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Yes, friends, AI-generated porn is here. Things are about to get really weird.

Jurassic porn: Caveman and cavewoman, getting jiggy wid it. Source: Midjourney.

It's a truism that any technology can be used for good or evil. But before that, it will probably be employed to satisfy a more basic human need.

Take electricity, for example. Two years after Edison perfected the incandescent light bulb, a British physician named Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the electric vibrator. It was called by the sexy name, "The Granville Hammer." [1]

This fine tradition has followed us into the digital age.

Back in 2008 I wrote a story titled "Thank you, Porn! 12 Ways the Sex Trade Has Changed the Web." [2] It turns out that the adult industry is responsible for much of what we take for granted on today's Internet. Broadband, online payment systems, streaming video, live chat, content delivery networks, and high-speed mobile service were either invented, or greatly accelerated, by the dark lords of forbidden flesh. [3]

Of course, the porn industry is also indirectly responsible for exacerbating some of the Internet's more nasty bits [4], including spam, malware, browser hijacking, domain theft, and Paris Hilton's career.

So it's inevitable that AI and pornography would converge, kind of like peanut butter and chocolate, only … more moist.

All the nudes unfit to print

For example: There are now AI-powered sites that offer "seamless photo nudification." [5] Upload an image of someone wearing, say, a swimsuit, and it will magically strip away the clothing to reveal the flesh beneath. (I'm no lawyer, but I'd bet folding money this also violates revenge porn laws in multiple states.)

This sort of thing has been going on with Photoshop for a while now, but having AI doing the heavy lifting is likely to increase the volume of these images by a few orders of magnitude, as well as make them much more realistic.

To me, the more intriguing phenomenon is purely AI-generated porn; i.e., nude images of people who don't exist. Rolling Stone just published a story about two enterprising nerds who made a small profit selling an AI-generated hottie named Claudia on Reddit, mostly as a joke.

“You could say this whole account is just a test to see if you can fool people with AI pictures,” says the team behind Claudia, who declined to disclose their real names. “You could compare it to the vtubers, they create their own characters and play as an entirely different person. We honestly didn’t think it would get this much traction.”

Claudia was created by Stable Diffusion, an AI program that uses machine learning to generate shockingly realistic-looking photos using nothing but a text prompt. (In this case, the text prompt was a selfie of a woman in her house “without makeup with black hair, shoulder length hair, simple background, straight hair, hair bangs.”) She is among the first, but by no means the last, fictional adult content creator to be generated via rapidly evolving AI technology, prompting a slew of ethical questions and concerns.

Here's Claudia: Pert, petite, and composed entirely of pixels. Source: Twitter via the Washington Post by way of Reddit.

Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell did his own deep dive into this phenomenon, asking fans of Claudia how they felt when they learned she was AI generated, and polling porn stars as to whether they feel threatened by their digital competition. Apparently not:

Mark Spiegler, an agent for porn actors such as Asa Akira and Riley Reid, said the stars in his industry are performers with charisma, skill and attractiveness with which no AI can compete.

“I don't think you can machine-learn a personality,” he said in an interview. “You can somewhat replicate it, but you're still missing that human spark and spontaneity.”

Because that's why people watch movies like "Hot Wife Mega Orgy Part 2" — for the personality. You know, like reading Playboy for the articles.

Porn to be wild

These fakes are increasingly hard to distinguish from the real thing. [6] This lovely young woman, for example, also does not exist in corporeal form.

Meet "Domenika." Source: Maxhitman.

This safe-for-work image comes from a site called Civitai, where image creators share their models (the AI models, not the human kind) along with the positive and negative prompts they used to generate each image.

The positive prompts (light brown hair, perfect eyes, soft lighting) are obvious, but the negative ones — things the artist told the AI not to draw — are the stuff of nightmares: Deformed pupils, fused lips and teeth, mutated hands, malformed limbs, extra arms and legs, too many fingers, and so on. [7]

Not all of them are that good. Like this blurry image, titled "AI generated nude," which comes with an NFT attached and sold at auction for just under $7.25. [8]

Really bad porn or a Georgia O'Keeffe painting? You decide. Source: OpenSea.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it's not like the Internet desperately needs more nudes. AI porn has the potential to be more disgusting, disturbing, and demeaning than what we've already got. On the other hand, if we're talking about purely AI-generated images, it's hard to see the harm. [9] Will the advent of virtual nudes mean that fewer flesh-and-blood humans will be exploited? Maybe.

However you feel about porn [10], it's been a part of human culture for as long as there's been human culture. I'm willing to bet the first cave paintings were of Ogg and Oggina making the wildebeast with two backs, before some stone-age puritan make them erase it and draw a woolly mammoth hunt instead. It's definitely been part of Internet culture since its earliest days [11]. It's not going anywhere.

And soon, it will be going to places it has never gone before. [12] Buckle up.

Will AI porn giving new meaning to the phrase ‘faking it’? Post your PG-13-friendly thoughts in the comments below.

[1] Hollywood made a semi-historical film about this starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy called Hysteria. I highly recommend it.

[2] One of the very few stories I wrote during that era that is still accessible on the Web. Draw your own conclusions.

[3] Fun fact: In the early 1990s, Penthouse gave away 2400-baud modems with the magazine's logo on them, so its fans could get to its website that much faster.

[4] Not those bits.

[5] It appears many of those sites are scams and probably harmful to your computer, if not your psyche. So Google that phrase with extreme caution.

[6] Or so I've heard.

[7] If there isn't already a market for "malformed AI porn," there will be one soon enough.

[8] They definitely overpaid.

[9] Except maybe the sex workers who are now out of a job.

[10] Honestly, 99% of it is just gross. Or so I've heard.

[11] Google "ASCII porn" and get back to me.

[12] Like Star Trek for pervs.