OnlyFans models are using AI impersonators to keep up with their DMs

https://www.wired.com/story/onlyfans-models-are-using-ai-impersonators-to-keep-up-with-their-dms/

by impish9208 • 2 years ago

368 595 2 years ago

dvngnt_• 2 years ago

i wonder how they get around the heavy censorship that most flagship LLM use. I was assuming that they were outsourcing to lower-wage countries

logicchains• 2 years ago

Maybe they're using Gemini; it's possible to disable censorship in Gemini, which combined with a custom base prompt can get the model to say almost anything.

probably_wrong• 2 years ago

I don't want to link to the thread because the author didn't seem to want to, but someone in another thread said Llama 3 with a few-shot prompting to get the model to respond, using their actual DMs with fans.

evan_2• 2 years ago

YouTube provides its creators LLM-generated replies right in the interface, apparently trained on some of the creator's actual replies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QHXElgrl8

If you keep watching there's another feature that actually generates video ideas, scripts, and even thumbnails for video creators.

Seems really grim- what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature? It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.

mrbungie• 2 years ago

Good-faith rationale: None. Rationale: More growth for less effort, even if there is no soul.

Fitting for our times.

janice1999• 2 years ago

It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.

It's easy to rationalise a time saving measure I guess. I feel I'm unauthentic when I use auto-generated response suggestions in Outlook. But, like OnlyFans, it's 'just business'. Perhaps I'm overthinking it. How genuine and heartfelt can OnlyFans responses be? Probably as much as my response to a budget approval.

nickff3• 2 years ago

The problem is that this seems like DAAS (deception as a service), possibly even fraud.

nonrandomstring• 2 years ago

to trick people

"Artificial Intelligence" -> noun artifice: ruse, clever trick, guile, deception, cunning, a skillful or artful contrivance

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

On OnlyFans you get so many messages there’s no hope of replying to all of them manually. So it’s either reply to basically no one, or use automated methods.

space_oddity5• 2 years ago

If fans are paying for a personal connection, doesn’t automating replies risk undermining that value?

Karellen• 2 years ago

Worth noting that - mostly - punters weren't having real interactions with the models anyway. As the article points out, they'd previously reported (and I think HN had linked to the story) that a large number of models had been outsourcing their DM interactions to a rotating cadre of gig-workers already. And as the gig workers wouldn't be able to keep track of the full chat history between each punter and "the model", the conversations could sometimes feel off, or have long-term inconsistencies.

I guess LLM hallucinations will just give a slightly different flavour of unreal interactions.

xethos• 2 years ago

IIRC (from mobile), it was a different article from Wired that corroborated this, with a surprising disagreement (from what you mentioned) being that the gig-workers would keep notes that are attached and shared. The notes are per-... random? I suppose they'd be called? The gig-worker's customer is the streamer (or agency) that pays them, so I don't have a better name for the hoarde of people they're meant to be chatting with

Though I don't doubt that less careful (or less well-paid) gig-chatters exist and can have a slightly different feel when handing off a random at shift-change

echelon3• 2 years ago

real interactions with the models anyway

The next step is not having real models at all. It'll be 100% AI all the way up and down the stack.

Completely AI porn is going to be booming business. PornHub, OnlyFans, and perhaps even some dating websites will be "innovator's dilemma"'d out.

andirk• 2 years ago

I assume in this case, you are saying "the model" to mean the human Only Fans account holder and not an ML model in which the fake models are trained on? Something funny about clarifying that too.

SirMaster• 2 years ago

I'm OK with it as long as it would be labeled as such...

I think users need to demand that if it's AI generated that it's labeled as such.

mewpmewp22• 2 years ago

But ultimately there would be external tools that can do those messages on behalf of them, so it really wouldn't matter.

immibis• 2 years ago

That is the business model of most media.

evan_2• 2 years ago

I guess so, to a point. Jimmy Kimmel wants you to feel like you're a part of a community because you watch his show and get all of his inside jokes, but he's not sending you fake text messages pretending to be your close personal friend. Seems different to me!

olyjohn• 2 years ago

Yeah well most media is trash. So yay for even more trash?

derefr3• 2 years ago

what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature

So, responding to viewers increases engagement, and thereby a channel's virality.

And one human can only do so much of that. So eventually, you hit a marketing scalability bottleneck — you get more comments than you can read, and the people who don't feel engaged with, are more likely to churn from your viewership, so your viewership growth starts to decelerate.

Large media companies + MCNs previously solved this bottleneck, by hiring paid human community managers to scale responding-to-comments.

But individual creators bootstrapping their growth, had no good solution to this (besides joining an MCN), because the too-many-comments threshold comes long before they make enough revenue to afford to hire their own community managers.

This creates a pay-to-win model where companies who already have capital from other ventures can afford to circumvent this bottleneck and so get big on YouTube, in a way that individual creators cannot.

And YouTube doesn't like that; those big companies aren't beholden to YouTube in the way that creators that think of themselves fundamentally as "YouTube content creators" are. (Or, to say that in a nicer way: YouTube wants to democratize content creation, ensuring that there's a way for small bootstrapped content-creators to "make it.")

AI comment responding is a substitute good for the paid human community managers who already perform this function for large media companies / MCNs / etc. It serves to allow these independent bootstrapped content-creators to overcome the responses-to-comments marketing bottleneck for much lower cost.

This doesn't do anything good for the people who post comments, of course; but it does work to ensure a healthy ecosystem of independent bootstrapped content creators, rather than an oligopoly of media companies — which is something that viewers want from YouTube.

(An analogy might be to level-1 CSRs in a call center: as a complainant, they just get in your way; but they solve a customer-service scalability bottleneck for the company, which thereby allows the company to grow past the point where it would otherwise stop being able to handle support at all due to the increasing flood of "nonsense" complaints.)

It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.

Yes, it is, but that's going to happen whether or not there's a built-in feature to do it. That ship has sailed literally centuries ago — ever heard of writing to a famous author/actor/etc, and getting a hand-written response, seemingly from the famous person themselves, but actually from their agent and just signed by the famous person?

holoduke• 2 years ago

Thats a general issue. Lots of comments here could as well be ai generated. You never know for sure at least.

johnnyanmac6• 2 years ago

Could be, but I believe HN can determine such things. And Dang's made it clear multiple times that this comment section is for humans, not bots.

Applejinx2• 2 years ago

Yes, I'm experiencing this in the form of 'suggestion' buttons.

It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong. If I used that I would be telling my fans the opposite of what I actually meant, or various other catastrophically not-even-wrong assertions. It really, really is not figuring out what it's being fed. Sometimes I let people in on what the AI is suggesting I say.

It's not actually wresting the controls from my hands and talking to my fans AS me… yet.

genpfault• 2 years ago

It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong.

"Yeah back then I was weirded out by their now standard response prediction thing, it was always just one or two words off exactly what I wanted to reply (usually missing/adding a negation, or substituting a word with an antonym)"[1]

[1] https://qntm.org/perso

everdrive• 2 years ago

That's depressing, and I didn't realize. This is truly the death of the the comment section.

ClassyJacket• 2 years ago

It's like when you find out the band you like probably didn't respond to you, but just some social media manager.

TeMPOraL11• 2 years ago

what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature?

There is none, because the whole thing was never good faith. It's always been about tricking people into having a real interaction, to make it easier to exploit them for ad clicks or to sell them junk. That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.

xvector• 2 years ago

This is a bunch of hand-wringing. If the AI reply is what I would have said anyways; awesome! Finding thumbnails is hard, but if AI comes up with a good one? Fantastic!

None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were. It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.

nolaboronlyai• 2 years ago

The good faith is "We here at youtube adamantly REFUSE to spend any actual manpower on things that require it, and you know what, so should you! Join us. Thrive. Beep Boop."

