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Seminal article (I guess), https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans > It’s just as easy to imagine demand for th

Seminal article (I guess), https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans > It’s just as easy to imagine demand for the “real thing” going down due to the emergence of more substitutes as it is to imagine the premium for parasocial authenticity going up. And yet only Generative AI “creators” will truly do whatever “you” want and only for you. And unlike real ones, they speak in every language and are available at any time (and eventually, in immersive 3D). Disagree. When (AI is) mentioned it has a negative correlation. Real content will fetch a premium

nemothekid 2y ago
It's the same pipe dream as "AI content creators will take over youtube". There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. A better way to look at it is there are 4 million humans out there trying every permutation to crack success, and ~400k actually do it. Unless you have a sufficiently advanced AI agent that is both varying it's content and it's marketing strategy to the tune of maybe ~1000 different iterations it's unlikely we will see a version of OnlyFans that exists that is majority AI generated. The "parasocial ai girlfriend" sounds like a flawed premise aswell. OF girls are not therapists - Cardi B, Bhad Bhabie, and others aren't raking in millions because they are good girlfriends (although that is part of the upsell). Social status plays a part in the most successful girls, people seem to subscribe because the creator is popular, especially if she's already built a platform elsewhere. In short, social status does not have an AI substitute.
- ghaff 2y ago
  From another angle, a bunch of us in the tech sector made pretty nice salaries. Very few of us were really all-stars in the sense that everyone knew who we we were on YouTube, etc. Which was fine.
- kiba 2y ago
  A good AI girlfriend wouldn't be a therapist but would mimics every aspect of a girlfriend, including arguments and fights and makeups, because that's how bonding occurs. That's going to be how successful AI girlfriend will be made.
  - l0ng1nu5 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
      Why? They're common people, not sociopaths.
      - Loughla 2y ago
        I think maybe it's my own personal bias, but it does feel like anyone who pays money for an AI girlfriend really won't want it to disagree with them. I believe they'll want an idyllic and fantasy version of a relationship.
        dwattttt 2y ago
        I dunno how sustainable that scenario is, because it brings to mind the maybe apocryphal Chinese curse "may you be granted everything you wish for".
        fsckboy 2y ago
        you are saying that the ai gf will not be like a real human female, but you are not making any argument that there is a defect in the bf's attachment to the gf.
        SoftTalker 2y ago
        Agree. The only advantage of an AI girlfriend is that you can shut her off when you're finished with her.
        atmavatar 2y ago
        While I grant that some and perhaps even most people won't want the AI girlfriend to disagree, there are some out there who treat arguments as a necessary and desirable spice in a relationship. That said, I can't really think of anything that would be worth arguing with an AI over.
        2y ago
- Dries007 2y ago
  > There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. I think that strongly depends on what you call "the creator economy". For example, on YT it's really mostly skill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2trao6dYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2trao6dYw Not that I believe its easy, nor do I think AI will be super good at it, at least not before everything else also enshittifies into the habsburg-AI-powered dead internet.
  - AmericanChopper 2y ago
    The idea that success is earned through luck rather than merit is a firmly ideological position, regardless of the domain you’re talking about. If you succeeded via luck then that provides a better moral justification for the related ideological position that you should be deprived of the fruits of your labor as much as possible, for redistribution to others who were simply less lucky than you. It’s really just sour grapes. The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume. It’s not 0 variance, but if you have some insight into what people want, and you do the work to execute your idea, then you can simply work through the ups and downs and success is almost inevitable.
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      > The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume Well, the formula for success in selling products is this. Most people don't define success in terms of business acumen. Except, of course, businessmen. If you perceive our society as centered around successful people, of course you'll see it as merit-based. If you perceive our society as poorly run and catering to the rich, of course you'll see success as primarily a product of circumstance outside of your control. Is it so hard to see that "merit" is necessarily defined in subjective terms?
