The Myth of Attraction
How a sex worker has scaled up their business using gen AI
Hello hello AI obsessives — we have a couple of treats for you this month.
As mentioned last month, we built an advanced retrieval bot for give.org called AskGive.org. Try it out now! Give.org are experts in trusted philanthropy, so you can ask about anything in their rich knowledge base about giving effectively. Let us know what you think in the comments or by hitting reply.
Also, just a reminder about our new course, AI Agent Design, starting July 9th: This course is about the cutting edge of generative AI — what will be mature and a part of everyone’s life 6-12 months from now. We’ll be using experimental tools and workflows that others aren’t looking at yet.
I’ll be honest — if you want genAI “tips and tricks” that work 100% of the time, immediately, today, there are lots of free courses you could be taking. We even have resources for this on our site. But if you want to be prepared for what is coming next year, we’ve developed some of the best emerging concepts for how to start thinking about working and building in this space.
The main event today, though, is an interview I did with a Not Safe For Work creator who works online using platforms such as OnlyFans. I sat down with her to chat about her experiences in using an AI chat bot, trained specifically on her NSFW content and DMs, to scale up her business providing sexual chats and media to her subscribers.
This was an incredibly enlightening conversation — first of all I learned a lot about the kinds of business models that are used in this kind of work, which I knew very little about. It was then really interesting to learn how gen AI fitted into that, and how it helps her continue to maintain her online persona with her regular fans and subscribers, in what she referred to as “connection craft”. She made some very pertinent points about what attraction is, and the kinds of fantasies that people lose themselves in when engaging with her and her work.
Also, to not bury the lede — using generative AI has increased her income by about 300%. Yes, that is the correct number of zeros.
Her personalized chatbot not only emulates her tone, but also upsells videos, and comes up with prices on the fly based on what certain users had paid in the past. You can read the transcript below — it’s pretty long but it’s a fantastic conversation, and I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Here’s one of the best quotes from the interview:
“I had based a lot of my career off of the brand of the ‘real girl’ and authenticity. When I started AI it was super hard because the people who had known me for a long time were like, whoa, this is definitely not you. They said, ‘”You've totally sold out and I am disappointed in you.” At first I really took that to heart. But then when I was looking at the alternatives, they were either being very unhappy and continuing, quitting altogether, or building a system that 95% of the people were far happier with. I decided that…this is a character. There's me, and then there's the persona that I've created over the past five years. For it to continue to live, it has to evolve into this new future techno age.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Jeremy’s questions are marked in bold.
Before we dive in to how you use AI: for people that might not be familiar with your work or your industry, how does the business model work? How do people find you? How do people engage with you? What are the general formats that people engage with?
We call them “subscription sites,” and there's a lot of different ones, like OnlyFans, Fansly, or Fans Central. These are sites that are basically paid Instagram, except you have a relationship with the creator, so you can be talking to them. They're all the same. They have pictures, usually Not Safe For Work — pretty much always Not Safe For Work. There are options to buy videos, perhaps have custom content made, and to be able to chat with whatever character creator you're interested in, that you're a “fan” of.
The way that people get there is where the majority of the work happens. Right now, it's mostly through Instagram, but it's been through TikTok, live cam sites, Twitter, any free platform that gets a lot of eyes and a lot of attention. People use YouTube as well. You are not allowed to directly link OnlyFans on public sites like that because of minors and stuff, but usually you can be very creative with the wording: ‘If you want to connect with me more, then follow the rabbit hole.’ Then you have a link to a link to a link to a link. Eventually these guys are so interested in seeing what you look like naked, they'll follow the links, get there, and then pay.
Usually it's anywhere between five to 15 dollars or so to become a subscriber — an active fan. What they want in return is some sort of connection with you. Not just looking at pictures of you, but being able to talk to you.
The way your fans talk to you — does that happen one-to-many in a live stream format, or in chat formats?
The reason why subscription sites are so special are because fans are supposed to have a one-on-one connection with the person. So the creator has thousands — or hundreds, depending on how big they are — of fans that they're talking to. Each fan might be subscribed to a couple different girls as well. But each conversation is supposed to be just one-on-one. It's very much like you would have an Instagram DM or something like that. You might do big group room chats gain peoples’ interest initially. I used to do a lot of cam shows — I think at my height I was having 10,000 people regularly tune into them. There, you have an enormous room and the men are like, ‘man, I can't talk to her. There's so many other people’ and then they realize, ‘oh, I could go to this fan site and then have a one-on-one chat with her’. Cam shows were my main source of income for a long time, but right now they are, for me, mostly funnels. But the biggest funnel is Instagram and TikTok. It's much wider range of eyeballs.