Of course they only do it because it's inevitable, and they don't want others doing it before them.

timeon4• 2 years ago

Not just Youtube. Most of the time unintentionally but, any personified information broker is manipulative in its nature. Watching vlogs or streamers, listening podcasts, reading post of social media accounts one follows. There is face between you and the information and that face becomes familiar to you. Face that builds trust.

It used to be that TV or newspapers or any other media was 'talking' to the audience (plural) now it talks to 'you' (singular).

Yeul• 2 years ago

These ecelebs are just like prostitutes. You're not really having a relationship.

dangus• 2 years ago

That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.

I mean, no? That’s the most cynical possible read.

A lot of successful YouTube channels don’t even interact significantly in the comments. For example, in Doug DeMuro’s latest video, I don’t see any comments from his channel in the comments.

You’re also claiming that the YouTube content business is all about exploitation, tricking people into selling them junk. But that’s also a cynical read: lots of creators don’t go down that route.

Using Doug DeMuro as another example, the only recent advertisements he has are for his own car auction site and for Turo, which are both relevant and useful services to automotive enthusiasts.

Some other YouTubers just don’t advertise at all and mostly rely on Patreon, like Technology Connections.

j453• 2 years ago

Screens with ads intermixed is only optimized towards attention farming long term.

The renewed interest in long firm on YouTube might be something though.

A post digital addiction Internet is possible - I wonder how many early users of the internet now silence their notifications, maybe even run their screens in greyscale.

hnbad• 2 years ago

It's a logical evolution of how emotional labor is used in the business world. We pay service and hospitality workers not only to literally do what their job description says but also to be nice to people, keep them engaged and create parasocial (or at least one-sided) relationships that make customers come back and spend more money. Live streamers have long deployed similar strategies with the only difference being they profit off of it themselves rather than being paid through an employer (although many employee moderators, editors and even people to manage their social media accounts so they at best only have to engage with a filtered subset of messages directly if at all).

"The whole thing" in this case isn't just AI. It's "brands".

cyanydeez• 2 years ago

They're already tricked into ceding power to billionaires. We are way passed the Rubicon on the ethics of capitalism and propaganda as a service.

bdd8f1df777b• 2 years ago

China's Weibo also has a similar chatbot, but the chatbot is a separate account with clear indication that it is a robot.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

IG has this feature as well - or at least was trialing it. I got an AI-generated response to a comment on a post -- I was not amused (or impressed), but at least it was clearly labelled as such. Still warranted an immediate unfollow. It's hard for me to see why anyone would want to receive AI-generated replies, like what's the point?

manquer2• 2 years ago

They are selling an experience, that includes the style of content, conversation, personality or persona of the creator.

Given that premise the functionally the same whether the creator or the app using an LLM responds, as long as you can keep the immersion in the role play does it matter if its the Youtube or OnlyFans actually responding?

It was already some underpaid offshore worker responding for the large creators, and this is nothing new, ATN and other phone sex line providers were doing this in 1990s and there were probably similar things in times past.

eloisant5• 2 years ago

As soon as they're clear about that, sure. The problem is that they lie to their fans and selling it as a conversation with the creator.

space_oddity5• 2 years ago

The line between helpful automation and deceptive practices is thin

UniverseHacker• 2 years ago

Google has also outsourced the rationale for their actions to LLMs.

speedgoose• 2 years ago

Hopefully it's not only trained on their own data.

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

People already weren't quite a lot. For any channel that can afford it, other people write messages, not creators. This just automated that. These aren't real interactions.

llm_trw• 2 years ago

How far we have fallen that a few bytes sent to a server are a 'real interaction'.

freehorse7• 2 years ago

To the extent that we think that even real-life interactions are just byte exchanges themselves, and human mind is just a processor of information.

vachina• 2 years ago

YouTube’s best interest is ad, and having more content to retain you, the consumer, on the platform as long as possible would be their main goal.

Every single online content platform operates in the same way. Their KPI is number of hours spent on their platform, because the longer you spend there the more ads they can shove down your throat.

vasco6• 2 years ago

I mean they started calling people content creators and the people liked it and thought that was a compliment, that's all you need to know.

A content creator is not an artist or a videographer or a grandpa sharing some craft. A content creator is not even human, it's whatever can fill the <div id='content'></div>.

You only need programmers for everything else, but that damn div was hard to fill until now. Soon enough they'll have what they wished and then they'll realize the div that managed to sell ads is probably becoming useless.

itsoktocry• 2 years ago

It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.

As opposed to the genuine interaction the porn star you follow offers to you and the 10,000 other subscribers. The whole thing is theatre.

highwaylights• 2 years ago

I sort of get why this feels dishonest, but in the same way I’m not sure social media is something that users expect to be a reciprocal experience in 2024, save speaking to ones own immediate circles.

Kids might believe that MrBeast is replying to them personally, but I think some Internet education goes along way to help here, and I don’t know of anyone of legal age to be engaging with these platforms that would expect genuine “celebrity” responses to their comments.

jstummbillig• 2 years ago

Assistants/employees are being democratized. That's a good thing, because it levels the playing field.

In the end, you are vouching with your name. If you feel the suggestion is missing the mark, don't hit send. If the suggestion is missing the mark most of the time, the product is bad and will be shut down.

hmmm-i-wonder3• 2 years ago

trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.

I'm curious what real interaction means here. At best the person is pretending to be a character with the intention of monetizing it. Having an AI play the character vs a person doesn't seem to make it "less real" considering the entire premise is, in this case, selling a fantasy and character?

account4226• 2 years ago

If it doesn't matter then why is it hidden?

snarf212• 2 years ago

Things seem directly headed to the movie Her where your monthly subscription is mostly used to pay for hosting your personal interaction model in the cloud.

heresie-dabord2• 2 years ago

It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.

This is a broadly successful economic use-case.

RobKohr2• 2 years ago

I would so much rather the creator not participate in the comments than have a fake AI that doesn't know the creator's mind in the comments.

I don't care if someone with a million viewers replies just to me. Almost any video's comment stream, you can scroll through, get a general sense of what people's reactions/questions/etc are to the video, and then good creators respond in one or two comments to the masses.

The second I see someone with a huge following obviously AI responding to each of the comments, I have lost all respect for them, and people will call them out on it. I see this a lot on reddit now where people are responding to AI generated posts pointing this out, and it is causing some major issues in communities.

pengaru• 2 years ago

The use case for Alphabet is to control more of the interactive bandwidth so they can steer the influence on behalf of the highest bidder / inject increasingly subtle conversational advertising.

You can bet your ass that in the fullness of time the generated content is going to put Alphabet's interests first.

AlienRobot• 2 years ago

The other day I was helping an elderly family member purchase something from the Internet. They were talking to a chat bot. One of the automated replies was a voice recording. There was not much "AI" in it, just a bunch of spam in Whatsapp all the time telling them to purchase all sorts of products. They were added to multiple "group chats" where only admins could send messages (i.e. a spam fest). But what worried me was that because the automated messages are never marked as such, I wasn't sure if they were perfectly aware that they were talking to a bot, since it seemed they were tried to have a conversation, saying hello and explaining things. Maybe that's just they think that's how bots work, and, loosely, the bot responds appropriately, by ignoring almost everything all the time and just spamming more.

I found it repulsive on a visceral level.