      - AmericanChopper 2y ago
        This is just arguing over phrasing. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, if you’re making YouTube videos, or music, or paintings, or cakes, or web apps, or cleaning diveways, your ability to succeed boils down to your ability to provide something other people want. That is the objective source of your merit. Perhaps your own idea of success in life is something that revolves exclusively around your own satisfaction, like going off and living in the woods. But this is exactly the same situation, you’re just only trying to provide the things that one person wants in that scenario, yourself. Your ability to do this will again come down to your own merit. Of course if you’re chronically frustrated by being less successful than you would like to be, then looking for alternative explanations such as luck will be an attractive scapegoat that could excuse you from scrutinising your own capabilities. But the human inclination towards doing that is certainly not morally righteous.
- bostik 2y ago
  > There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. That observation has echoes of the music industry - another extremely top-heavy creator business. There are formulaic ways to make "good enough" and "catchy enough" songs, but the window for "X enough" keeps shifting. Cranking out grunge won't be sustainable in the age of K-pop. But the massive runaway hits have been predominantly outliers for their age. They have veered far enough from the mainstream to be interesting in new ways, different enough, and surprising enough to break through. But to predict in advance what kinds of outliers will win the lottery? Largely random, indeed.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Yeah but Rick Rubin is always involved and Max Martin has written a hell of a lot of megahits. Makes you think.
    - dumbo-octopus 2y ago
      Jack Antonoff as well. There certainly exist a handful of people who consistently produce hits for decades.
    - 71bw 2y ago
      >Rick Rubin Dear God, I've looked into his discography[1] and nearly every album I think of as great from the last 30 years is there. Seasons in the Abyss, The Life of Pablo, 99 Problems, SOAD self-titled + Toxicity, The Geto Boys self-titled, Licensed to Ill... Is this man a hit printer or something? Really shows that Metallica went to him with Death Magnetic after the joke called St. Anger lol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin_production_discography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin_production_discogra...
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - sirspacey 2y ago
        His skill is helping creators do their best work. It’s a rare one.
sigmar 2y ago
To what extent is the current content being paid for on onlyfans "real content?" There are companies that you can pay to manage your onlyfans messages[1]. As in- people think they are messaging the content creator, but are actually messaging some random employee of a third party company. I'm not sure how many of the people paying to message the content creator understand that this is common, but I'd imagine some are willfully ignorant about who is replying to their messages. Couldn't they also be similarly "blind" when interfacing with an AI substitute? [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/onlyfans-management-agency-chatters/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/onlyfans-management-agency-c...
creer 2y ago
Further, different audiences are looking for different things. One other response mentions social status. I will contribute another: personal human interaction with someone that seems both "out of your league" AND "no-need-to-get-away-from-the-computer" available. That configuration has significant value (as real content from a real human) for enough of these fans, enough of which recognize this and pay well for it - to make it worth the performer's time. And still very far from "generative AI".
safety1st 2y ago
There are a few key points to understanding the OnlyFans business which are not covered by either article (and the one on xsrus.com is pretty old and is off by several billions regarding revenue now). * Point #1, OnlyFans is the biggest thing in porn by far, its rise is meteoric. * Point #2, OnlyFans is in the business of selling relationships. It's not a tech company and attempts to analyze it as such are therefore off the mark. Customers pay OnlyFans because they feel they are obtaining a relationship with the model, that she is aware of them and responding to them in a personalized fashion. * Point #3, The relationships OnlyFans sells are fraudulent - a high percentage of customers actually believe they are talking to the model. In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced. Some models run their own accounts but most of the time it is more professionalized with a pimp/production company behind the scenes who just orders