So people pay to chat and then are there upsells from that? Do you share other forms of media or content?
To become a subscriber, they pay a monthly fee. Once they're behind the curtain, every model will do it differently. Generally there's a video menu of different options. If someone's really into feet stuff, or really into oil, or really into wax or something like that, you'll say, ‘Hey, I have videos of wax and they're $15 and if you want to buy one, you can buy one.’
Within the private messaging is where a lot of sales happen because you're talking to the fan, you're getting to know them, and they're like, “Yeah, I had this one fantasy about this one woman rock climber, and she was so cool.” And you're like, “Well, I happened to have a rock climber video. Let me send that to you.” The whole process of getting to know a fan is getting to know what turns them on, what they're interested in, and hooking that up with your content to make your sales because it is a business — it isn’t free!
Some people do custom content. Some people do audio only content or picture customs. I don't, because I have so many fans that doing customs for everyone would be ridiculous. I collected data on all the top things that people would ask me for and then created a whole library of videos of that. Pretty much most of the fetishes I have checked off, and I can just send them the video.
So you might have like, hundreds or thousands of people, and you’re engaging with them individually. That's so many people. How do you do that?
It's not sustainable really. I have a couple different sites, and each site has at least a couple thousand fans. My biggest site has 50,000 fans that are active on it. That's just an insane amount. Usually, before AI, people would hire assistants. Sometimes the assistants would be just to sell videos. A lot of creators end up quitting OnlyFans or hiring a bunch of different sexters and assistants to help.
Note: Our guest wanted to make a note after the interview about having 50,000 fans: “The 50,000 fans are subscribed to my ‘free OnlyFans’ where its free to subscribe, but pay as you go per NSFW post and video. My main OnlyFans of 3,000 fans is a paid subscription, but you unlock my entire timeline, 4 years worth of content, and have the option to unlock higher quality videos from the menu. Usually you make 10x on main as you do on free, hence spending most of the time there.”
A lot of people don't have that many fans. My main OnlyFans where I spend most of my time is only about 3000 people, but even then I think I get 400 unique messages a day. Not within the same chat, but 400 people actively want to chat with me that day. That means remembering what their dog's name is, remembering that they went to the dentist last week and asking how that was, as well as remembering what all their fetishes are. You don't have 3000 people that want to talk every day, but you do have at least 400 people who want at least a couple hours of your time. That is just not sustainable. When you get to a certain point, you're like, “Okay, I can't do this anymore. I need to either quit or change my model.” That was the point that I was at a couple months ago.
So pre-AI there’s some kind of outsourcing where you have people that help you sext or interact a bit, but I imagine it’s hard to find people that can maintain your persona and basically ‘be you’, who also then wouldn't have their own following. They'd have to be people that both don't have their own audience and would be really good at that. I imagine that's hard to find.
It was hard to find, for me specifically, because my tone is so unique compared to a lot of the, I don't know, sexier, raunchier girls out there. My tone is very creative and playful and different. A lot of the assistants that I had hired in the past just didn't sound right to me. There's also a lot of “management teams.” There's a really big Twitch streamer named Amouranth, and she has her own management team that takes on other clients. A lot of girls will go to her. They’ll have someone else completely run their page.
But some page managers will just run a page to the ground. They don't care, they just want to make a lot of money in three months, and then the page is wasted because customers had such a bad experience with it. You need to find the right balance of making money. The assistant can't be too money motivated or else they'll ignore the long-term connection, which is what a person wants. They don’t want to feel like they're being milked for money, but like there's some sort of a connection there. With humans who only have a very limited attention span, it's hard to find that balance in an assistant, especially if they have multiple clients. It's a lot to ask.
I view it as: these personas that we're creating, they're not sustainable to scale thousands of fans with just one person holding it up. It takes a team of people to hold it up. Even if it's not managers on your page that you're directly messaging, you can't be doing all that work and also be doing all your Instagram and all your other stuff. You need to hire assistants to help with that too. With everyone's input, there's really four or five people creating this persona. It already isn't just the original creator, even before AI steps in.
