyFans... meuh. To me, the idea of interaction there reminds me strongly of the "adult" phone lines of old. You want someone to tease you and say naughty things to you? Well, you can get that for 99 cents/minute.
If you want to buy the attention of someone specific, when they can let someone/something else do that for cents on the dollar... don't be surprised to be tricked.
On only fans people are paying extra for individual specific attention.
But AI can be good enough to fool people that are specifically looking for that experience.
Sure, free market view, if the automated chat isn't good enough then it will lead to people leaving. The point is, it is good enough.
Don't think anybody is complaining that people on only fans are being duped, maybe more concerning that if you can have realistic video and chat, and people are being fooled, then there is some wider impacts on society. Large chunks of people could get fooled by any number of relationships that aren't real.
If you're paying for it, how genuine is it really?
The fans make the person famous. The famous person isn't doing a favor for the fans. They should remember that
The whole ecosystem is toxic and, at the risk of sounding like a prude, should be banned.
And the adult industry knows this, which is why sites like Onlyfans empahsize exclusivity and direct interactions. Faking those makes the whole thing even more of a scam.
It's not all black and white.
Nah, first and foremost, the comment page and the video itself should start with Surgeon General's warning: "You're watching a long-form, semi-interactive ad. None of this is authentic, and none of it is meant to do anything good or nice for you."
(And perhaps also: "You're probably better of going for a smoke instead of consuming this.")
It is akin to a movie stating "a true story" - some liberties may be taken but if the protagonist becomes world president then travels to mars and becomes king of the martians. I am going to start looking for citations.
IMO, yes. Copy-pased might be accepteable if it is the author himself doing the selection of what to copy and paste.
If the main value of the comments is interacting with the person in question then anything less is fraud. If authenticity doesn't matter then the label won't impact the desired effect.
Should people know that these interactions have never been genuine? Yes. Is that an excuse for scamming people? Absolutely not.
I don't follow any creators for such a purpose. I follow creators who make interesting and meaningful things, be they YouTube videos or otherwise. The sorts of people who make a thumbnail that explains what the video is, not just one that's most likely to get attention in the algorithm. Conversely, those folks often respond to people who comment on their interesting and thoughtful things in interesting and thoughtful ways, with interesting a thoughtful replies. This is called a conversation, and it exists for purposes far beyond engagement, and is not a task well suited to AI automation (thank fucking god).
One would counter that if your (if you are indeed some sort of creator) replies are so easily automated, and your thumbnails automated, then the question must be asked... who needs you? How long until YouTube replaces you with a bot, trained on your previous videos, and tells you to kick rocks? After all, you're an unnecessary expense.
Expecting internet celebrities to have "authentic" interactions with you is just parasocial relationship. It always has been, and gen-AI just reveals it.
Yeah, and it doesn't even change it - it just makes it more appealing for news to run with a story. Of course, the focus is on AI/authenticity angle; I'd thought they'd give some space for the plight of brand agency marketers (and cheap labor they subcontract to) being pushed out of their jobs by LLMs, but I guess that would require first explaining to people that it was those marketers who people were having their "relationships" with all along. But that's just too sad and complex to report on; it's more of an op ed stuff anyway.
Or in other wors, yes we should be concerned about the crime syndicate moving into town even if petty theft existed before.
Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
But I feel offended that they think badly printed signature with pixelation will fool me or will make it somewhat better.
I don’t miss interaction with CEO but I know someone put in effort to fool me.
From all Christmas bonuses and gifts over the years from companies I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Then don't. It is pathetic and disingenuous to pretend to be personal when you are not. Especially those who spend extra on a single squiggle of blue printer ink.
No, but I assume it would still be considered a valid signature in case of some legal dispute. The CEO may not have signed the document by hand (nor even read it), but the company placing the likeness of CEO's signature in the document signals that the CEO accepts responsibility for it. The CEO is still "in the loop" anyway, they had to personally approve the use of their signature like this.
Which is to say, I consider such "fake signatures" perfectly OK. I just don't consider them as a sign of care or personal interest.
Now, marketing communication that does it, is another story. It's bullshit all the way through, signature included.