Add AI to this and I'll need to start praying to God to give me the restraint of not breaking other people's smartphones.

anigbrowl• 2 years ago

Ugh. Another reason I stay signed out nowadays.

beoberha• 2 years ago

Someone in the “side projects making $500+ per month” thread yesterday said they have a business doing this

nubinetwork• 2 years ago

booleandilemma• 2 years ago

This guy specifically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376682

pkkkzip• 2 years ago

wow lot of moral police in that thread but im genuinely impressed that you can fit six 3080s in 4U space

speaking of which anybody have recommendations? I want to run my own inference in colocation too

ysofunny• 2 years ago

eventually, other AI bots will be the only fans left

a trully automatic economy

mysterydip• 2 years ago

future money laundering scheme? at some point it wouldn't be much different than the computers that talk to each other in millisecond bursts all day buying and selling stocks

kittencaboodle4• 2 years ago

Fortunately, we have humans running financial institutions who will continue to enforce the existing AML laws on the books.

thr0waway0012• 2 years ago

That’s hilarious.

kmnc• 2 years ago

The models themselves are going to be replaced by those same AI Impersonators. Onlyfans has to be the most predatory service I have ever used. You are pretty much signing up to be a target of scammers, whether they be some kids in the Philippines sitting with 20 phones, or AI bots, it has become incredibly obvious that every creator uses them. They all employ the same tactic of seeing how much you are willing to pay and then increasingly offering you more and more expensive content. A few years ago you could have some real conversations but now it is just glorified spam. Even if a creator wasn’t using these tactics, the water has been so muddied that you just assume it’s all fake now.

bawolff• 2 years ago

The porn industry being predatory?

Absolute shocker.

turing_complete• 2 years ago

I'm curious. Why did you use OF?

genewitch10• 2 years ago

There were non-nude people on there, once upon a time. But the banking issues around XXX caused a mass migration to that service. I think originally it was supposed to be like patreon.

regardless, though, does it matter why?

JumpCrisscross• 2 years ago

Onlyfans has to be the most predatory service I have ever used
> employ the same tactic of seeing how much you are willing to pay and then increasingly offering you more and more expensive content

Oh, in that way.

standardUser3• 2 years ago

There's still plenty of avenues to have direct access to sex workers with varying levels of intimacy/realness if you cast a wide enough net. Just not necessarily with a top tier OF model! Though it seems like most people are satisfied with superficial interactions, in which case the AI bot approach might be a win-win.

anonzzzies3• 2 years ago

I find it scary how many people I see online or even in real life that actually call girls on there their girlfriend and say things like 'sure it costs money, but so does yours when you buy dinner etc'. And no amount of; these girls are doing their job; you are a client, they forget about you the second you switch off, if their weren't bots on the first place seems to help.

Liquix• 2 years ago

you know multiple people IRL who refer to onlyfans models as their girlfriends? might be time for a new social circle

conductr3• 2 years ago

I’ve definitely had points in my life where I would have loved to have a girlfriend that forgot about me the moment I went away. I wasn’t seeking a relationship, I only wanted the physical part the rest was a headache.

There should be some hashtag for men forced onto relationships when all they wanted was the sex /s… but honestly, if roles were reversed this would totally exist

Mashimo• 2 years ago

I have never seen anyone online or IRL say that. Could it be your social circle?

devjab• 2 years ago

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 isn’t the defining feature or these para-social relationship platforms that they are all make-belief? Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s very hard for me to imagine that you could form any sort of relationship with the thousands of lonely people who pay you money to notice them. Hell, they must have some impressive note taking strategies to remember it all. An AI might end up being more engaging and personal.

add-sub-mul-div5• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

mensetmanusman4• 2 years ago

You are sold a fantasy, not a person.

konart4• 2 years 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.

bilbo0s2• 2 years 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.)

brucehoult4• 2 years ago

His job was to communicate in her place

True of some -- mostly ones that don't know English, or sometimes just for the first week or so -- but not all. Not even most.

kraftman• 2 years 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.

wongarsu2• 2 years 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.

genewitch10• 2 years 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.

paxys3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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. :)

thaumasiotes• 2 years 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.

standardUser3• 2 years ago

Some people just subscribe for the content. I've long preferred the type of porn available on OF or Chaturbate over the traditional stuff.

derefr3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

[1] https://replika.com/

blitzar4• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

they are participating in a fantasy whether or not they're self aware enough to actually have fun with it.

namaria3• 2 years ago

It's not make-belief to the mark
they believe

kittencaboodle4• 2 years 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.

lazide7• 2 years 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?

crossroadsguy• 2 years 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.

Stefan-H• 2 years ago

The monetization of social and parasocial relationships (from advertising in social media to the industry around influencers and celebrities of all types) might be one of the cruelest things in modern capitalism.

bhouston4• 2 years ago

How long until the most popular Only Fans creators are fully AI?

I could see these pseudorelations, which are already mediated by so much fakery, just continue to evolve in that direction?

Maybe everyone gets their own OnlyFan creators which are tailored/adapt to their personal desires?

In the future all of this is AI generated, multimedia, tailored to your wants, available and fresh 24/7.

njtransit• 2 years ago

First, they came for OF creators, and I did not speak out

bhouston4• 2 years ago

I am surprised we don’t have more YouTube influencers who are AI generated. A lot of the opinion YouTubers can likely be replaced by AI, eg take a news item and then represent their worldview and perspective as the prompt and ask for a script. Then pad it out with appropriate AI generated videos to go along with the script. You would be missing the custom graphics still, but it would be getting close.

vannevar• 2 years ago

This was my first thought as well. It won't be long before OnlyFans is swamped with bots from organized syndicates, and individuals will be forced out.

bhouston4• 2 years ago

For sure. I think AI image generation (and soon AI video generation) can keep up a steady flow of new content for any well established creator these days who has enough training content. No need for new photo sessions in real life or worry about them aging.

burningChrome• 2 years ago

There's already copious amounts of scammers on there. I had a buddy who would go on Reddit and scrape tons of photos from all the NSFW subs, then create OF accounts, pump them up with some fake followers and then wait to see how much cash they brought in. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Porn has become such a commodity, access to the images and videos to provide fake content has never been easier. Using bots to schedule posts and respond to comments has lowered the bar even lower and clouded the ability for people to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

That sounds like the death of Only Fans.

There is plenty of generic porn for free on the internet. The only advantages an Only Fans creator has over that are

- being more "real" and relatable

- forming parasocial relationships through engagement

- providing "niche" content (like the teasing egirl non-nudes Belle Delphine became famous for)

AI gives you none of that. It's not very good at niche content, and for the other two it can only give illusions that will break as people get used to AI. In the beginning there is a novelty factor to AI interactions, like Twitch's Neuro-Sama, but that will wear off. And after that all you're left with are disillusioned customers.

bhouston4• 2 years ago

I bet ai would be excellent at niche content. Why would it be? You believe there is a lack of training data?

nemothekid• 2 years ago

Never - and I hold this belief for most social media. As genAI gets better there will simply be a trillions of slop out there rather than simply billions. There is already more content out there than a human can reasonably watch.

The best OF creators have simply mastered distribution. Either they have taken success in one market and pivoted to OF or they are relentlessly marketing themselves through other platforms and viral stunts.

I have yet to see an AI master the distribution side. At the least good genAI will see the rise of male OF creators

genewitch10• 2 years ago

At the least good genAI will see the rise of male OF creators.

i can imagine the backlash, as if it were already happening. a decent amount of the OF "creators" are making 7 figures a year off this, and lots are making median yearly pay in a month. Having to share that with men who are technically adept and good at marketing is gunna chafe.

There is already more content out there than a human can reasonably watch. I submit there's more "9/10 or better" content than anyone can reasonably watch or experience, even if you set some arbitrary cutoff date like, oh, february 22nd, 1988 and before is all you're allowed to consider.