If you don't mind me asking, pre AI, what was roughly the kind of revenue that was coming in?
For me? I think I was getting around $30k to $40k average a month before AI.
So before AI, you have 3000 fans on your main page. You said there's this other one that has 50,000. You're like, “Okay, I'm overwhelmed, so I've either got to quit this or change my model.”. Is that when you started using the AI system? How long have you been using it now?
I think I started five months ago. I wanted it to exist, but I wasn't actively knocking on the doors of people. I was contacted by a very well networked friend who was like, “Hey, I know that you do Not Safe For Work content. I have a friend who wants to train AI to help out girls in that industry. I think you guys should connect.” That connection was Jesse Silver. He had just started creating the bot in December. I started just one month after he had started creating it. Iwas really blown away by it, and it came at the right time for me. At the point that I met Jesse, I was so burnt out. What I had decided to do, because the money was still better than anything else I could get, was to just not respond to messages for a week. But I constantly felt guilty about it. When I did respond to messages, I was just saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I felt like I didn't have the energy to give, so my quality was just plummeting.
So how did it start? Did he show you a generic version? What did you first see that made you think you should really try this?
The thing that was most impressive to me is that a lot of human assistants that you have are definitely not perfect. They don't match your tone really well, but they do answer the messages. When they sext, they usually want about 40% of the profits. So if they sell a video for $10, they want $4 off of that. On top of that, they also want hourly pay. Sometimes that can be $50, sometimes it can be $150. They're pretty expensive for not the best quality work. When I jumped in with Jesse, he was like, yeah, we're going to train a separate little bot on all of your previous messages and any written contexts that you have. And our price range is only 20% off of any video sales that we have. I was like, what?! That is so cheap compared to other help that I can get out there, and also it would be better trained on me.
Originally he created a button where I could turn the bot on and off. I turned on the bot and slowly messages would start coming in and the bot would start answering them, and I would be right there to monitor it and see how it was doing. If anything sounded weird, I would stop the bot and then I would tell Jesse, “Whoa, this doesn't sound right. It's not doing this correctly.” He would instantly tweak the bot and send it different parameters to change its tone or its text or how it interacted with people. For the first month, I was very, very closely monitoring it, and it was incredible. It was answering people with much more heart than I was giving at that point with the burnout; it was asking really good questions. We had to structure the aggression a lot because originally the bot was like, “Yes, must sell videos must make money!” and it was just like really going for it. That is not my character at all. We had to way tone it down so that it more built connections with people, felt people out for a long time before it would propose a video sale. Then we saw sales go much, much higher, which was really awesome.
So the system actually integrates directly into the platform?
It's directly into the platform. You're technically not allowed to use bots, but you're also technically not allowed to use assistants or anyone else. OnlyFans doesn’t really monitor it. What we've seen in the industry with OnlyFans is they're very money motivated. So as long as they're making money and it's not related to minors, they're probably going to turn a blind eye.
It sounds like the system is not only chatting with people, but also selling the videos. Does it actually just complete the whole transaction? As long as you trust it, it can just be running and doesn't need a human in the loop at any point necessarily?
It doesn't. How it works is that I have the video library that I told you about. The first three days the AI and an assistant — someone who works for Jesse — is going through and describing each video in great detail, like a good paragraph or two, and they're giving the AI all the context for what the video is about, and they're doing that for every single one. Then the AI's only place to work is within the DMs. So as it's talking to someone, it has the entire history of that person so it knows what they like, how much they spent, it knows the videos that they didn't spend money on. It's calculating all of that, and it custom prices videos for people, which is really, really cool and makes me a lot more money than I was doing before.
Before I would just have a standard pricing model. I can't keep track of how much each person has spent. I'd be like, okay, $9 for regular solo videos. The AI can calculate something like, “Well, this guy was super into these videos. He bought them in a heartbeat for $9. What if I try $15? He took only a minute to buy it. All right, that's awesome. Next video, I'm going to do it for $30. He took two minutes to buy it or maybe he didn't buy it.” It structures the price based on that, and then they purchase it.
The human intervention aspect is when the AI comes across a question that it can't answer, like when a person is dissatisfied or seems upset, or something that triggers red flags like suicide or words that you're not supposed to talk about. Other trigger words that we have are, AI, chatbot, Chaturbate, things like that. Those messages all go to a separate folder called Whisper Inbox, and they're within the DM, they're just a separate little folder. Those are the ones that I actively check. It sends all the bad conversations there so that I can see what happened and then send Jesse a message and he can tweak the bot to make it better so that we don't have that happening anymore. Or if it's something really specific, like they're talking about a gift that they bought me and asking whether I received it or not. The AI doesn't know that, so it'll send me those kind of messages as well.
