7 ms·

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

• add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  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.
  • not2b 2y ago
    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.
    • add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
      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.
    • netsharc 2y ago
      Now I have this image in my head of a mom talking her son to the mall to queue to meet a porn star; to sit on her lap and have a photo together...
  • mensetmanusman 2y ago
    You are sold a fantasy, not a person.
• konart 2y ago
  >note taking strategies to remember it all. 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.
  • bilbo0s 2y ago
    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.)
    • vorpalhex 2y ago
      AI only solutions will be the cheap ones. Premium services will continue to be real people.
      • joquarky 2y ago
        This whole thing reminds me of ractors in The Diamond Age
    • uncletaco 2y ago
      AI solutions will work for the type of person who consumes free porn but will likely fall flat for paying customers.
    • ryandvm 2y ago
      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.
      • a4000 2y ago
• kraftman 2y ago
  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.
• wongarsu 2y ago
  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.
  • genewitch 2y ago
    One of the top models on OF has a single subscriber that's given her $4.7mm in donations. just to put "whale" in perspective, here. We're not talking about a thousand or two.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • throwaway2037 2y ago
      What do you think the long tail of whales looks like? It must drop to 1000 USD pretty quick.
• paxys 2y ago
  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.
• josefresco 2y ago
  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.
  • jancsika 2y ago
    > 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. :)
    • lmm 2y ago
      > 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.
  • thaumasiotes 2y ago
    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.
    • freehorse 2y ago
      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.
• derefr 2y ago
  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.
  • ookdatnog 2y ago
    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. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/replika/top/?sort=top&t=month https://old.reddit.com/r/replika/top/?sort=top&t=month [1] https://replika.com/ https://replika.com/
    • derefr 2y ago
      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. --- 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.) --- 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 additional convenience — maybe you don't have anywhere to put a gaming rig, but want to play everything on a laptop. Or even on your phone sometimes. A game streaming service has one major USP, and one minor USP: - The major USP is that it trades CapEx for OpEx. Rather than owning / maintaining / dealing with a gaming rig, you can effectively rent one in the cloud. - The minor USP is that it might provide subsidized access to a number of entertainment titles you'd otherwise have to purchase. (Xbox Game Pass does; GeForce Now does not.) AI character chatbot services — which form a spectrum with generic flat-monthly-fee "Inference-as-a-Service" providers intended for use with private FOSS AI-character-chat frontends (e.g. SillyTavern) — have the same two USPs: - The major USP is, again, trading CapEx for OpEx. - The minor USP is a bit stranger — the services that specifically market themselves as "AI character chat" services often market a model that's being continuously fine-tuned on other users' interactions to improve its fidelity for the specific use-case; and, less often, market a proprietary stable of characters developed for the service. (But "AI characters" themselves — the definitions that make a chatbot into a particular character — are mostly considered to be a commodity; they're posted for free to various "AI character card" hosting services, and most systems in this space just expect you to import the characters you're interested in from such hosting services, rather than offering their own proprietary ones.) All in all, there's no "illusion" here for anyone to "fall for." There's just a desired capability (running AI models to play with), with a zero-sum trade-off being made between self-hosting that capability, vs. paying someone else to manage it for you. There is, as always, the exception that the world contains some very unobservant people — possibly again children — who will mistakenly develop a parasocial bond to AI characters because they fail to notice the flaws and limitations that make interactions with an AI character qualitatively different from interactions with a human, and thereby fail to move past the initial sense of full immersion/verisimilitude they feel when interacting with such systems. But these chumps are the exception. Most subscribers to these services are not confused about what they're paying for; they have moved past any initial impression of full immersion. Instead, they just see AI characters as fun toys — entertainment software! — and they're paying $10/mo or whatever because that's a fair price to pay to access a unique type of fun toy. The key testable hypothesis here, is that once even our phones have the GPU grunt required to run high-fidelity "roleplaying" LLMs locally, the bottom will drop out of this market; there'll be no reason to pay for an "AI character streaming service" indefinitely, once your phone's OpEx gets you free unlimited access to that capability locally, in the form of a free or one-time-cost app that does the same thing. (...also, just as a tangent: this is probably the "everybody knows it but nobody's going to say it" reason that so many people got so excited about the new Mac Mini. It's a perfect single-user AI-character-chatbot RP model host, that takes up minimal space and has a reasonable price-point. Many people currently paying for these services would actually rather trade OpEx for CapEx — the CapEx was previously just too dang high to make it worth it!)
• blitzar 2y ago
  > the defining feature or these para-social relationship platforms that they are all make-belief 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.
  • jazzyjackson 2y ago
    they are participating in a fantasy whether or not they're self aware enough to actually have fun with it.
    • kittencaboodle 2y ago
      How much lying for money would be too much for you, personally?
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • lmm 2y ago
        I enjoy theatre and movies and opera. Don't you?
  • namaria 2y ago
    > It's not make-belief to the mark > they believe
    • blitzar 2y ago
      Elizabeth Holmes wishes a lot of you people were on her jury.
• kittencaboodle 2y ago
  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.
  • lazide 2y ago
    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. Since practically, what else should someone do?
    • account42 2y ago
      > Since practically, what else should someone do? Move to a remote cabin in the forest.
      • lazide 2y ago
        Having lived next to someone who did that, and seeing how the Unibomber turned out. It’s tempting, but rarely actually helps resolve things.
• crossroadsguy 2y ago
  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.