how social media and a.i. created the involuntary porn star
Sex tapes used to be shocking scandals. Now, you may be in one and not even know it.
If you’re in an age bracket where mornings require a bit of gentle stretching and your knees sound suspiciously crispy if you stand up a little too fast, you might just recall the age of the celebrity sex tape given a few reminders.
Those now legendary clips featuring Playboy Playmate and Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe from 1996 were some of the first videos to become viral on the web, starting an entire scandalous and taboo industry that could net paparazzi millions of dollars if they were willing to bend the law a little.
Each video landed like a media equivalent of a nuclear bomb. At the time, celebrities spoke to the public almost entirely in prearranged interviews, at press conferences, and through publicists and official statements. Magazines published grainy photos in which they — gasp! — walked around LA or NYC, drank coffee, or shopped like mere mortals to millions of fans dissecting their casual outfits in detail.
They also tended to be attractive and often had at least some talent, so there was at least a little curiosity when suddenly there was a chance to see them naked, maybe confirm salacious rumors, or see if their sex lives were as exciting as their fans often imagined. Or, to put it more bluntly, did the glamorous, popular cool kids of the adult world look good without all the designer clothes and professional lighting, and could they fuck as well as they could act, or joke, or sing?
But the tapes wore out their welcome. Aside from the moral aspects — which would take a whole article to cover on their own — sex tapes became a way for C and D tier celebrities to cash in and suddenly, the joke was that you were a nobody if you didn’t have one. Hell, at one point the common joke in the Fish household was that we knew what we needed to do if I really needed to boost my still very low profile as a pop sci and tech blogger, and radio contributor.
Meanwhile, thanks to social media, we went from eagerly waiting for a rare occasion our favorite celebrities would talk to us, to begging them to please, just maybe, shut up once in a while. And now, in an age when anyone can become a celebrity of some sort, and enough people like your thirst traps, setting up an OnlyFans page becomes a no-brainer and a good way to pull in seven figures a month.
And thus, we went from the sex tape being a scandal, to taboo, to cheap gimmick, to publicity stunt to reboot a career, to more or less a requirement. But this is not where the story ends because the same people who used to lust over celebrity sex tapes so much that they made photoshopped celebrity nudes of various quality to share on all sorts of seedy forums, turned to AI, and their targets quickly moved on from famous people to everyday John and Jane Doe. Mostly Jane.
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One of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me in public was a random guy at a college party confusing me with a porn star. Yes, that was every bit as awkward as it sounds. Yes, I’ve seen myself in the mirror and was just as perplexed as you must be. My instinct was to move on as quickly as possible, but if he insisted on making such a big deal about it, we could’ve pulled up the video in question and showed very clearly that no, it wasn’t me, and he was just being weirdly creepy.
But then again, this was a decade before AI deepfakes, so I didn’t have to worry that to save face or to embarrass me, this guy would’ve used some pictures or a video of me on social media to generate a hardcore clip that looked believable in dim lighting and at first glance. Today, it’s not just a concern. It’s happening every day as chatbots and generative models are creating unwitting virtual porn stars.
Entire online communities are spending days on end glued to porn, both real and AI to cater to their increasingly esoteric tastes, using it for incel fantasies, and both sharing and selling nudified images of real women and girls, even if they’re in high school and never shared a nude image in their life. Models simply find a workable match in all the porn on which they’ve been trained and fill in the blanks using benign social media or prim and proper yearbook pictures as a starting point.
The technology moved so quickly in the shadows, there seems to be no real answer on how to deal with the massive problem they’ve created. As long as the users don’t get caught or exposed with a cache of fake nudes of real people — and the majority don’t and never will — and aren’t facing someone who wants to make an example out of them as a warning, there are no consequences. And by the time there are, an awful lot of damage has already been done.
What used to be a publicity problem for celebrities usually armed with lawyers, huge media platforms, and vast financial resources to either combat or monetize on ended up becoming a painful headache for ordinary people who have none of that, and are also judged by entirely different standards. And if they try to do something in public, they’re now at risk of having their new careers undermined from day one.
For example, these deepfakes are being weaponized in international politics, and with a still substantial population of technically semi-literate demographics who are easily tricked with increasingly more advanced AI images, manufacturing a sex scandal is a trivial task, and with older voter demographics, this tactic would be effective, and by the time the fraud is revealed, the attack ads and headlines are already out there.
In 2023, Virginia state legislature candidate Susanna Gibson had to deal with a video of herself having sex with her husband on a live feed leaked and eagerly distributed by Republicans to the press. She lost by roughly 700 votes. Now, the same political operatives don’t even have to luck into a real video. They could just make deepfake and do the exact same thing with any candidate doing a little too well in polling, just like in the above referenced case of Cara Hunter in Northern Ireland.
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For the same cruel, utterly fucked up reason that celebrity porn tapes wore out their welcome, this AI-powered stealth and revenge versions of it targeting the everyday person are exploding in popularity. A big part of the initial appeal was shock value, a performative gasp followed by “how could they do this?!” coupled with a voyeuristic kink. The whole point is that the content was private and those involved didn’t want that content shared or talked about.
Most of the original tapes in question were ostensibly boring precisely because they were not porn, and porn is to sex as an Olympic 400 meter freestyle relay for a gold medal is to splashing around in your gym’s swimming pool. Adult entertainment is lit, staged, and directed to look impressive and show you everything. A casual clip from two attractive people having normal sex? Yeah, it’s gonna be a snooze fest.
What people were getting off on was the violation of privacy. The shock of those in the videos they never thought would see the light of day. The scandal as they tried their best to control the fallouts and answer some variation of that inevitable “why would you possibly record this if it wasn’t supposed to be watched” question from a dozen late night hosts, knowing full well that “in the heat of the moment, you make questionable decisions” won’t be accepted.
So, when celebrities and influencers are now offering wholesome mode, shock jock mode, and “spicy mode” as a matter of course, those voyeurs who need to see red faces and tears to get off can recreate the experience with nudify apps and AI porn based on random strangers or their classmates, who don’t have a media strategy or armies of lawyers and PR reps and can’t fight back. The even more twisted creators and consumers of this content can even use it for blackmail.
Meanwhile, right wing movements, which capitalized on anti-incumbent fury caused in no small part by runaway post-pandemic inflation, are using their bully pulpits as a way to censor the web to ostensibly protect us from all this evil porn and reintroduce purity culture and virginal trad wifery.
Which kind of feels like trying to put toothpaste back in its tube by force, especially as thanks to AI, we’re all about to have sex tapes whether we want to or not, and many of these right wing movements’ most ardent supporters will diligently respond to AI porn bots on social media between complaining how porn stars make way too much money and how OnlyFans is an evil Jewish plot to destroy the Western family. It’s kind of like an absurdist comedy without a punchline, except its really happening.
But hey, maybe if we’re all about to be porn stars with our without our input, we’ll find even more sexual topics important to our physical and mental wellbeing forcefully and rapidly de-stigmatized. Or we can just keep doing what we’re doing now and pretend to be shocked and talking about these matters out of both sides of our lying mouths. Either way, consider getting into your best OF shape. You might need it.