> I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Which reminds me - even actually hand-written letters can be fake. Have you ever found a hand-written letter inviting you to a Bible study?
I grew up in a religion that's big on preaching; mostly door-to-door, but when that's for some reason impossible (e.g. time, health constraints), people would write letters instead. Some people were real "high performers" here, in the sense they would sit down over couple evenings and hand-write couple dozen letters, to be distributed around some neighborhood instead of going through it personally. I used to be impressed by dedication, but it eventually dawned on me - it's just exploiting the faux personal connection. They're selling something (which they may feel is genuinely worth it), and hand-written letters is just a sales tactic. They're hoping you pick it up and think about how much effort someone put into a personal letter to you. But the effort is not genuine; it's a fake signal. In reality, the author probably had a good time spending an evening with friends, writing a letter after letter after letter.
So while I 100% believe the intentions of that manager of yours were pure and his heart was in the right place, I post this as a warning for the general case: high effort doesn't automatically imply it's genuine and honest. If it feels like sales, it probably is.
Related: the secret to pulling off a magic trick is to put much, much more effort into preparing the trick than a reasonable person would expect. Same applies to sales.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen
Please speak for yourself only.
If the AI can replace you so easily then your interactions are worthless. In practice it won't say what you would have said but some corporate approved PC-filtered version of it devoid of any soul.
> None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is a sociopath.
> It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
If (when) this catches on, it won't just be "mega celebrities" using these dystopian methods. But no, even for them expanding the scope of their ability to delude and take advantage of simps is a negative.
Of course they only do it because it's inevitable, and they don't want others doing it before them.
But that does not make it "inevitable".
As such, I'm not sure where you'd like to draw the line. There's no obvious, defensible place to do it, not unless you're willing to go back up, expand the scope and fight the entire advertising industry on principle - in which case, I'll agree, because I believe that's where the problem originates and where it needs to be solved.
Market forces demand it, and people are beholden to the market so long as they exist within its sphere.
There are a plethora of other forces at work beyond "the market".
Yes, if no one imagines anything different the future will turn out as we expect. But with even small changes to legislation, norms and culture thing can turn out completely different. It is only inevitable if we resign ourselves to the status quo.
Those are the qualities that define "the market". What are the other forces you speak of?
Markets can change. They have many times before. But, and call me unimaginative if you will, I struggle to see why anyone would want to pay substantially more to ensure that comments on YouTube are written by a real, live human, let alone enough people to sustain the service. It is not like you are face-to-face at the bar. It is a blob of text that has always been disassociated from what human involvement there may have been behind the scenes.
Inevitable in the strictest literal sense may be too much, but the chances of the market changing here seem infinitesimally small to the point that "inevitable" is close enough.
It used to be that TV or newspapers or any other media was 'talking' to the audience (plural) now it talks to 'you' (singular).
Maybe it gets a bit weird when you start messaging your favourite Youtuber and they reply fast enough that you feel like it's a personal conversation rather than a professional correspondence. Sending a letter to Cronkite would have been far less immediate.
Treating media as anything other then virtually entirely read-only has always been what nutters do - they'd be the only ones writing any significant numbers letters to the person if the TV, and the same is probably true of modern media.
I'm past calling this unintentional. It's not. If it's some random account barely anyone has heard of, posting interesting stuff every now and then, then sure, that's unintentional - and also mostly harmless. However, if the creator is somewhat known[0], posts regularly, and their content is structured and polished, and they start uttering phrases like "like and subscribe" or "ring the bell"[1], or Patreon is mentioned - then you're looking at entirely intentional manipulation.
To a degree, it's unavoidable - it's the nature of the medium and the economy at large. Making quality videos is pretty much a full-time job, so even the creators with purest of hearts will be forced to include stuff that puts their videos on SponsorBlock lists. But then there's a difference between those who want you to subscribe to their Patreon and maybe buy some stickers so they can afford treating their hobby as a job, and those whose content is just a vector for feeding you first-party and third-party (sponsor) ads. Most well-known vloggers are, unfortunately, the latter. Also anyone who's called or calls themselves an influencer is - it's literally the definition of that word.