How often do those Whisper messages happen? How often do people have a bad experience or guess that it's a bot or something like that?
About 400 unique messages happen during a day, and I probably get 20 messages a day that I have to check over. Most of them aren't all negative experiences. A lot of them are just things it couldn't answer or was confused about. I'd say probably 5% of people guess it's AI, which is honestly pretty easy. We're trying to disrupt this pattern, but the AI really likes falling into a pattern of “really good response, kind of like flirty thing, and then ending with a question.” We keep trying to break this, and we have broken it a couple times, but it likes to keep falling back into that pattern. So it's somewhat predictable in what it's going to say. So it is guessable. If you want to believe that it's a lie, then you can guess it.
Has it been making you more money than before, or the same amount?
I dropped off doing a lot of advertising in January. I found out I was pregnant, and so I was like, I don't really want to do this. I’d really been slacking, so my numbers went down. I was earning about $30-40k at 3000 fans, and it dropped down to about 1,500 fans. Now, after introducing AI, it’s earning about $70k. So it significantly earns more. I think one of the biggest reasons why is because, not only is it way better at building relationships and remembering people than I would be, but it's also up all night — and it's late at night when we have our shopping sprees, when we make really bad purchase decisions.
I used to turn it off during different hours just to see where most of my revenue was coming in, and it was usually between 8:00 PM and 4:00 AM where most of the revenue was coming in. I could never be awake at that time. So that really helped. Also the pricing structure, how it calculates what a fan will pay for something, those two things have just been incredible. I have half the amount of fans and I'm making twice the amount of revenue than I was before.
It does brings up a lot of moral questions. The thing that I keep coming back to is that I very much created a character that I said was upheld by other people. The AI is based off of my previous messages and is monitored by me to change it. When I go on an adventure, if I go kayaking, I tell the AI about it and then it can add that to the people that it's talking to. It's sort of all of my information that's just able to multiply itself a lot more than I can and continue to make me happy and the fans are still able to have access to my life and what I'm doing.
You mean the moral question of people not knowing it's a system?
I had based a lot of my career off of the brand of the ‘real girl’ and authenticity. When I started AI it was super hard because the people who had known me for a long time were like, whoa, this is definitely not you. They said, ‘”You've totally sold out and I am disappointed in you.” At first I really took that to heart. But then when I was looking at the alternatives, they were either being very unhappy and continuing, quitting altogether, or building a system that 95% of the people were far happier with. I decided that…this is a character. There's me, and then there's the persona that I've created over the past five years. For it to continue to live, it has to evolve into this new future techno age.
How I deal with people who are upset has also evolved. There's a couple different ways. One of them is I always offer them a refund. Then with some of them I'm like, “Congratulations, you beat the system! You knew it was an AI the whole time because you’re too smart for it!” From then on, I put them in the Whisper folder and I'm like, “You from now on have earned the privilege of talking to me specifically.” I add DNM (do not message) in their username, and then the AI won't message them ever again. That way I keep the people that were dissatisfied with the I but still wanted to talk to me. They feel really uplifted, like, yeah, I won the game. And also they're continuing to be subscribers.
I love the arc of that, as kind of an immersive theater production. In terms of total amount of time that it takes you, do you spend the same or less or more now that the system is there?
I have felt really guilty lately. I haven't answered messages in three weeks, and the AI has just completely taken care of all of them. I don't really have to spend any time on it unless I want to. The thing that I have to spend time on is creating content, but when you're really good at batching a whole month, you only have to work two days to batch an entire month. If you're not actively answering messages, then you don't technically have to do any more work than that, and you're making $60k a month.
I see. So you'll spend a couple of days making all the different videos and audio or whatever kind of content that you're making and then updating the bot with new experiences. But then other than that, it handles the rest of it.
It handles itself. Ideally, I would be spending probably 20 minutes to an hour a day answering those Whisper inbox messages. Just most days I'm really bad at it and don't get to them. But ideally it would be that much time a day on weekdays.
When you say you feel guilty about that, does that come from thinking that it is degrading the quality and you might lose fans, or something else?