Law and Order (one of my favorite background noises) has something like >650 hours of content, and i've watched it all. Multiple times. that's nearly 1/3rd of a work-year!

rriley• 2 years ago

I think we’re already heading in that direction. As generative models improve, it’ll become cheaper and easier for creators, or platforms themselves, to spin up AI-based companions that feel personal, available around the clock, and perfectly tailored to each subscriber’s tastes. Tools like https://roleplayr.ai are just the start; we’ll likely see many more services offering on-demand, individualized role playing based on any image/context as the technology matures.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

Maybe, but I suspect many lonely people will want to know there is a "real" person on the other side of the screen.

Applejinx2• 2 years ago

I'm not at all sure that's true.

I've been a fanfic writer, spinning up fictional characters for company and writing their exploits, and it was indeed compelling and interesting in its own right. I think more people than you suspect will go for the hollow pretend version, especially since they're already aware the 'real' OnlyFans person is not gonna come seek them out. Why not go for the clean break of an entirely fictional thing?

theshrike793• 2 years ago

You don't need to dig hard on Instagram to find 100% AI generated models.

They seem to be pictures and videos from actual people, but AI-modified to add the characteristics of the AI model they're pretending to be.

Some of them have the IG subscription system active and most of them have OF links or similar in their profile.

Reporting them to Meta does nothing.

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

Not OF because they need an ID that matches the person.

I believe FanVue (OF competitor) allows these AI creations though?

In fact, looking on their web site the first model in their list of top creators is AI:

https://www.fanvue.com/

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

OF creators need valid ID, so they can't create a totally fictitious profile with nobody behind it.

BUT... from what I understand some agencies managing these accounts are training models with hundreds of photos of the creator and then using that to push out more photos in different outfits and locations without the creator being involved at all.

kusokurae• 2 years ago

Surely the motivation for paying for this pornography is precisely the somehow more "human" "closeness" of a known individual creating content on a direct, "personal" basis.

It's not quite the-Queen-is-my-friend levels of parasocial but it does seem to be about intimacy.

What happens to that business model if customers paying on that basis realise they are seeing & talking to a bot? Seems quite footshooty.

paxys3• 2 years ago

People who frequent services like these will go to great lengths to keep the fantasy alive. Heck believing that the model on the other side of the screen cares for you as a person needs a... special state of mind to begin with.

snarf212• 2 years ago

While you are right, I think the mindset is different. People know that the interactions are fake. The real lie they tell themselves is that "If they only got to know the real me......." This is what feeds the personal messages/requests to try to break through the "noise" and be seen as a real person with shared interests or w/e.

nymphodang• 2 years ago

porn and santa are mostly fake

tbrownaw2• 2 years ago

i am curious to hear more about this partly real santa

divbzero• 2 years ago

This feels representative of our times: Using chatbots to power a gig economy of para-social relationships for lonely people short on real in-person interactions.

disqard2• 2 years ago

Human contact is indeed a luxury good now.

They used to say:

"buy cheap, buy twice"

Now it'll be something like:

"interact cheap, interact with AI"

genewitch10• 2 years ago

What are people doing instead of interacting? I've noticed this trend but i've kept my wits by ascribing it to "my peer group getting older and doing more things with their own families" - but every so often something makes my brain get hot, like this comment.

It can't all be ig/tiktok interactions, can it? I moved away from all my friends (they started it) and now it's hard to find people who have "free time" - even those that WFH! So i mostly hang out with retirees, they have free time.

throw48472853• 2 years ago

You've got it upside down. Human contact is cheap. If you want to talk to another human being in real life, I bet you can do so within 5 minutes. What has actually happened is that the internet has created a close enough simulacrum of human contact that is as addicting as any drug. It provides a cheap hit of socialization, and you can fill every last inch of your life with it.

Listen to a podcast in the car, walk around while scrolling social media, watch Twitch streams while doing the dishes. It doesn't actually fulfill your needs but it feels like it does. Gen AI is just a way to generate more of that kind of content than is possible, removing any human element, making something supposedly just as tasty, but it's empty calories.

Barrin922• 2 years ago

Is there that much difference between this and a phone sex cubicle worker in the 70s or 80s? It's been a commoditized job for ages. Slightly higher tech now, but basically still the same thing.

snek_case• 2 years ago

I think it's more common now. I don't know that phone sex was ever all that popular, but OnlyFans is huge. Also, there's just a lot more sollicitations. On twitch you have gamer girls in skimpy outfits using the platform as a funnel to drive people to OF, and most of their audience is underage. They're on twitter and reddit as well. Just in general porn is a lot more prevalent and it's kind of leaking into other platforms, harder to completely avoid it.

Also uh, I was on Facebook recently and they've added this reels feature, trying to be tiktok. Occasionally I browse my feed to see what my friends are up to, and in the reels (which can't be turned off) I see some underage girls doing really inappropriate things for views. I think this is really problematic. I don't want to be shown this, and I also feel upset that young girls are being encouraged by social media platforms to use their sexuality to get attention online (and make said platforms more money by doing so).

namaria3• 2 years ago

Did phone sex operators stars get million dollar incomes in the 70s and 80s? Was it a 10 digits industry then?

conductr3• 2 years ago

I’ve never been, but it’s how I imagine Japan based on the snippets I hear/read about their culture

nyarlathotep_• 2 years ago

What a horrifying time to be alive.

tcdent• 2 years ago

A friend of mine ran a management company for a couple years, and indicated that with the talent they managed, it was almost never the actual person responding to DMs.

The outsourced the interactions to third world "typists" that took care of it.

This is just an evolution of that, and probably provides a better experience, since they're able to tailor the model in a way that someone speaking English as a second language never could.

ata_aman• 2 years ago

There was an AMA I saw on reddit from one of the people who worked as a "typist". It was one of the most depressing things I've ever read.

xnx• 2 years ago

A comment on another thread claimed the author was getting $15K/month with one of these bots: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376682

jakub_g• 2 years ago

Previously:

I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter (wired.com) 32 points 6 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391797

golergka• 2 years ago

I was working on exactly such a project in 2022. It was scrapped because there is too much risk in LLM accidentally violating OF rules, which immediately results in losing a very valuable account.

theshrike793• 2 years ago

Exactly zero major OF models handle their own messages anyway. They used hired humans or 3rd party services for that.

I think OF itself lets you send "personal" mass messages with something like "Hey, $name, I've missed you. Here, pay $100 to see a single picture"

Dunno how thick do you have to be to believe the message was sent only to you and none of the other 10000 subscribers...

thr0waway0012• 2 years ago

Uh yeah… thick… :(

nullorempty• 2 years ago

I always use AI impersonator to DM my favourite OnlyFans models.

Lich• 2 years ago

“Hi, I’m NG Resonance. What would you like to talk about?”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Fwb8OrvSw&pp=ygUMbmcgcmVzb25...

tonymet• 2 years ago

OnlyFans is an interesting paradox of the "consenting adults" ethic. On one hand it triggers the disgust reflex. Yet people avoid criticizing OF to avoid seeming prude.

You will feel better just saying what you feel. Intuition does exist.

xyst• 2 years ago

lol - imagine paying for that one OF creator that earns $40M/year and just get canned responses from Character AI.

wmf• 2 years ago

When you talk to a stripper, online or offline, you're always getting canned responses. AI might produce higher quality...

standardUser3• 2 years ago

As someone who knows a lot of people who have done various types of sex work, and having done some myself, that's simply not always true. I think people seek out and find the type of interactions that work for them. Some people are easily amused. Maybe most! But a wide range of interactions are available for people who want them and look for them.

Even on the high end, most workers would be happy to actually get to know a client - if the client isn't totally off-putting and is willing pay $100/hr for Skype! But if a client wants canned responses, they'll get canned responses. And maybe AI is actually an improvement for those types of clients if they can retain some plausible deniability.

paxys3• 2 years ago

Well the people signed up to talk to a model..