--
[0] - Perhaps you could say they're "effectively a brand" in their niche - but then, that phrase alone should tell you something.
[1] - Unless it's preceded by "climb the steps" - then you're dealing with a whole other barrel of monkeys.
I don't agree with this at all. No one is forced into making video cration their only job. Yes, making videos on weekends means less "output" and as a result a smaller following. But so what? It's still a choice. And IMO almost always a bad one if you care about quality - pretty much no person can keep up creative quality for long when working on a schedule and that's before you even get to intentionally degrading the quality for the sake of monetization.
Every person at the very least has the choice of just creating and sharing things rather than trying to build a business. Of course calling them "creators" already shifts the discussion into the worldview that shapes the current internet.
If "Youtuber" isn't a profitable job without engaging in slimy practices then maybe it shouldn't be a job at all. In fact, trying to make any human activity into a profitable business is one of the big if not the main driving forces behind the enshittification of the internet as well as many things outside it. And it's always this same justification - that engaging in shitty behavior is required to compete.
Personally I don't mind you mentioning your Patreon [0] but "like and subscribe" guarantees a dislike from me and I sure as hell am not going to subscribe [1]. Sponsored sections will get me to immediately close the video and make a mental note to ignore videos from that person in the future. Yes, I could use SponsorBlock but if someone is willing to sell themselves in that way I don't trust them or their videos to not be also compromised in other less obvious ways. It's important to remember that Youtube and similar media is completely optional entertainment and you don't need to engage in any of it.
[0] Please consider alternatives though, Patreon itself is a pretty shit website what I only use begrudgingly.
[1] I don't use youtube subscriptions at all, only RSS subscriptions for the very few channels I want to follow - most things are not important enough to get regular releases from and I'm fine with only seeing videos that are good enough for others to share them with me.
The basic reproductive qualities of females favor LTR since it takes 9 months at the very least to pop out a kid, during which time mating with other males provides no additional children for them.
It will be an interesting world if these short transactional relationships are basically available anywhere like chips out of a vending machine. I suspect most of the reason for laws against prostitution are a mixture of protectionism for prostitution rings (they need the illegality / high risk to lock in heavy profits) and disproportionately appeals towards the female reproductive strategy that is potentially at a disadvantage with guiltless "normal" sanctioned prostitution on the table at every computer and street corner.
I mean, no? That’s the most cynical possible read.
A lot of successful YouTube channels don’t even interact significantly in the comments. For example, in Doug DeMuro’s latest video, I don’t see any comments from his channel in the comments.
You’re also claiming that the YouTube content business is all about exploitation, tricking people into selling them junk. But that’s also a cynical read: lots of creators don’t go down that route.
Using Doug DeMuro as another example, the only recent advertisements he has are for his own car auction site and for Turo, which are both relevant and useful services to automotive enthusiasts.
Some other YouTubers just don’t advertise at all and mostly rely on Patreon, like Technology Connections.
The renewed interest in long firm on YouTube might be something though.
A post digital addiction Internet is possible - I wonder how many early users of the internet now silence their notifications, maybe even run their screens in greyscale.
And yeah I turn off notifications always on everything. Even my smart phone is usually in Do Not Disturb.
I don't know how much of my online experience shaped this, though. I've got an asperger personality (worded as such because I've not been diagnosed) and unexpected interruptions of any kind drive me insane.
Then there are notifications like they have on LinkedIn and now Facebook where they're more like ads than they are genuine notifications. Things such as "so and so shared a post you might be interested in." These are not designed to notify of you something you wanted to be alerted to, they exist to "drive engagement." Because I don't even like notifications when it's something I care about, these really trigger me to the point where I don't even want to use the "platform" anymore. It's so bad on LinkedIn that I just stopped reading the notifications all together since if you try and turn off all notifcations on LinkedIn .. good luck. You'll spend hours navigating through complex multi-page forms clicking on toggles and then they'll just add some new notification and auto-enable it for you. There's no global "turn of all notifications for all devices" option that I've been able to find.