pictures and clips from the model, so the intimacy the customer is buying is a lie. * Point #4, and this may be the biggest one explaining OF's meteoric rise, OF creators are allowed to advertise via their social media profiles, whereas a conventional porn site is not. Reddit, X and Instagram are all massive drivers of OnlyFans traffic and signups. The business model is that softcore porn is hosted on these social media sites, which makes tons of money for the social media sites, and then there is a link or mention to the OnlyFans profile where OF delivers the service for whales who want to escalate their porn consumption. I'll say it again, the key innovation in the OnlyFans business model is that they figured out how to get women to advertise their service on Instagram. Not a tech company. Another significant takeaway is that since OF's product is fundamentally a lie, the social media giants are indirectly profiting from fraud.
- williamdclt 2y ago
  > In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced It depends how you define “successful”, but I would say that’s not true. I personally know several OF models for whom it is their fulltime job (earning decent money), and they do not outsource anything. Highly popular models almost certainly do, but there’s a lot of smaller creators who don’t
  - sulandor 2y ago
3eb7988a1663 2y ago
This was a minor point in the Diamond Age novel. Artificial intelligence is capable of acting in digital movies, but is still imperceptibly off. Requires a real human being to give that extra bit of authenticity.
beAbU 2y ago
Sure, real content will fetch a premium, but I think there is absolute bank to be made with AI enhanced or AI generated curated pornography in our near future. I will also not be surprised at all when the inevitable scandal breaks where some popular OF creator was ousted as being AI generated instead of being "real". There are Instagram influences that are on the platform /today/ that are immensely popular, and they are completely AI generated. Some of their followers even know this, yet they don't really care.
llm_trw 2y ago
>When (AI is) mentioned it has a negative correlation. I have an llm inference rig that I enjoy on the weekends and the problem for the first time in my life is that I have supernormal stimulus which doesn't seem to reduce in potency the more I use it. It's gotten to the point where I don't visit porn sites any more because the locally generated material is better than what I can find there, and these are just the first sparks of gen AI porn. Gen AI porn will make the issue of online pornography seem laughable when it drops in requirements so you can run the state of the art models in prosumer hardware. What do you do when reality is a distant second to the digital world?
- chasontherobot 2y ago
  > I have an llm inference rig that I enjoy on the weekends and the problem for the first time in my life it that I have supernormal stimulus which doesn't seem to reduce in potency the more I use it. I have no idea what this sentence means
  - jpsouth 2y ago
    I read it as they have a powerful enough machine to generate weekend material that doesn’t seem to degrade in user experience or satisfaction (i.e get boring over time) which you may experience when enjoying ‘normal’ weekend activities.
  - k33jf33l2 2y ago
    He's jerking off to the output of a stats library and can't help wondering if/when it'll lose its luster.
- sulandor 2y ago
  > What do you do when reality is a distant second to the digital world? realize it's a torus and wander happily in circles
- akomtu 2y ago
  That's what going to turn our society upside down before we realise what we're dealing with. Sex is a lot like doing drugs that as a side effect make you release your life energy. The same energy that creates new life in the right circumstances. In the nature, obtaining sex is difficult, which limits the amount of this sex drug we can consume. AI removes this "obstacle" from our way and opens the gates to such dungeons of our mind that we thought never existed. The effect at the society level will be a giant short-circuit when the electric energy that makes our bodies alive will rush down and burn the wires.
spencerchubb 2y ago
Just don't tell the consumer that it's Gen AI
ec109685 2y ago
It’s already fake. The creator is not really into you and your interactions are with some dude in an offshore call center, not intimate chats with the person you think you’re having. It’s ridiculous this is considered okay by the platform. Unlike something like professional wrestling (that is make believe real content), the AI equivalent to only fans seems like it will be trivial to make. And as the article pointed out, part of why onlyfans exploded in popularity is that other sources of free porn dried up, so it shows there is a substitution aspect where if something better / cheaper comes along, people will switch to it.
kragen 2y ago
> Seminal article (I guess), https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans is it possible to write a non-seminal article about onlyfans, though?