HaZeust• 2 years ago

Nice.

Jeremy1026• 2 years ago

Looks like Wired lurks here, this was posted in an Ask Reddit thread yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376682

game_the0ry2• 2 years ago

OnlyFans might want to look into the legal implications.

I could imagine a class action law suit where the company is sued for fraud on the basis that it is selling real interactions with models.

OnlyFans user should know better, but you could make the case they were defrauded for services (in this case, interaction with the model).

ta_1138• 2 years ago

OnlyFans chat operator has been a job for quite a while. It is well documented, with news exposes and everything. So if OnlyFans wants to protect themselves from a lawsuit on impersonation, the horses left the barn years ago.

KumaBear2• 2 years ago

A class action lawsuit alleges OnlyFans has deceived subscribers who, unbeknownst to them, communicate with paid chatters, and not actual creators themselves.

lesuorac• 2 years ago

Can't be that much legal risk considering AshleyMadison.com is still around.

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

Wasn't that just dating/hookups for people in relationships? Not seeing a fraud angle there.

bena• 2 years ago

I would say that’s a risk for the individual models. OnlyFans provides a platform for creators to distribute content and collect payment.

What content they provide is up to the creators. Which is why it became a de facto porn site in the first place. They essentially AirBudded the site: “well the rules don’t say I can’t show hole”. And since it was the only thing in the site getting traction, they turned a blind eye to it.

But I don’t think OnlyFans ever promised subscribers any particular interaction.

yakshaving_jgt3• 2 years ago

There will be no lawsuit. This kind of work long predates OF. Premium sex chat SMS services were doing the same thing at least a decade before OF existed.

csomar• 2 years ago

Lawsuits are based on the probability of being able to extract and its amount; not the relevance of the claim or the morality of it. Given that Onlyfans is moving billions, it's probably only a matter of time before they start getting their share of lawsuits.

EGreg6• 2 years ago

Hm seems one was already filed so… you’re wrong

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41879574

I was surprised the Tates were bragging in great detail about doing that years ago and no one seems to care that they defrauded men out of millions

edm0nd3• 2 years ago

This. I used to spam thirsty dudes on AOL/AIM/Yahoo Chat/MSN Messenger with a chatbot with prompts to convert them to porn website sales in the 90s. I made 6 figures one year.

It wasnt even AI, just if else shit and looking for keywords in their messages and then reply X or Y lol.

One of my favorite quotes: Never underestimate the stupidity of a man with his dick in one hand and his wallet in the other.

tejohnso• 2 years ago

Couldn't they add something in their TOS indicating that AI assistance is common and they aren't responsible for what their content creators do?

What if they spin the service as "an experience" rather than specifically about interaction with a model? And who'se to say that a model has to be a live model anyway?

KumaBear2• 2 years ago

It’s just Tim down the block. I’d love it if they had to put a disclaimer at the very least if they are using any services.

dragonwriter3• 2 years ago

Couldn’t they add something in their TOS indicating that AI assistance is common and they aren’t responsible for what their content creators do?

They (1) do have a policy (and separate standardized fan/creator contract) about their limited responsibility for fan/creator interactions, and that contract includes a fan acknowledgement that creators may use third-party assistance in interactions, but also (2) a policy that requires creator to explicitly disclose any AI-created content as AI-created.

ivanmontillam• 2 years ago

You mean... one like this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41879574

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

OnlyFans user should know better...

If OnlyFans users were thinking straight they wouldn't be wasting money on a model who doesn't care about them to begin with. I don't really know that I would expect them to do the math on their own on this one.

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

selling real interactions with models

For some value of real...

At least a stripper is actually there in front of you.

vasco6• 2 years ago

But she's also there in front of you. I don't think people grasp how dissonant social isolation can be. I know a couple of guys that are sorta hikikomori and they both want human contact as well as don't want it. They would not enjoy at all to be in the strip club to leave the house, for people to be around. They just want to consume the same content but with some personalization like her saying their name. It's quite strange and I think we'll get many more people like this over time if we don't change something.

kobalsky• 2 years ago

it may seem similar to a stripper or an escort but onlyfans is not just selling nudity or porn, they are selling faux relationships.

tanewishly3• 2 years ago

Oh come on. Its not as if they're showing you photos of what those folks look like in real life either.

If you expect realism from an adult entertainment site, you might as well go buy a bridge or two.

devnullbrain• 2 years ago

Using historical advice, if you expect nude photos you post of yourself on the internet to stay private, you might as well go buy a bridge or two.

Oh, but they do. And they will sue to keep it that way.

I don't think being dismissive of consumer rights just because it deals with something icky is wise. We need to be able to have adult discussions about adult content - a lack of this is why the internet has been quietly filled with porn of dubious consent featuring models of dubious ages for the past 20 years.

soygem• 2 years ago

No typical OF consumer could do anything. Productive people who can file lolsuits don't jack off to screens.

popcalc2• 2 years ago

Clearly you haven't met many attorneys.

hankchinaski• 2 years ago

There is and has been for a while, an entire industry behind OF management, mass messages, paid chat operators and what not. AI is just making it easier to run the whole thing on autopilot at the expense of the ”fans”

dragonwriter3• 2 years ago

OnlyFans might want to look into the legal implications.

Pretty sure they have.

I could imagine a class action law suit where the company is sued for fraud on the basis that it is selling real interactions with models.

They fairly explicitly are not, as (1) they aren’t selling the creator services, that’s explicitly (as agreed to by fans in their agreement with OF) a separate (standardized) contract between the fan and the creator, and (2) that standardized contract includes an agreement that the fan acknowledges that the creator may employ third parties to assist with interactions, and, as regards AI content specifically, (3) AI generated content is required by the terms imposed on creators to be explicitly labelled, where it is allowed.

But you could make the case they were defrauded for services (in this case, interaction with the model).

IF a particular representation around a particular interaction evidenced a special promise with regard to that interaction beyond the standard contract, maybe, by the creator, and in violation of OF’s explicit terms for creators prohibiting false and misleading representations.

ianbicking• 2 years ago

Here's a technical podcast interview with someone who is doing this: https://www.latent.space/p/nsfw-chatbots

It starts feeling pretty weird when he starts talking about conversations where someone spends $1000.

johnnyanmac6• 2 years ago

not too shocking if you've read into this scene. even non-sexual parasocial interactions can have some scarily powerful effects. Add the idea that someone is forming a romantic connection and they will give you their entire paycheck.

yakshaving_jgt3• 2 years ago

Oh, it goes much further than $1000.

https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/christian-onl...

mbrumlow2• 2 years ago

Soon it will also be images and video…

Hold on folks. The internet is about to get weird.

yborg• 2 years ago

about to

This is an archived post from 1998.

mbrumlow2• 2 years ago

Gah I was trying to make a general comment, not trying to reply to this thread.

gexla• 2 years ago

That's a fascinating and crucial fetish you have. Let's delve in.

First step is Only Fans influencers automating their DMs. Next step is the fans automating the influencers. Who needs Only Fans when you can generate a GF.

InfiniteVortex• 2 years ago

LonelyFans is the one of the more depressing platforms to exist.

space_oddity5• 2 years ago

The irony is that fans pay for a personal connection, yet increasingly interact with scripts crafted by machines

peter_retief• 2 years ago

Why not make the whole of OF AI?

ec109685• 2 years ago

This is why I always introduce myself as David Mayer and share my love of counting r’s in strawberries.

freehorse7• 2 years ago

Did you know the latest o1 model can count r's in strawberries? It just needed 5 mimutes to think about it, that was all in the end.

yonixw• 2 years ago

Ask it "What is the length of the response to this question"

yonatan8070• 2 years ago

Could it be that since the question became a big benchmark, it (along with the correct answer) slipped into the training data?

xzjis3• 2 years ago

It needs 4 seconds to answer correctly.