I don't comment on YouTube videos as much as I used to, because people started comparing the comments sections they are shown for a given video to what their friends and spouses are shown and realized that the comments section is also now algorithmically curated for you based on your viewing and commenting habits. This leads into some serious "dead Internet theory" territory, especially related to this article about OF creators using AI to reply to DMs. Because if two people can see different subsets of comments for the same video, and if YouTube has AI reply features for creators ... how can I trust that the comments I'm reading and replying to are actual humans? Even if they are humans, I don't want to interact with people that just agree with me.
My devices should work for me, not the other way around.
"The whole thing" in this case isn't just AI. It's "brands".
Given that premise the functionally the same whether the creator or the app using an LLM responds, as long as you can keep the immersion in the role play does it matter if its the Youtube or OnlyFans actually responding?
It was already some underpaid offshore worker responding for the large creators, and this is nothing new, ATN and other phone sex line providers were doing this in 1990s and there were probably similar things in times past.
Some didn't care and still used them, many were scammed, but that is the nature of the industry. Sadly it has always been on the consumer of unregulated sexual services to be aware of how the industry of their era works.
Should we legalize, regulate and make it safer for both the buyers and also sex workers? Yes, but that is an another conversation altogether.
Every single online content platform operates in the same way. Their KPI is number of hours spent on their platform, because the longer you spend there the more ads they can shove down your throat.
A content creator is not an artist or a videographer or a grandpa sharing some craft. A content creator is not even human, it's whatever can fill the <div id='content'></div>.
You only need programmers for everything else, but that damn div was hard to fill until now. Soon enough they'll have what they wished and then they'll realize the div that managed to sell ads is probably becoming useless.
As opposed to the genuine interaction the porn star you follow offers to you and the 10,000 other subscribers. The whole thing is theatre.
Kids might believe that MrBeast is replying to them personally, but I think some Internet education goes along way to help here, and I don’t know of anyone of legal age to be engaging with these platforms that would expect genuine “celebrity” responses to their comments.
In the end, you are vouching with your name. If you feel the suggestion is missing the mark, don't hit send. If the suggestion is missing the mark most of the time, the product is bad and will be shut down.
I'm curious what real interaction means here. At best the person is pretending to be a character with the intention of monetizing it. Having an AI play the character vs a person doesn't seem to make it "less real" considering the entire premise is, in this case, selling a fantasy and character?
This is a broadly successful economic use-case.
I don't care if someone with a million viewers replies just to me. Almost any video's comment stream, you can scroll through, get a general sense of what people's reactions/questions/etc are to the video, and then good creators respond in one or two comments to the masses.
The second I see someone with a huge following obviously AI responding to each of the comments, I have lost all respect for them, and people will call them out on it. I see this a lot on reddit now where people are responding to AI generated posts pointing this out, and it is causing some major issues in communities.
You can bet your ass that in the fullness of time the generated content is going to put Alphabet's interests first.
I found it repulsive on a visceral level.
Add AI to this and I'll need to start praying to God to give me the restraint of not breaking other people's smartphones.
speaking of which anybody have recommendations? I want to run my own inference in colocation too
a trully automatic economy
Absolute shocker.
regardless, though, does it matter why?
Perhaps this is why every platform ends up banning or pushing all the XXX to a red light district.
It doesn't always have to be hardcore, but the implication of having an OF is "porn star".
>> employ the same tactic of seeing how much you are willing to pay and then increasingly offering you more and more expensive content
Oh, in that way.
There should be some hashtag for men forced onto relationships when all they wanted was the sex /s… but honestly, if roles were reversed this would totally exist
I could well image if you looked like a young Clooney, it'd not be hard to arrange one night stands, either.
It's released in 2017, so more cam-girl than OF model, but it shows a deeply parasocial girlfriend-stand-in relationship of someone that spends a good chunk of his disposable income on that. I think the now common OF model + chatters are an evolution of that has even more tendencies to create girlfriend-stand-in relationships.
Offline: I meet many people as I travel and skip company (I have a small company doing emergency software/hardware fixes, so jobs are very short and diverse) a lot and talk a lot with strangers for fun; sometimes we end up going deep in the night over beers and things come out. Usually they are somewhat awkward and lonely guys with the tendency to see women as things; that intersects often with programmers/engineers. These are not even the weirdest things I hear from strangers either.