nemothekid 2y ago

It's the same pipe dream as "AI content creators will take over youtube". There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. A better way to look at it is there are 4 million humans out there trying every permutation to crack success, and ~400k actually do it. Unless you have a sufficiently advanced AI agent that is both varying it's content and it's marketing strategy to the tune of maybe ~1000 different iterations it's unlikely we will see a version of OnlyFans that exists that is majority AI generated. The "parasocial ai girlfriend" sounds like a flawed premise aswell. OF girls are not therapists - Cardi B, Bhad Bhabie, and others aren't raking in millions because they are good girlfriends (although that is part of the upsell). Social status plays a part in the most successful girls, people seem to subscribe because the creator is popular, especially if she's already built a platform elsewhere. In short, social status does not have an AI substitute.

ghaff 2y ago
From another angle, a bunch of us in the tech sector made pretty nice salaries. Very few of us were really all-stars in the sense that everyone knew who we we were on YouTube, etc. Which was fine.
kiba 2y ago
A good AI girlfriend wouldn't be a therapist but would mimics every aspect of a girlfriend, including arguments and fights and makeups, because that's how bonding occurs. That's going to be how successful AI girlfriend will be made.
- l0ng1nu5 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ZoomZoomZoom 2y ago
    Why? They're common people, not sociopaths.
    - Loughla 2y ago
      I think maybe it's my own personal bias, but it does feel like anyone who pays money for an AI girlfriend really won't want it to disagree with them. I believe they'll want an idyllic and fantasy version of a relationship.
      - dwattttt 2y ago
        I dunno how sustainable that scenario is, because it brings to mind the maybe apocryphal Chinese curse "may you be granted everything you wish for".
      - fsckboy 2y ago
        you are saying that the ai gf will not be like a real human female, but you are not making any argument that there is a defect in the bf's attachment to the gf.
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        Agree. The only advantage of an AI girlfriend is that you can shut her off when you're finished with her.
      - atmavatar 2y ago
        While I grant that some and perhaps even most people won't want the AI girlfriend to disagree, there are some out there who treat arguments as a necessary and desirable spice in a relationship. That said, I can't really think of anything that would be worth arguing with an AI over.
      - 2y ago
Dries007 2y ago
> There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. I think that strongly depends on what you call "the creator economy". For example, on YT it's really mostly skill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2trao6dYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2trao6dYw Not that I believe its easy, nor do I think AI will be super good at it, at least not before everything else also enshittifies into the habsburg-AI-powered dead internet.
- AmericanChopper 2y ago
  The idea that success is earned through luck rather than merit is a firmly ideological position, regardless of the domain you’re talking about. If you succeeded via luck then that provides a better moral justification for the related ideological position that you should be deprived of the fruits of your labor as much as possible, for redistribution to others who were simply less lucky than you. It’s really just sour grapes. The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume. It’s not 0 variance, but if you have some insight into what people want, and you do the work to execute your idea, then you can simply work through the ups and downs and success is almost inevitable.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    > The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume Well, the formula for success in selling products is this. Most people don't define success in terms of business acumen. Except, of course, businessmen. If you perceive our society as centered around successful people, of course you'll see it as merit-based. If you perceive our society as poorly run and catering to the rich, of course you'll see success as primarily a product of circumstance outside of your control. Is it so hard to see that "merit" is necessarily defined in subjective terms?
    - AmericanChopper 2y ago
      This is just arguing over phrasing. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, if you’re making YouTube videos, or music, or paintings, or cakes, or web apps, or cleaning diveways, your ability to succeed boils down to your ability to provide something other people want. That is the objective source of your merit. Perhaps your own idea of success in life is something that revolves exclusively around your own satisfaction, like going off and living in the woods. But this is exactly the same situation, you’re just only trying to provide the things that one person wants in that scenario, yourself. Your ability to do this will again come down to your own merit. Of course if you’re chronically frustrated by being less successful than you would like to be, then looking for alternative explanations such as luck will be an attractive scapegoat that could excuse you from scrutinising your own capabilities. But the human inclination towards doing that is certainly not morally righteous.
bostik 2y ago
> There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. That observation has echoes of the music industry - another extremely top-heavy creator business. There are formulaic ways to make "good enough" and "catchy enough" songs, but the window for "X enough" keeps shifting. Cranking out grunge won't be sustainable in the age of K-pop. But the massive runaway hits have been predominantly outliers for their age. They have veered far enough from the mainstream to be interesting in new ways, different enough, and surprising enough to break through. But to predict in advance what kinds of outliers will win the lottery? Largely random, indeed.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Yeah but Rick Rubin is always involved and Max Martin has written a hell of a lot of megahits. Makes you think.
  - dumbo-octopus 2y ago
    Jack Antonoff as well. There certainly exist a handful of people who consistently produce hits for decades.
  - 71bw 2y ago
    >Rick Rubin Dear God, I've looked into his discography[1] and nearly every album I think of as great from the last 30 years is there. Seasons in the Abyss, The Life of Pablo, 99 Problems, SOAD self-titled + Toxicity, The Geto Boys self-titled, Licensed to Ill... Is this man a hit printer or something? Really shows that Metallica went to him with Death Magnetic after the joke called St. Anger lol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin_production_discography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin_production_discogra...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - sirspacey 2y ago
      His skill is helping creators do their best work. It’s a rare one.

sigmar 2y ago

To what extent is the current content being paid for on onlyfans "real content?" There are companies that you can pay to manage your onlyfans messages[1]. As in- people think they are messaging the content creator, but are actually messaging some random employee of a third party company. I'm not sure how many of the people paying to message the content creator understand that this is common, but I'd imagine some are willfully ignorant about who is replying to their messages. Couldn't they also be similarly "blind" when interfacing with an AI substitute? [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/onlyfans-management-agency-chatters/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/onlyfans-management-agency-c...

creer 2y ago

Further, different audiences are looking for different things. One other response mentions social status. I will contribute another: personal human interaction with someone that seems both "out of your league" AND "no-need-to-get-away-from-the-computer" available. That configuration has significant value (as real content from a real human) for enough of these fans, enough of which recognize this and pay well for it - to make it worth the performer's time. And still very far from "generative AI".