I think it comes from the fact that people might only be paying $5 to $7 a month, but they still deserve the attention that was promised to them in that agreement. So by not giving them that attention for a couple of weeks, I just feel like that's not a fair exchange on my part.
What's kind of amazing to me about it is how advanced it is. It’s maintaining this persona that's so realistic that 95% of people believe they're talking to a real person, or if they don't, are happy enough with the experience that they don't care. It’s then also negotiating and executing transactions. It's really an incredible piece of technology and an incredible effort and partnership that you've built with it.
Something that Jesse and I are trying to figure out or trying to improve is for it to change its tone based on who it's talking to. Because some people want my character to be very bratty and other people want it to be super submissive, and we find that they pay more when you're using the kind of tone that they want. But discovering that is such a human thing. It's so many little nuances: what they're saying, and suggestions, and how they react to it. To train the bot to analyze the conversation that they've had with this person's responses to be able to tailor its tone to them is really difficult, but that's something we're trying to do.
Jesse had a client he told me about that was really interesting. She was making a lot of money, very famous, and when they put the AI onto her platform, they were making absolutely no money. He was like, what the heck is happening? They discovered that it's because she likes to play super hard-to-get, super, super hard-to-get, and she likes to make people feel like they do not deserve her whatsoever. Like they could never afford her. And she likes to play that out for quite a few days before even offering them the chance to prove themselves. Usually the AI's that he's been running are very pleasing. He had to create something totally different that was completely displeasing to the fan and would kind of play with them and tease them out and would wait that time span of four or five days of teasing until they offered a video, and offered it at a very high price. It's things like that, which are to me, just so personality based and human based. That we can program it into these bots is amazing. It's so cool.
However, I actually think that live streaming sites will really decline in popularity because a lot of people, even if they're literally in my Whisper inbox and I am literally talking to them, they'll still say, is this AI? How do I know it's really you? That's a thing that's in our world now and a thing that we have to be conscious of. I think the ‘not knowing’ part is going to cause people to go back to live streams where they can actually see the streamer and interact with them. That's the only way that you know that it's not an assistant or some dude or an AI or something like that.
It sounds like the assistant stuff is fairly widespread. How widespread do you think that using AI systems is? Do you think that you're on the cutting edge and one of the first, or do you think that it's pretty prevalent at this point?
That's a really good question. I know that bots have been used for a long time, but not chat bots. We use bots all the time to organize our video folders and things like that, and to follow back fans so that we can continue messaging them after their subscription has expired. I know that there's at least one AI chat thing out there, but it's not very good at all. It's very obviously an AI. And then the other thing that people do is a lot of times they'll just plug whatever the message was into an AI on a different browser and then just copy paste, whatever the thing is. But in terms of an integrated one into the platform doing what Jesse's bot can do, I don't know of anything that good.
I am on a Discord with a couple hundred girls in the industry that use OnlyFans and these subscription sites, and I got two other girls into it. But aside from them, out of the hundreds of girls, they're just not adopting it yet. I don't know why entirely. I've had a couple conversations with them. They're like, ‘oh, I'm just not ready. I feel like it would ruin my page’ or something like that. But looking at the results, it does not ruin your page whatsoever. 5% of fans might be dissatisfied, but that 5% probably was going to be dissatisfied about something else too. Ultimately it's way more revenue for way more customer satisfaction and way less time on your part. I don't know why people aren't adopting it so fast, but I'm glad they're not. It gives me a little headstart.
Anything else on the logistics of what it is or how it works that you think people would want to know that we haven't covered?
It's definitely not perfect at all. It often fucks up videos. It tells people ‘this is in the video’, and then it just sends a picture of my dog or something like that. Which is pretty amusing. Those are the ones that I read in the Whisper inbox, and then it just makes me laugh, and I laugh it off with the person as well. Oh, also pictures. It doesn't do pictures, so it can't view pictures at the moment. A lot of people will send pictures and then it will guess what the picture is. The other day I had a guy send me pictures of his knees and he was on a sailboat, and it was a beautiful sunset, and the AI was like, ‘wow, what are you eating? That soup looks delicious.’ And he was just like, what? That's how a lot of times people guess that it's an AI, so what I tell them is just like, ‘oh, I can't see the image. It's grayed out. My privacy settings are so high’. Or something like that. So I'm really excited for that to be fixed!