They don't do this at all. I know a guy who worked as a cam-girl manager for some time. His job was to communicate in her place with 4-6 people at the same time (via text of course) while the model "acts" on the screen.
(At least, that will be true for run of the mill cam girls. Obviously certain other types of influencers may be more difficult to emulate via AI.)
Honestly this dystopia is a big letdown over the one I was expecting.
Due to the amount of incels or men who aren't really in relationships or even work these days, they should be causing significant social unrest as they have nothing to lose and try and overthrow the current social structure. In reality we hardly see any real violence or trouble from incels other than the odd angry rant on social media and the idea is that things like porn, video games and social media take care of the base needs just enough to stop the angry from boiling over and causing real trouble.
This type of terrorism did happen in Germany i.e. the "Halle" shooter, but he had to rely on homemade weapons with his own black powder ammunition and his attack failed, because his guns weren't strong enough to breach doors at a synagogue. What he did do is shoot a random woman passing close by (less than 5m distance) who was angrily glaring at him and then he went to a random kebab shop to shoot up an immigrant, before the police caught him.
It's really mostly a matter of keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have access to them.
What about knives? I see news about knives attacks from China and Japan quite often.
But we shouldn't forget that a big part of the "incel" community is actively pushing for reducing rights & liberties of women, because they see them as "things" or just "lesser humans".
If you replace real women by AI sexbots, not only you remove them a source of income (I know, it's not perfect today either, with pimps & stuff like that, but at least some women can make a living with this) but also there's a big risk that the AI are going to be quite extreme in their behavior, alienating "incels" even more, which would be harder for real women to do.
Money is in the driver's seat. Not men's rights or women's rights. People can certainly have their preferred philosophies, but that's not going to change what's going to happen.
True of some -- mostly ones that don't know English, or sometimes just for the first week or so -- but not all. Not even most.
Just to take one example, I know one who opened a beauty salon in St Petersburg, grew that business, opened additional salons in first Vladivostok, then Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, and most recently Dubai. Earlier this year she got residence and moved to Dubai permanently.
To give another example, in the USA this time: Aella. I don't think I need to say anything more there, you can google.
Понял?
Feminism and their desire to legitimize sex work will be the death knell to high wages for sex workers, and eventually drive the sex workers asking for it to other occupations that suit their risk and profit appetite. ~50% of the population has a pussy and if it's seen as completely benign, legal, and normal to sell yourself the supply will go up 10 fold to the point it becomes a job every stay at home mom vies for while applying to be a transcriptionist or whatever else.
She is chasing the grey line of risk, and Dubai is the sweet spot right now of risk:reward. When she is found out, the best she can hope for is a revocation of her visa and a swift kick out of the country.
She moved to Dubai because Putin etc.
I mean, it kinda just makes sense. If you're actually seeing them on a platform competing with countless others then they've demonstrated that they're at least good at marketing. They likely learned it themselves as well.
What does successful(ness?) has to do with being smart? I guess we both can name quite a few people (doctors, scientists etc) who are very smart and knowledgeable in more than one field. But are not successful. At least not in any economical scense.
>Just to take one example, I know one who opened a beauty salon in St Petersburg, grew that business, opened additional salons in first Vladivostok, then Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, and most recently Dubai. Earlier this year she got residence and moved to Dubai permanently.
>To give another example, in the USA this time: Aella. I don't think I need to say anything more there, you can google.
>Понял?
That's just a typical russian thinking: if one can push through their way through whatever shit they are in - they are smart.
No they are not. Successful? Maybe. Hardworking? Sure, I never said that they are lazy or something like that.
Hotshots as they are - most of them are not smart.
> I know one who opened a beauty salon
I know many people who started working right after school graduation. They worked hard and quite successful too. Some have businises or other goods sources of income. Still - they are borish and anyone with at least few hobbies will have hard time talking to them because they have very few interests outside of money and spending money.