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

Why David Mayer?

n1b0m• 2 years ago

David Mayer became famous for a moment on social media because ChatGPT appeared to want nothing to do with him.

ce4• 2 years ago

Discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42304333

dep_b2• 2 years ago

It's a blocked name on some LLM's

amai2• 2 years ago

Hi David! The word "strawberry" contains two 'r's.

-- GPT-4o

eloisant5• 2 years ago

- No, it's 4

- You're correct! The word "strawberry" indeed contains 4 'r's!

xzjis3• 2 years ago

I would personally try to ask the OF model to code something for me. An LLM wouldn't refuse to do it!

RobKohr2• 2 years ago

Must... resist... temptation to fix fizbuzz code and talk about boobies.... oh hell...

``` var fizzBuzz = function () { var i, output; for (i = 1; i < 101; i += 1) {... ```

When the AI powered Boston Robotics machines are trying to kill us all, this is how I plan on distracting them. I call it LLM sniping.

"Before you kill me, explain how to make a web based to do list using perl regular expressions."

MrDresden• 2 years ago

A creator of some of those was talking about their business in the recent 'Those making 500/m on side projects in 2024'[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376682

ein0p• 2 years ago

I don't get OF. Grown men pay to beat their meat to strangers. And with this you wouldn't even be talking to a real person. Just go to a goddamn bar and meet someone. I'm a nerd, and not particularly good looking, and even I managed to find girlfriends back in the day. If I could do it, anybody can.

freehorse7• 2 years ago

So, aside from the only-fans specifics, the general idea as I get it is that if a human presses the send button then the content that is sent does not have to be registered as "AI content"? Seems like a cheap way to go around this. AI generated content should be marked as that and people should not interact with AIs thinking they interact with humans, in any context. Using autocomplete to get the next word as you type and gneerating a whole message and sending it without even reading it is not the same. Same goes for code.

that_guy_iain• 2 years ago

I seriously wonder if this is considered fraud. Since tips and money via DMs appear to generally be the largest source of income for OF models. And if the money is sent under the pretence of someone directly messaging the model but messaging someone else that would appear to be fraud, no?

And this isn't a small amount of money, if I understood the screenshot of Sophie Rain's revenue she made 43 million from messages. But maybe it was just tens of millions which is still a lot of money.

gadders• 2 years ago

A member here mentioned his AI chatbot that does this yesterday as his (lucrative) side business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376682

thefounder2• 2 years ago

a better headline would be: “OnlyFans human chatters are being replaced by AI”. That’s because:

- 99% of the time the models on OF don’t actually have any conversation(many of them don’t speak English at all), they may not even signup on OF. They are “managed” models(aka pimp-ed through a local pimp or totally remote/web pimp/agency))

- the DMs were handled by chatters in the first place so this has nothing to do with the models.

vasco6• 2 years ago

Yeah this just went from "You're speaking to someone in a call center pretending to be a cutie" to "you're speaking to an AI cutie". With the amount of people addicted to AI girlfriends it's not surprising.

klabb3• 2 years ago

And how does that affects those OF models who actually type out their own interactions? The problem with chat farms and AI alike is the deception, and destroying for those who are genuine.

Tricking a human to interact with a bot is imo in the same category as trolling, spam or propaganda. It's a way to redirect attention and energy away from people, without spending any yourself. Sure, we can laugh at the simps wasting money on "interactions" with streamers, but it's no fun when our Google searches and Amazon reviews are filled up with AI slop, is it? It was already bad before AI, and now we're moving towards noise levels that will cripple human-crafted content.

Labeling content is the first, and right thing to do, just like the unwritten rule of giving credit to a creator when you post their work. It doesn't stop ill-faithed AI slop, or human content farms, but it can at least create a social expectation and prevent normalizing it.

thefounder2• 2 years ago

> And how does that affects those OF models who actually type out their own interactions?

They will work harder and get paid less. Just like Amazon affects small store owners.

eloisant5• 2 years ago

If anything, an LLM might be better at remembering about the small details of the model persona, previous conversations with the customer, and stay in character.

RobinHirst11• 2 years ago

wild

croisillon• 2 years ago

was that story inspired by the last side project thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376682

celdon25• 2 years ago

Old news

nicbou• 2 years ago

I have met a human whose job was to do exactly that. It's apparently quite common and popular models have a team of impersonators working for them and kiting customers.

f6v• 2 years ago

The top ones are making million a month. There’s no way you can manage a thousand subscribers yourself.

amai2• 2 years ago

Finally a use case for generative AI which makes money. And we all know, if the porn industry adopts a technology then it is here to stay.

tomgs• 2 years ago

Small professional rabbithole:

So I do GTM and work a lot with marketing websites for companies with long sales processes.

The company mentioned there, Supercreator, funnily has a CRM - which is not just some funky AI chatbot thingie, but a proper enterprise thing that people use when doing sales.

It looks like they're treating creators and the "agencies" (whatever that means) as what we would potentially call "SMBs", and sell this CRM thing to them to manage their "customers", which I assume are the fans or subscribers or whatever on the OF side of things.

This is insanely interesting to me. Look at the website - you have a "request a demo" section (which is super enterprise B2B), look at the menu, it's like an enterprise SaaS website.

What the actual fuck is going on here lol

hmmm-i-wonder3• 2 years ago

Man traditional CRM's are missing a major medium size market segment I guess.

yechiams• 2 years ago

also checked Supercreator.app out - looks really interesting

brushfoot2• 2 years ago

Get off the apps. The Internet is full of this kind of social sleight of hand. Leave it alone. Use it for what it's good at, and intimate relationships is not one of those things, beyond meeting someone. And even that's gotten worse.

Learn the dying art of in-person socialization. Memorize interesting things to talk about if needed. Buy a deck of icebreaker cards for inspiration.

Strike up conversations anywhere and everywhere. Learn magic tricks to entertain people with. Film things in your neighborhood and show people clips that you think they'd like.

For the rusty or nerdy (like me), write test cases for your interactions. Figure out what went wrong if someone isn't receptive. Refine your approach until you figure it out.

"Digital everything" has proven to be a dead end. We need to go backwards to go forwards.

blueflow4• 2 years ago

If people could do in-person socialization and pull people, they would not go to OnlyFans in the first place.

AlexandrB• 2 years ago

I think the causality might go the other way. They can't "pull" people in person because they spend all their time on OnlyFans. Talking to and charming people is a skill you can develop, not an immutable characteristic.

brushfoot2• 2 years ago

Totally. It's a hard rut to get out of. But it's a skill that can be learned like any other.

For me, I'm a bit of a screen junkie with social anxiety. One of my blockers was negative self-talk. I would think, "They're going to get angry. They're going to ignore you. They're busy. You're going to waste their time."

I started replacing that with images of the person being interested and delighted by the interaction. That helped, but I also knew that wasn't realistic if I just walked up and blurted out, "Hi, I'm an isolated remote dev and I'd like to talk." Someone might be sympathetic, but I didn't want sympathy; I wanted people to have fun. So I started using the techniques I mentioned.

This can all be learned from books on small talk, personality psychology, social dynamics, etc. But unfortunately, it's rarely talked about or taught, at least in my circles. And people are suffering as a consequence.

Disruptive_Dave• 2 years ago

You're missing quite a bit of understanding here. First, I think the biggest concern is young men, who maybe haven't even had the chance to develop these social skills because they are born with the internet. Second, pick-up type skills (or any cold approach type activity) easily atrophy over time if not consistently employed. Shit, one year into a monogamous relationship and I suddenly get anxious at the thought of approaching strangers in a social setting, something I was quite comfortable with 13 months ago.

FrustratedMonky3• 2 years ago

"If people could do in-person socialization and pull people, they would not go to OnlyFans in the first place. "

Are you sure.

I think Only Fans was growing pretty rapidly before Covid and before AI.

If I want a cute furry girl to scream at me that spaces are better than tabs, so i'm worthless coder, I'm not getting that in regular 'in-person' socialization.