safety1st 2y ago

There are a few key points to understanding the OnlyFans business which are not covered by either article (and the one on xsrus.com is pretty old and is off by several billions regarding revenue now). * Point #1, OnlyFans is the biggest thing in porn by far, its rise is meteoric. * Point #2, OnlyFans is in the business of selling relationships. It's not a tech company and attempts to analyze it as such are therefore off the mark. Customers pay OnlyFans because they feel they are obtaining a relationship with the model, that she is aware of them and responding to them in a personalized fashion. * Point #3, The relationships OnlyFans sells are fraudulent - a high percentage of customers actually believe they are talking to the model. In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced. Some models run their own accounts but most of the time it is more professionalized with a pimp/production company behind the scenes who just orders pictures and clips from the model, so the intimacy the customer is buying is a lie. * Point #4, and this may be the biggest one explaining OF's meteoric rise, OF creators are allowed to advertise via their social media profiles, whereas a conventional porn site is not. Reddit, X and Instagram are all massive drivers of OnlyFans traffic and signups. The business model is that softcore porn is hosted on these social media sites, which makes tons of money for the social media sites, and then there is a link or mention to the OnlyFans profile where OF delivers the service for whales who want to escalate their porn consumption. I'll say it again, the key innovation in the OnlyFans business model is that they figured out how to get women to advertise their service on Instagram. Not a tech company. Another significant takeaway is that since OF's product is fundamentally a lie, the social media giants are indirectly profiting from fraud.

williamdclt 2y ago
> In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced It depends how you define “successful”, but I would say that’s not true. I personally know several OF models for whom it is their fulltime job (earning decent money), and they do not outsource anything. Highly popular models almost certainly do, but there’s a lot of smaller creators who don’t
- sulandor 2y ago

3eb7988a1663 2y ago

This was a minor point in the Diamond Age novel. Artificial intelligence is capable of acting in digital movies, but is still imperceptibly off. Requires a real human being to give that extra bit of authenticity.

beAbU 2y ago

Sure, real content will fetch a premium, but I think there is absolute bank to be made with AI enhanced or AI generated curated pornography in our near future. I will also not be surprised at all when the inevitable scandal breaks where some popular OF creator was ousted as being AI generated instead of being "real". There are Instagram influences that are on the platform /today/ that are immensely popular, and they are completely AI generated. Some of their followers even know this, yet they don't really care.

llm_trw 2y ago

>When (AI is) mentioned it has a negative correlation. I have an llm inference rig that I enjoy on the weekends and the problem for the first time in my life is that I have supernormal stimulus which doesn't seem to reduce in potency the more I use it. It's gotten to the point where I don't visit porn sites any more because the locally generated material is better than what I can find there, and these are just the first sparks of gen AI porn. Gen AI porn will make the issue of online pornography seem laughable when it drops in requirements so you can run the state of the art models in prosumer hardware. What do you do when reality is a distant second to the digital world?

chasontherobot 2y ago
> I have an llm inference rig that I enjoy on the weekends and the problem for the first time in my life it that I have supernormal stimulus which doesn't seem to reduce in potency the more I use it. I have no idea what this sentence means
- jpsouth 2y ago
  I read it as they have a powerful enough machine to generate weekend material that doesn’t seem to degrade in user experience or satisfaction (i.e get boring over time) which you may experience when enjoying ‘normal’ weekend activities.
- k33jf33l2 2y ago
  He's jerking off to the output of a stats library and can't help wondering if/when it'll lose its luster.
sulandor 2y ago
> What do you do when reality is a distant second to the digital world? realize it's a torus and wander happily in circles
akomtu 2y ago
That's what going to turn our society upside down before we realise what we're dealing with. Sex is a lot like doing drugs that as a side effect make you release your life energy. The same energy that creates new life in the right circumstances. In the nature, obtaining sex is difficult, which limits the amount of this sex drug we can consume. AI removes this "obstacle" from our way and opens the gates to such dungeons of our mind that we thought never existed. The effect at the society level will be a giant short-circuit when the electric energy that makes our bodies alive will rush down and burn the wires.

spencerchubb 2y ago

Just don't tell the consumer that it's Gen AI

ec109685 2y ago

It’s already fake. The creator is not really into you and your interactions are with some dude in an offshore call center, not intimate chats with the person you think you’re having. It’s ridiculous this is considered okay by the platform. Unlike something like professional wrestling (that is make believe real content), the AI equivalent to only fans seems like it will be trivial to make. And as the article pointed out, part of why onlyfans exploded in popularity is that other sources of free porn dried up, so it shows there is a substitution aspect where if something better / cheaper comes along, people will switch to it.

kragen 2y ago

> Seminal article (I guess), https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans is it possible to write a non-seminal article about onlyfans, though?