Of course big creators have long outsourced this. You aren't writing with them but with someone entirely different who gets paid to answer messages. Using AI is just the next step in enshittification of something that's pretty exploitative to begin with.
just to put "whale" in perspective, here. We're not talking about a thousand or two.
Hm...
I assume custom requests would either happen realtime-- in which case it's not currently possible to substitute AI video output-- or asynchronously-- in which case the proof of personal connection eventually happens during a future realtime video stream.
If the customer is paying for DM'ing during times when the person isn't streaming, I'm having a hard time imagining why it would matter whether AI is used or not. Well, at least if the quality is decent enough for what I imagine are rather terse, domain-specific DMs. :)
You'd be surprised. A lot of men really do just have no-one to talk to.
Which is not the case currently, you think you're talking to your favorite porn actress but you're talking to some dude in India pretending to be her and trying to sell you "exclusive content" (i.e. prerecorded videos from a catalog).
Of course, the OF creator can't form true relationships with thousands of people. I'm guessing that the implicit mental model in the heads of OF subscribers who "donate" to creators, is that this is a competition — that they're all participating in something like an ongoing hidden auction for a slice of the creator's limited time. They think "if I just pay the most, then she'll feel obligated to pay attention to me." (Of course, most creators feel no such sense of obligation.)
If OF subscribers can know in advance that that jump is fundamentally impossible — such as if they can discern that a dumb AI is responding to their donation-attached messages, and that that AI fundamentally has no feature to forward messages to the creator themselves — then they probably wouldn't bother "donating" in the first place.
I think these people are, by and large, under no illusion that their AI companion is anything other than a computer program, but they get attached anyway and choose to live in the illusion.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/replika/top/?sort=top&t=month
[1] https://replika.com/
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Re: the former, I would read "interacting with an OF creator" as no different than interacting with any other "their job is to pretend to like you for money, but they aren't putting themselves in a position where they're ever obligated to do anything for you" type of sex worker. For example, the employees at strip clubs; or for maybe an even better analogy, the employees at a Japanese "host club".
These are quintessential parasocial relationships: the consumer of such a service is buying an illusion, but the "product" they expect to be buying is specifically the illusion of fondness, as performed by a human. They're buying a pure act of emotional labor done by a human — "service with a smile", but where the service is the smile. (It's the same thing people get out of donating to a Twitch streamer — the streamer thanks them on-stream for their donation. They get noticed in a performatively appreciative manner.)
And, depending on how in-demand that human's time is / how many other consumers want that same emotional labor output from them, that emotional labor can be incredibly highly-valued in the market. Which is why some OF subscribers — despite knowing that the possibility of deeper connection to the OF creator is likely illusory — are still willing to pay huge amounts of money. They aren't expecting to literally enter into a sugaring relationship with the OF creator; but they are expecting to get the creator's attention and possibly receive a hand-written thank-you note or shout-out or some custom selfie they didn't ask for. An act of emotional labor on the OF creator's part, performatively responding to their donation.
But, like with going to see a magic show, this kind of illusion is only valuable when it has high verisimilitude. Nobody will pays to see a bad magic act, if they know it's going to be bad. And nobody donates to an OF creator, if they know they're going to get AI responses.
(I'm sure there are some OF consumers who are not observant enough to realize they're receiving AI responses, and so feel like they are receiving the parasocial emotional labor service they paid for. Just like there are some people — usually children — who are not observant enough to notice the flaws in a bad magic act, creating a market for bad magicians.)
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Re: the latter — paid subscribers to AI character chatbot services treat this economic relationship entirely differently. They don't see the individual chatbot as anything that holds value. And a business model that tries to get them to pay for a specific AI chatbot character, would likely never work.
Rather, from my understanding, to the people who subscribe to these things, paying for the service is analogous to paying a subscription to a game streaming service like GeForce Now.
In both cases, there's a large quantity of interactive entertainment out there that you want to "play". And running that interactive entertainment locally, would require capabilities that none of the devices you own possess. And it would be very expensive to buy the fancy hardware with those capabilities—possibly to the point of financial impracticality, if you want a top-of-the-line experience. (And, funny enough, in both of these cases, the fancy hardware is a GPU!)