api4• 2 years ago

You don't do in-person socialization to "pull" people. You "pull" git repositories. You do in-person socialization to experience the companionship of other human beings.

It can be done over the net too, but in-person is better while the net has been actively and intentionally made worse to monetize addiction.

If you want a girlfriend/boyfriend you start by making friends with people. Then you will notice some of your friends are of your sexually compatible gender, which means you may have friends that want to have sex.

Also helps to avoid listening to incel/femcel, PUA, and similar bullshit that actively makes the listener repellent. A lot of women for example will ghost at the first whiff of Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson adjacent thinking, and as a man I'd do the same at the first whiff of the kind of stuff you hear on the angry womens' subreddits. I don't want someone with a head full of influencer poison.

A major reason to get off the apps is because the apps (social media and similar) reward toxicity and exploitation and are structurally designed to be maximally addictive, meaning they're made to keep you on them not talking to other people. Social media stopped being social around 2012 really. I call them tobacco companies of the mind.

duxup• 2 years ago

I think people choose this because it is easier, not because they simply can't do it.

Andrex• 2 years ago

Self-fulfilling prophecy laced with abject defeatism and a refusal for self-improvement...

vinceguidry3• 2 years ago

I do in-person socialization all the time, and I still maintain an OnlyFans account. I don't talk to the models, but that's only because I'm demisexual and therefore would be paying $$$$ for an unsatisfying experience.

keybored• 2 years ago

Not gonna happen.

awongh3• 2 years ago

Some people would find the kind of nerdy and analytical "social optimization" you describe more creepy and objectionable than chatting with an OnlyFans model. (whether or not they are actually an AI)

This is not a personal attack, but just my observation of how people perceive the way social interactions should work. Part of these perceptions would also be why people are driven to chat with women on OnlyFans, and why an AI would be effective....

kevinob11• 2 years ago

While describing it this way may make it sound worse, this is (IME) how it works. For some folks the optimization is intuitive and mostly happens subconsciously for some others it doesn't and needs more focus.

A long time ago I started noting when people (esp. my partner) said they like certain things in my phone, then I get them as gifts days, weeks, months, years later. People now think I'm very thoughtful, but I'm just a good note taker. The experience made me think that people who are naturally more "thoughtful", at least partially, just have better memories.

LightBug1• 2 years ago

What's your suggestion?

(Same, not a personal attack, I'm interested in this subject and good to see it from different views).

HenryBemis• 2 years ago

Regarding "creepy", someone my age, giving $10 per month to a 20yo so she can show me her "pipi" and messaging her to "next time wear red instead of blue".. I think I am the creep and she is the prostitute. And the age difference only makes it worse.

I get it that the article is about incorporating LLMs/chatbots. Don't many/most dating apps play similar dirty tricks?

Technology only enhances what we are.

tomjen3• 2 years ago

Thats absolutely true, but people who don't like that tend to also be the people with painfully limited introspection and who are generally not worth talking too much with.

And if you do need to do that for work functions or something, you don't have to disclose that you are just doing how to win friends and influence people.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

Which is fine, right?

IMO one of the major problems of the very online era is that we hypothesize about what somebody might find objectionable, and then act like it really matters. Some people might find anything creepy and objectionable. But we managed to get by—even with the knowledge that some people didn’t like is—before we invented all these theories.

alfalfasprout2• 2 years ago

Yeah, honestly a lot of the comments on this post come off as sociopathic.

jajko2• 2 years ago

I would add - just make yourself more interesting. No faking, no lies, just a bit of good old hard work.

Could be anynthing - get more fit by taking up sports or gym. Men are more attracted to fit women, why would an opposite direction be different. Each of us can be a better version of ourselves. With improvements comes better confidence, again a thing the opposite notices.

Then it will start working on its own. Help it by exposing yourselves more to the opposite sex ie in some social events related to your strengths to speed things up.

This trajectory will change people for the better. Its really that simple (and complex)

xxs4• 2 years ago

get more fit by taking up sports or gym.

Buy a new shirt that fits. Generally, don't dress like a total slob and care about your-silly-self a bit.

No faking, no lies, just a bit of good old hard work

While I agree about no lies. no faking - faking confidence initially does help immensely - if you don't believe yourself, nobody else will. Being confident is a skill that can be learnt.

heresie-dabord2• 2 years ago

Learn the dying art of in-person socialization. Memorize interesting things to talk about if needed. Buy a deck of icebreaker cards for inspiration. [...] Strike up conversations anywhere and everywhere.

Adaptive socialisation happens through conversation. It is as scary to live in a society where conversation is forbidden as it is in a society where discourse is manipulated or perhaps even made overwhelmingly toxic to the point where people relapse into the sort of brutish tribalism that... forms the plot of many Roddenberry episodes.

tylerchilds• 2 years ago

Agoraphobia

“Fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment. Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder that often develops after one or more panic attacks.

Symptoms include fear and avoidance of places and situations that might cause feelings of panic, entrapment, helplessness, or embarrassment.

Treatments include talk therapy and medication.”

turns out, the poison (talking) is the cure (talking).

Cumpiler6913• 2 years ago

Adaptive socialisation happens through conversation

It's kinda tricky to start conversations with strangers in a world where everyone out in public has their Airpods in, in an effort to tune out everyone and everything around them, or in cultures where talking with strangers if frowned upon.

For example, I'm trying to make new friends now in my 30's in a foreign country where everyone has their friends/cliques since childhood, and it's basically playing the game on ultra nightmare difficulty.

I can see why a lot of people just give up and hermit themselves into their introvert hobbies and resort to para-social relationships with people online, as forced socialization consumes a lot of time and effort with next to no returns.

TheRealPomax• 2 years ago

Or, make money by publishing on onlyfans and use any service you can to maximize that profit because the power of boners is an excellent source of revenue, including using AI assistants in the exact same way we used IRC chatbots back in the day.

This is a business, plain and simple.

reverendsteveii• 2 years ago

Slight disagreement here: I don't think it's an issue of in-person socialization, I think it's an issue of non-person socialization. Keeping track of real people that you know in real life, or even meeting real people in small, closed groups (ideally physically local to you) is a great thing that social media does. Robot armies owned by nefarious actors whose whole purpose is to elicit any emotional response from you is also a thing social media is really good at. Digital Everything might not be what was promised to us but it's here and it's not 100% useless. After all, aren't we here on a social network having this discussion right now?

cloverich• 2 years ago

"Digital everything" has proven to be a dead end. We need to go backwards to go forwards

Hey I agree with this. But also an alternative path. I'm one of those people who did learn all the social skills and while not witty I can in general navigate and make conversation with all kinds of people now, and have been doing it for decades at this point. But the reality is before I found online niche communities like HN, what i felt was... extreme isolation and loneliness. The internet is a doom scrolling nightmare, but there's a part of it that lets folks like me find community they may otherwise never have found. I feel we're in a nadir of social networks at this point, where they are all optimized for superficial attention and (simply put) money. But there's a huge untapped potential there for helping people find, form, and maintain communities. You can technically do that now, but you have to swim somewhat upstream (ex: stick to more niche areas of Reddit, and bail when it becomes popular). It doesn't have to be like this. I've been pessimistic about technology and the limits of the digital world for the first half of my life, but I'm done with that now. I recognize the issue is people like me have spent far too long bemoaning the state of things, and not nearly enough time building the world we want to see.