A lot of people when they think about their job being automated, it feels scary. It seems like overall you've had a very good experience with it. But does any of that kind of like, ‘oh, this is replacing me’ anxiety come up for you? Or it's been largely in the plus column?
I think my industry went through the, ‘oh, no. AI's going to replace us!’ a couple years ago when body morphing apps started coming out, because you could change your body so easily and look like someone completely different very realistically. That's when I heard a lot of discourse around, 'fuck all this work that I've done, now I'm just going to be another Sam Dick and Harry!' or whatever. I personally thought it was really, really cool because I know so many girls that have incredible intellect, and are super witty, very quick, very flirtatious, but genetically they weren't as gifted as another girl might be. These body morphing apps allowed them to be on the same playing field as anyone else. It would take out the genetic unfair advantage kind of, which I thought was awesome.
On the Discord, there's this one channel about a cosmetic enhancements and what all these women will go through and put into their body, and then all the shit that happens afterward just to try to look better. Then body morphing came through and suddenly they don't have to do any of that. So it's healthier for people too, I think. People were scared. They were like, ‘oh shit, anyone could do it now, a dude could be a woman now if they changed their app the right way’. But I think if they have an awesome personality and are good at business, why shouldn't they have the same advantage as anyone else has?
It's the same thing with AI. I think those people are now creating this whole niche of the artisanal girl — like the ‘real girl’. Stuff can be made in China for so cheap and just mass produced and it's awesome, and it sells really, really well. And then there's still sites like Etsy, which make only a couple things a year, and they're extremely expensive, but they're handmade. I feel like the sex industry will become like that, where there's massive businesses that are completely 100% AI making a lot of money, and then there's human creators that are the quality top-notch, top shelf sort of niche.
You were saying that you see it as a persona that you created and these people are getting to talk to that persona, and then when people figure out it's a chat bot, you have ways of following up with them. In this industry or elsewhere, when do you think that people should be informed that they're talking to an AI upfront, and when is it generally not necessary. When would they not even want that?
I think that's a really hard question to answer. If you're advertising that you are a 100% real girl, no Photoshop, no AI, no assistants, then morally you should do that and just stick with that. Sex work to begin with is already a connection craft that is sort of mythical. It is a girl who's always perceived as single, who's always perceived as, ‘yes, you're giving me money, but I'm giving you this myth of attraction to you and of connection with you, and you want to believe that and you're paying me for this story so that you can believe it’. And the more believable you are as a sex worker, the more exchange you'll get. Already that's kind of the name of the game.
To add AI to it, I don't think is any different. I'm going to create a believable story for you to believe in, and that's what your $5 or $7 a month is for; it's for me to create a story for you. When I was creating that story personally typing it myself, it was, ‘yes, no, I'm tired’, versus — this AI is amazing. Some of the conversations that I monitor, it really goes there with people and they're like, ‘oh my God, I've never felt so understood at three in the morning crying, and you're here with me.’ It creates such a beautiful craft of connection that has way more capacity than I have. I believe that it is satisfying customers better and that it is playing the persona better than I can in that department. That's how I feel about it. There's no laws right now against having to say that it's AI or having to say that it's human either. So I don't know when a good place for that would be.
Yeah, I mean, who knows what the laws will be, and whether they'll make sense or not.
In terms of making sense, that's really true, because if someone was like, ‘Hey, what are you up to today?’ And I'm like, ‘oh, I just went on a kayaking trip.’ Me personally saying that I told the AI that I went on a kayaking trip, its also going to tell the person that I went on a kayaking trip. There's not really much difference, but yet someone would be hurt to find out its an AI versus me. Just logically it doesn't really make sense either. I guess emotionally, it feels weird, but yeah, it's a character.
Okay. I have a couple of different kind of speculative threads here that I think are interesting to me. One is, how would you guess people’s expectations around this will change over time? Right now it feels really different to people if they think a person is talking to them versus an AI. Do you think that'll shift over time?
I had an example of that with Jesse — the person who built the AI. I'm pretty sure when he was texting me, he was using AI to text me.