Also, you might want some additiona...
It's not make-belief to the mark (or john) - they believe they are in a relationship with the person / thing talking back to them.
> they believe
Is it a disorder to be depressed when the actual situation is really screwed up and soul crushing? Because most folks will get prescribed anti-depressants for this kind of situation.
Since practically, what else should someone do?
Move to a remote cabin in the forest.
I could see these pseudorelations, which are already mediated by so much fakery, just continue to evolve in that direction?
Maybe everyone gets their own OnlyFan creators which are tailored/adapt to their personal desires?
In the future all of this is AI generated, multimedia, tailored to your wants, available and fresh 24/7.
Capcut has(had?) a feature to just pump this garbage out. I thought i had a video on youtube i made with capcut but apparently i have scruples and didn't even upload it privately.
Porn has become such a commodity, access to the images and videos to provide fake content has never been easier. Using bots to schedule posts and respond to comments has lowered the bar even lower and clouded the ability for people to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.
There is plenty of generic porn for free on the internet. The only advantages an Only Fans creator has over that are
- being more "real" and relatable
- forming parasocial relationships through engagement
- providing "niche" content (like the teasing egirl non-nudes Belle Delphine became famous for)
AI gives you none of that. It's not very good at niche content, and for the other two it can only give illusions that will break as people get used to AI. In the beginning there is a novelty factor to AI interactions, like Twitch's Neuro-Sama, but that will wear off. And after that all you're left with are disillusioned customers.
The best OF creators have simply mastered distribution. Either they have taken success in one market and pivoted to OF or they are relentlessly marketing themselves through other platforms and viral stunts.
I have yet to see an AI master the distribution side. At the least good genAI will see the rise of male OF creators
i can imagine the backlash, as if it were already happening. a decent amount of the OF "creators" are making 7 figures a year off this, and lots are making median yearly pay in a month. Having to share that with men who are technically adept and good at marketing is gunna chafe.
> There is already more content out there than a human can reasonably watch. I submit there's more "9/10 or better" content than anyone can reasonably watch or experience, even if you set some arbitrary cutoff date like, oh, february 22nd, 1988 and before is all you're allowed to consider.
Law and Order (one of my favorite background noises) has something like >650 hours of content, and i've watched it all. Multiple times. that's nearly 1/3rd of a work-year!
I've been a fanfic writer, spinning up fictional characters for company and writing their exploits, and it was indeed compelling and interesting in its own right. I think more people than you suspect will go for the hollow pretend version, especially since they're already aware the 'real' OnlyFans person is not gonna come seek them out. Why not go for the clean break of an entirely fictional thing?
They seem to be pictures and videos from actual people, but AI-modified to add the characteristics of the AI model they're pretending to be.
Some of them have the IG subscription system active and most of them have OF links or similar in their profile.
Reporting them to Meta does nothing.
I believe FanVue (OF competitor) allows these AI creations though?
In fact, looking on their web site the first model in their list of top creators is AI:
https://www.fanvue.com/
BUT... from what I understand some agencies managing these accounts are training models with hundreds of photos of the creator and then using that to push out more photos in different outfits and locations without the creator being involved at all.
It's not quite the-Queen-is-my-friend levels of parasocial but it does seem to be about intimacy.
What happens to that business model if customers paying on that basis realise they are seeing & talking to a bot? Seems quite footshooty.
They used to say:
"buy cheap, buy twice"
Now it'll be something like:
"interact cheap, interact with AI"
It can't all be ig/tiktok interactions, can it? I moved away from all my friends (they started it) and now it's hard to find people who have "free time" - even those that WFH! So i mostly hang out with retirees, they have free time.
1. people are working more than ever, especially in this economy. Some do lots of overtimes, some have multiple jobs (be it two literal part time jobs or full time job and doing dash services on the side). Some have other side hustles that they hope to convert into more income
Personal anecdotes: I work in games so it's never a surprise when I hear some of them need to crunch for a few months. A few others are actually trying to build up their band and do gigs every other weekend
2. non-surprisingly, people's down on money. Probably not much explanation here; not much time to hang out if they have to move (2 of my friends out of state) or job hunt after a layoff (pretty much all my friends at some point in 2023/4).
