On Tuesday, I participated in one of Substack’s new Stacked Debates series. Noelle Perdue and I tackled whether or not generative AI would conquer the porn industry. I took the pro position. After all, the adult entertainment is, after Silicon Valley itself, the most technophilic industry in the world.
Here is my opening statement:
Consider that porn has always been at the bleeding edge of technology. With each new advance in media production, pornography has been quick to adopt the latest format. As soon as there were motion pictures, there were pornographic movies. As soon as there were home videos, porn came to VHS. And as far as internet video goes, the porn industry created that format itself. The first video available to stream online was Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape.
Incidentally, it was also the first viral video ever.
The rapid expansion of digital porn production, hot on the heels of internet adoption, was the primary driver behind campaigns to regulate digital content and censor offensive materials. But attempts to block the rise of internet pornography only prompted more innovation. When porn was banned from YouTube, it moved to PornHub. When it was banned from Tumblr, it moved to Twitter, now X. When digital micro-transactions and social media networks enabled the creator economy, and porn was preemptively banned from the first prominent creator platform Patreon, the industry quickly adopted OnlyFans.
Today the frontier is generative AI.
As with the creator economy, porn has been preemptively banned by most AI platforms: ChatGPT, Midjourney, Higgsfield, etc. Predictably, open source tools like Stable Diffusion already provide an alternative. Pornography has the tools to use generative AI today, but unlike digital video, the uptake has not been instant, leading many to insist:
THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT.
Some speculate this is because generative AI lacks the parasocial element foundational to porn consumption i.e. people are getting off on the presence of the person on the other side of the OnlyFans chat as much as the OnlyFans content itself.
But this is not unique to porn. Parasocial relationships are the bedrock of all contemporary media, in so much as all media in 2025 is in some sense social media.
The internet personality making the content is as important as the content itself. Or in a more traditional context, the celebrity in the movie is as important as the script.
Counterintuitively, we find the strongest argument for a generative AI takeover of porn in its parasocial nature. Even though no sex was had in the creation of the content and no one, no human at least, is on the other end of the chat. The truth is:
Consumers already know that on OnlyFans, you are as likely chatting with a 24 year-old gooner as the porn star herself.
And yet they’re indifferent to it. Why?
Because porn is based on fantasy, the suspension of disbelief. You don’t need a warm body on the other end of the chat. Only the illusion of one. Posters on the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI do not care that the object of their affections is wireborn i.e. artificial. It simply doesn’t matter.
The illusion is enough.
So why then hasn’t generative AI already made big inroads into porn?
Is it because AI is centralized enough to censor porn production? Unlikely.
As I pointed out earlier, there are already workarounds for that.
Perhaps, it’s because consumer preferences are already tied to the likenesses of non-wireborn performers? I think that’s unlikely, too.
Generative AI hasn’t taken over the porn industry because we’re in the early stages of the adoption curve—the Pets.com, we have no idea what the profitable business model of this new technology looks like, dot.com bubble end of the adoption curve.
When the majority of online porn consumption shifts to generative AI, I believe the first phase will involve the stolen IP of current performers.
That collab you’ve always wanted to see? AI can make that for you.
Your head on the body of a horse fucking your favorite performer. It can make that, too.
Obviously, the performers will hate this. And it will probably be illegal—at least in the civil sense. But like attempts to limit the constant leakage of paywalled content to free hosting sites, it will be a lost cause.
Like A&M Records before them, who won their legal battle against Napster, but lost the war against the Internet, the performers will lose the war against AI.
Unlike our debate host, Substack—sorry to brownnose—most platforms do not have an ideological commitment to paying content creators. We are the boot disk for entertainment platforms that tech hopes will soon rely not on unpaid humans, but unpaid AI.
Consumers want things cheap and fast and Silicon Valley is more than happy to oblige.
Excluding paypigs, whose fetish is wasting money, porn consumers are no different.
Spotify siphoned off the recording industry’s profits by offering a cheaper product. It seems inevitable that an AI platform will do the same to porn industry.
And it’s not just the customizable nature of AI porn that will supercharge this transfer of power. Persuasive techniques invented by social media platforms will be used to make pornography even more addictive than it already is.
The duration of your viewing, the genre you are viewing, what you click on, what you pay for, what makes you log-off, and most importantly, what keeps you logged on is already being analyzed and developing a profile of your tastes.
Tastes you may not even realize you have.
Tastes you may have been conditioned to have.
The point is to make you addicted. And nimble AI will do that better.
What individual porn creators will face is not just a machine that can steal their likeness—or a likeness close enough to evade legal scrutiny—but one that can instantly generate content, iterate on it, and fine tune it.
A machine that creates a pornographic one-shot and sends you straight to the goon cave.
In the best case scenario of the generative AI takeover of porn, tools and platforms will give porn stars control and financially compensate them.
That would be fair. After all, they created the original training material used to create the AI.
Unfortunately, that’s the more unlikely scenario. In an industry whose capital needs are vast—AI requires GPUs, minerals, electricity, water, etc.—monopoly is the fastest path to success. OpenAI, increasingly loathed and increasingly dominant, seems most likely to win that race.
But even if pornography is banned from its servers, a smaller AI company will dominate the porn niche. Just as Pornhub is the YouTube of porn, there will be an OpenAI of porn.
And how does Pornhub treat performers? Not well, not well at all.
But that’s simply the way platforms work.
The logic of the internet demands it.