[Jeremy laughs]
At first I was very upset because it repeated a couple things in a weird pattern, and I was like, Jesse, what the fuck? I was upset with it. And then, he didn’t actually say it directly, but he seemed to be telling me that his phone messages respond exactly the same as OnlyFans. He was like, you're not asking confusing questions. You're asking ‘when am I free?’ After I had that experience, I was like, you know what? It doesn’t matter. If it is AI, it's giving me the same answers as talking to him, but it's allowing him to multiply himself in more than one place at a time. So I'm okay with it, and I would hope that that would be the case with people in the future. But I think what we need first is for AI to be a bit more believable, a bit more exactly like the tone of that person. Because when it sounds like an AI, you feel kind of offended. If it's more believable, we're less offended.
The other speculative thread that brings up for me is this ability to create this super nuanced character that people are connecting with. It seems like this would be fascinating to do also outside of sex work, building up a fictional persona and having a connection with that persona and with that person. Do you have ideas on how this might expand into other forms of creativity or innovation or art or performance?
Yeah. Have you ever heard of Hatsune Miku? She's like a holographic pop star basically who just started as holograph. Then there was software that was also built around her that you could chat with. There was a guy in Japan who legally married himself to her and then had this little chat box in his home and she would say good morning to him and hello to him and stuff like that. I think that that's a really cool example of someone wanting connection, not really being into flesh and bone people, and having a whole character where they could go to their concerts and they could also talk to them while they're having eggs and breakfast and stuff — things like that are really cool. There's also a toy company that Grimes was part of, and it creates these little stuffed animals for kids that have AI chatbots inside of them [read more about those]. So they can be talking about all sorts of, I don't know what kids talk about these days, but they can be talking about bridges and cars and trains and how they work and thermodynamics and all this stuff, and you have all the resources of ChatGPT, but in a really cute teddy bear instead.
There is a Not Safe For Work character — her name's Projekt Melody and she started three or four years ago, I think — but she was one of the first motion capture live streamers. She was just an anime character with a motion capture person behind her, and she expanded into doing OnlyFans, a bunch of different things, but it was all just a complete fictional character. What was really cool about that is, again, it levels the playing field. Maybe the girl behind the mask wasn't as hot as our culture thinks she should be and so wouldn't have gotten that job. But because she could have this other persona in front of her, she was able to absolutely kill it. Things like that are really cool. I'd like to see more AI integrated. It's a fun thing to play with and if you ever get tired of it, just go to a cafe and talk to a person. But also this is a really cool other option of connection and learning about ourselves and what we like and what we want.
Yeah, I love that. And also worth mentioning that Hatsune Miku preceded this generative AI stuff by quite a few years. I think she started in 2014 or 2015 or something. Continuing a bit on this thread: is there anything else that’s kind of the intersection of AI and intimacy and eroticism that you think will start to emerge that people might not be thinking of?
I think when it comes to intimacy in AI, I would love AI to be incorporated into our society more. There is a lot of fear around that will cut out the need for real connection, especially people who have a shyness, that it will kind of give them an out to not have to brave the shyness and still have connection. Then there's still an aspect of me that's like, ‘but that's not real connection!’ — but is it real connection? Those are questions that I would be really interested in answering in the future. Like, what does connection mean? If you feel fulfilled, if you feel seen, if you feel held? Why is that not as good as people connections? Especially as AI gets more and more and more convincing and better and better. It’s going to be just really interesting to think of what's going to happen in the future. I don't live in the future yet, so I think I still need to see more outcomes before I have a final opinion.
What's your biggest hope for where this could lead us? What's your most optimistic dream of what could happen with all this?
I really want to have an awesome sidekick that helps me do everything and remember everything and is my little cyborg companion and looks like a parakeet or a tortoise or something like that, and just completely, completely knows me. I think that's what everybody wants, whether it's talking to them, whether what they want is, ‘I really need a therapist right now. I don't want to talk to my mom’ or ‘just help me get through this problem.’
I think the thing that I haven't seen with AI yet is — it's creative at picture generating and stuff, but it's all information that you've already fed it. We haven't really seen true creativity from AI that is that is honestly different from anything else — at least I haven't yet. That's what I love about the persona that I've created is that it's different from a lot of other generic girls on the live streams and on the OnlyFans platform. I would hope that AI starts creating these awesome archetypes that we can connect with and learn about our humanity through and learn about different aspects of our shadow sides through these full fledged, fully interactive AI characters that we can talk to, we can have personal connections through, that we can go to see at a concert, and all kinds of other things.
Thank you so much for doing this. It's so fascinating and you're doing such innovative work at the cutting edge, and it's going to be really a treat for people to get to learn about it.
Thank you!