3. There's a lot of pandemic habits that never truly wore off. Some simply stay on social media, a few of my friends were always into MMOs and put more time than ever into that. They are interacting, just not necessarily with you.
4. Family. Very old knowledge, but when friends get serious partners and later spouses and especially kids, that's what they put almost all their time into. A single friend will fall off without some work.
Listen to a podcast in the car, walk around while scrolling social media, watch Twitch streams while doing the dishes. It doesn't actually fulfill your needs but it feels like it does. Gen AI is just a way to generate more of that kind of content than is possible, removing any human element, making something supposedly just as tasty, but it's empty calories.
I'm fairly gregarious, and find it fairly easy to approach strangers (if I have to). Yes, a lot of human contact can be had for fairly cheap.
However, I'm also aware that this is far from "normal" -- the average person is not this way (at least, not today). How/why things have come to be this way, I cannot pinpoint, but our lives have gotten progressively busier to the point where many of us choose convenience over "richness/fullness of experience".
However, my point is still valid, in that if you are an average person today, the prevailing social gestalt in America is "mind your own business, and don't talk to (or approach) people in the street".
Yes, weird folks like me, who are willing to be more vulnerable (what if the person you just said "Good morning!" to cusses you out?) will be able to get human contact for cheap, but high-quality Human contact is definitely waning.
P.S. Also agree with you that GenAI (and other modern technologies) are providing a frictionless existence, while also removing the richness and meaning that comes with the friction. It's the "soma" from Huxley's "Brave New World".
Also uh, I was on Facebook recently and they've added this reels feature, trying to be tiktok. Occasionally I browse my feed to see what my friends are up to, and in the reels (which can't be turned off) I see some underage girls doing really inappropriate things for views. I think this is really problematic. I don't want to be shown this, and I also feel upset that young girls are being encouraged by social media platforms to use their sexuality to get attention online (and make said platforms more money by doing so).
Is it? Who in their right mind pays for porn?
It could just aswell be a 98% money loundry scheme.
The people I have known that have made OnlyFans content made as little money as you would expect.
There has always been money in porn though with a giant power law distribution. The only difference now is that instead of some sleazebag porn producer trying convince some woman they are the next Jenna Jameson, we have this sleazebag technology platform doing the same thing.
One of my former colleagues bought a flat in london with the proceeds from their dancing in night clubs. Which I thought at the time, and still do, is might impressive. They keep that private, for a number of sadly obvious reasons, however they are not ashamed of it.
They refused video chat, because it was less protected, and less anonymous. In a (good) club, you are protected by bouncers, no phones, no intimidation. OF and the rest you have limited control on who shares your stuff, so its much harder to be a part time model.
Apparently so. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_sex)
"By the end of the 1980s, nearly all of the major local phone companies in the United States, plus the major long-distance carriers, were actively involved in the phone sex business[...] In 2002 profits from phone sex were estimated at one billion dollars a year"
And in relative terms in particular that seems pretty huge given how much smaller all the phone and online markets were compared to what they're now.
Well the comparative change is kinda the point. OF is huge and content producers have a chance of making big bucks, as opposed to what was there before
The outsourced the interactions to third world "typists" that took care of it.
This is just an evolution of that, and probably provides a better experience, since they're able to tailor the model in a way that someone speaking English as a second language never could.
I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter (wired.com) 32 points 6 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391797
I think OF itself lets you send "personal" mass messages with something like "Hey, $name, I've missed you. Here, pay $100 to see a single picture"
Dunno how thick do you have to be to believe the message was sent only to you and none of the other 10000 subscribers...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Fwb8OrvSw&pp=ygUMbmcgcmVzb25...
You will feel better just saying what you feel. Intuition does exist.
Even on the high end, most workers would be happy to actually get to know a client - if the client isn't totally off-putting and is willing pay $100/hr for Skype! But if a client wants canned responses, they'll get canned responses. And maybe AI is actually an improvement for those types of clients if they can retain some plausible deniability.