On the future of Pornography
On Artificial Intelligence, personalized porn, human-like dolls and the Porn Industries decline.
In the latest two episodes, I described not only the history of porn but why modern porn as we know it is so addicting. Now the question remains: If porn, meaning 2D-Videos on your phone, is this addictive and hard to quit today, what will it look like in the (near) future? There are two scenarios.
Scenario I:
With the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) became accessible to everyone for free. Just like in the early days of the internet, people immediately started using it for pornographic purposes. Fast-forward to today, and there are dozens of AI-driven chatbots and image-generators capable of playing out virtually any scenario you can imagine with little to no filters. Some chatbots are even explicitly designed to serve as a “digital girlfriend”, but more to that in another episode. Although the created images are clearly recognizable as artificial, they rapidly improve in quality. According to tech-experts, AI generated images and videos will just be unrecognizable from real images in the next few years.
With AI video-generators, it even is possible to create a video of the pornographic promt you desire. As artificial images, they are set to rapidly improve in quality. Last but not least, artificially powered text-to-speech generators offer a wide variety of voices to choose from to read out your promt.
What has this to do with porn, you may ask? The yet-to-happen combination of these AI features will enable everyone to create his own pornographic movie. There is no question if it will happen, but rather when it will happen.
If movies are not for you, (voice)-chatting with an individually tailored character who sends personalized explicit images and videos as part of the conversation will be possible too, probably. Although artificial, it will feel indistinguishable from a fellow human being. Porn, today still more a form of voyeurism than interpersonal, is set to get more individual over the next few years. There will be a role switch never seen before when viewers become producers.
Especially with the growing number of loners we see today, this development is concerning. Why go out and look for a woman if you can create the perfect one yourself, no effort required? So much to Scenario 1, which is likely to come true within the next few years. This should scare us all.
Prediction II:
Until now, I only talked about pornography getting more personal, from a staged movie, to intimate chats with individual preferences. However, the billion-dollar porn industry is not going to sit tight and watch its own downfall (even though that would be nice). Instead, they are going to follow the trend of making porn more personal, yet with a different approach. Using Virtual Reality (VR), watching porn will change to being in porn. Ultimately, the industry will aim at making porn indistinguishable from natural sex aswell.
To reach that goal they already work on optimizing sexual toys like fleshlights, torsos, or even man-sized dolls. Some changes involve a more realistic material, inbuilt heating to simulate body temperature, aswell as self-lubrication of the toy. Since the mid-2010s there are prototypes combining those features. Some even can speak. Too good to be true, some might say. I however think that the porn industry is losing the gamble it took here.
There is one massive problem in all of these approaches. People watch so much porn because it is free and requires literally no effort. Neither VR-Goggles, nor toys are free however, and require more effort than simply opening a website. The price for one human-like doll as describes above is 15.000$. Even if you could, you would not be willing to pay that price.
What about a cheap fleshlight one may ask? Again, I do not think this will pay off. For most porn-addicts – the majority of them teens often still living at home, hiding their habits (more to that next week!) – this is simply unrealistic. Buying even a cheap toy takes money, planning, and a safe hiding spot. Getting addicted to dopamine-frying, easy accessible videos also is much easier than developing an addiction to pleasuring oneself with some toys.
Therefore, VR might be the industries last straw in that respect. No one bought a phone to watch porn, yet everybody uses it for it. The same could go for VR-Goggles. The porn industry now again is reliant on the tech-industry, hoping for a broader adaptation of Virtual Reality in everyday life. Zuckerbergs Metaverse might actually be its last chance for this strategy to work out. If it does not, they would need to come up with a new strategy pretty quick.
Summarized, the porn industry is certainly going to face problems over the next few years. While most industries quickly adapted to artificial intelligence, porn stayed the same. Facing a growing number of people recognizing the negative effects it has, willing to quit their addiction, they need to offer something new. If it fails to do that, chances are the dark age of porn conglomerates comes to a silent end.
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