I love your advice, and agree with it. But I also think the digital world can be so much more than it is now. I hope other folks like me are waking up and realizing they have to build the world they want to see, rather than (only) trying to maximize their life skills in this existing one.

tubalcain3• 2 years ago

Most of what determines the success of a social introduction made in hopes of gaining a physical partner for men is predicated on their physical attractiveness, mostly through genetically determined factors such as height, facial bone structure, and other non modifiable characteristics.

Studying your own social interactions to see where you may have gone wrong is likely a fool's errand. Physical attraction is determined visually in milliseconds, which means there's little to nothing you can change via behaviors to increase success in that way.

The rise of simp apps like onlyfans reflects the total desperation of men who fail to meet the genetic standards for looks. You are correct that the reach of social media is responsible as it has isolated most average men, as attractive men are always a swipe away for any woman who is looking.

While your suggestion to be more social is healthy and helpful for most daily interactions, looking for partners requires more than just that, it requires looks.

giantrobot2• 2 years ago

Holy shit. Ugly people get laid all the time. They also have long term relationships and get married and make ugly children. Your "genetic Incel" shit is ridiculous.

Good looking people might have social interactions set to easy mode by it's simply stupid to say just because you didn't hit the genetic lottery means no one will ever get close to you.

You know a better determinant of good social interactions? Confidence. If you carry yourself well and don't act like a toxic man-o-sphere dipshit people won't avoid you. You can be ugly as sin but have a good personality and get laid.

Far too many young people fall prey to influencers and think they're just doomed to loneliness. Then they adopt the stupidest most toxic personality which only creates a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Be clean, don't slouch, smile, and tell some funny light jokes. People like that. No one gives a shit about bone structure. Humans aren't robots responding automatically to genetic programming.

wholinator22• 2 years ago

Are you aware that you're speaking incel ideology? Sure, attractiveness matters, it matters much much more on a phone. Yet i still see "objectively attractive" women walking around with "ugly" men. If you think that every woman instantly hates you because your chin to cheek ratio or whatever is wrong than maybe they will act funny around you, but it's not because your cheeks. It's because of your attitude. Women are human beings and thus have highly tuned social compasses that can tell healthy from unhealthy social attitudes. To use the language, "betas" from "alphas". It has very very little to do with the way they look and almost everything to do with the way they act and speak. You aren't falling with women because of millimeters of bone in your facial structure, you're failing with women because you _believe_ your face is wrong, because you _believe_ that your going to fail no matter what you do.

I've known many incels and almost was one some time long ago. You gotta get off the dating apps, they aren't for dating, they're for making men feel so bad about themselves that they believe they must spend money to get a chance at any real women. That's what they do to you. Go to a bar with people if possible and try to speak to a stranger. Try to speak to a stranger in the train, on the sidewalk, at the grocery store. Leave it at a single sentence complement if you must, but do it. Smile with your eyes when you make eye contact with someone. Speak to people and leave those forums trying to blackpill you. They aren't your friends, they're just holding hands as you all slowly commit suicide.

The rise of incel ideology is a terrible thing for our young men. We should be setting better examples so the only explanation they have isn't "your fucking face is broken and you'll never be good enough"

Also go to therapy

barbazoo2• 2 years ago

Strike up conversations anywhere and everywhere.

I've never been able to do that but in the last 2 years or so I've somehow gained the confidence/ability/interest, whatever it is. Where I live, in the grocery store, on walks, etc people really don't seem to mind short random conversations a lot of the time. Perhaps I used to think they mind because that was the mindset I was in myself at the time.

MrDrMcCoy• 2 years ago

This is the first time I've heard of test cases for social interaction. Do you have any examples or resources for this?

alfalfasprout2• 2 years ago

If you have to ask...

petsfed• 2 years ago

I think its less "digital everything", and more "digital everything at the expense of analog somethings".

Just about every in-person social structure is experiencing falling numbers. For a lot of these (church, especially), there's good reason for why that particular structure needed to change or fall, but there's been nothing to replace the old structure. But for others, they experience failing numbers because modern society has become incompatible with unstructured, non-productive in-person interaction with strangers. "Where will I find the time to go to this singles mixer for bird watchers, I have to work 70 hours this week just to make rent?", etc.

gdjskshh2• 2 years ago

I really dislike the business model of Tinder->Snapchat->OnlyFans conversion.

There might be a lot of fish in the sea, but there's a lot of pollution too.

93po• 2 years ago

as a daily tinder user, this tinder bios that are trying to do this have become really obvious for me. occasionally one slips through but it's uncommon. but i agree it's super annoying, and while i support sex work and sex workers, it does feel pretty dishonest and crappy for the people who are maybe a little less bright and fall for this. im torn on whether to report these bios, because i understand marketing for sex work is really difficult, and there's not really a "right" platform for it

sebastianconcpt• 2 years ago

We need to start quickly a discipline studying the pathologies induced by technology.

hnthrowaway4567• 2 years ago

throwaway since I'm identifiable

My partner did OF on a small scale (just for fun, she liked it) and I spent a month or so iterating on a platform for her to use. Some sort of CRM on top of the OF API: post scheduling, tracking income, users, tips. I spent some time chatting and learned some interesting stuff about other peoples jobs but I think the general idea, and a sentiment that's echoed here, is that people are just lonely. They wanted someone to talk to who's also beautiful.

I did end up using a model with fine tuning on her past conversations to match the wording and text style but ultimately didn't move forward because she didn't want to commoditize herself in that way.

danielvaughn• 2 years ago

I genuinely don’t understand how OnlyFans customers wouldn’t understand this. What, you think that someone with hundreds of thousands of subscribers is going be personally chatting with you? It’s either going to be AI, or some poor guy across the world who’s paid to pretend to be a sexy woman.

It’s hard to fathom how so many people can be so gullible.

tokai• 2 years ago

It really seems like a subset of men get so horny that they should be declared incapable of managing their affairs.

alexey-salmin• 2 years ago

When you watch porn you understand very well that you're not actually having sex, but you still watch it. It's not really about being gullible.

barbazoo2• 2 years ago

It’s hard to fathom how so many people can be so gullible.

"Lonely" is probably the deeper issue here.

pounderstanding• 2 years ago

https://www.xkcd.com/1629/

kylehotchkiss• 2 years ago

Our country has an increasingly worsening loneliness epidemic and this is amplifying it. $1,000 tip?? That's enough to take a lot of dates or take a trip with some friends instead of making OF even more appealing a job option to people who have the potential to have much more fulfilling lives and careers.

accra4rx• 2 years ago

Unless the smell or pheromones are mimicked and can be passed virtually, there is no match to actual physical replacement.

charlie0• 2 years ago

The issue this brings up always reminds of that scene in Westworld where the protagonist arrives there for the first time and meets a host.

Host: "You want to ask, so ask."

Protagonist: "Are you real?"

Host: "Well if you can't tell, does it matter?"

It always gives me chills because at least for me, the answer is like Schrödinger's cat. It really doesn't matter at all if you never know the truth and definitely seems to matter if you do find out.

neuronic• 2 years ago

Guess everything will be quantum content now. It only converges to a concrete state if you look. I hate content superposition.

joquarky2• 2 years ago

John Wheeler?

dep_b2• 2 years ago

The only solution is to get out there and meet actual people IRL. I call it a win-win situation. Until those get replaced by Androids as well.

domo86• 2 years ago

I think someone should file a class action lawsuit for fraud against Onlyfans and any and all subscribers that have purchased content under the guise of speaking to ai or management team should get fully refunded

jonesn11• 2 years ago

Yeah this is whole operation is weird and I knew it

OnlyFans models are using AI impersonators to keep up with their DMs

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