Artificial intelligence promises many things: the end of disease, the end of humanity and the ability to create “your perfect fuck-toy.” As one porn site advertisement has it, with a bewildering mix of philosophy, tech jargon, solipsism, and salesmanship: “No limits, no morals, no safe mode… Just cum, and repeat.” Certainly, it’s proposed, the business model is a solid one: vastly reduced production costs and fewer legal and labour obligations for the makers, endlessly customisable sexual stimuli for the users, more tailored to their needs, this enhancing well-being all round. What’s not to like?

Of course, if you’re a porn actor the picture is not so clear cut. As AI porn progresses, clips will soon be full-length, high-definition videos with chatbot-style interactions, a long way from the uncanny valley of the glitchy, blank-eyed cheerleaders with seven fingers of just a couple of years ago. Surely, adult actors had best find a new job?

Perhaps not yet. When it comes to technological disruption, the porn industry has historically proven itself to be extremely adaptable. Neither the rise of aggregate porn sites, nor the event of free porn access did much to dent it. And much as the porn industry drove demand for online payments, streaming and other now ubiquitous tech, it’s now forging ahead with AI as well. Some porn actors are already on board with the technology, promoting their AI duplicates for what would provide an entirely passive income stream.

But the rise of AI porn – and what’s more broadly referred to as SexTech – is likely to cut much deeper than the surprising late-stage career revival of Marilyn Monroe. And not all in a negative way. There’s the case, for example, that it’s giving more control to the user, in that it will be less passive as a form of consumption. Or that it will afford the opportunity for marginalised people to see themselves reflected in the new mainstream porn landscape. AI porn for DEI, in other words.

Of course, having Marilyn back means there’s no need for, say, the notorious abuses of the casting couch. Similarly, it’s argued that the stand-out advantage of AI-generated porn is that its production no longer requires people to (as some claim) degrade themselves or be degraded – let alone the involvement of those against their will.

Since the only limit will be our imaginations, AI porn might also bring in a new era of sexual insight. It could be a showcase for the diversity of preferences and used in therapy to address sexual dysfunctions. It could also lead to liberation: every fetish will be readily explorable in a safe environment. That, in turn, might help encourage a more open attitude, argues Noelle Purdue, a one-time porn producer – now a porn historian and lecturer – who was among the first to experiment with the development of AI porn.

“People have a very complicated relationship to sex and sexuality and it’s difficult not to develop some strangeness around it and in how we respond to topics relating to it,” she says. Maybe AI porn will help us recognise that “if you’re into something ‘weird’, that’s OK. But really the biggest disappointment is how boring AI porn is. Developers can generate anything and still you just get the same smoothskinned, big-boobed ladies.”

That may reflect how narrow the tastes of high-frequency porn users are; the typically young, male and heterosexual viewers just want more of the same, exaggerated to the cartoonish effect that cosmetic surgery has to date afforded.

Indeed, AI porn, despite the opportunity it gives to model an instant and ideal sex partner, risks supercharging already addicted use for some while underscoring sexual and physical stereotypes, particularly of women. This, again, is something mainstream porn has long done, but AI puts the Barbie effect of unrealistic body proportions on steroids.

More worryingly is how it may shape expectations of, and attitudes to, (mostly) women. The EU investigating X over the use of the platform’s Grok AI to create sexual deep fakes of women both famous and anonymous may hint at the complexity and confusion to come.

“There are harms in the sexual imagery AI can create that involve images of real people – to Taylor Swift’s ‘good girl’ image, for example. Even celebrities are limited in their power to have this stuff removed once it’s out there,” explains Conor Linehan, Senior Lecturer in applied psychology at the University College Cork. Linehan recently competed a four-year study into mitigating the harms of deep fakes (nearly all of which are pornographic).

“But more concerning perhaps are the myths that are arising in the public around deep fakes much as they exist around rape. These include the idea that the victim ‘deserves it’, for example, or that deep fakes aren’t a threat to identity because viewers know they’re not real,” he adds.

Then there are the harms that interacting with AI-generated porn, rather than just viewing it, can bring. As Raquel Savage, an adult performer, educator and sex therapist argues, AI porn doesn’t just make one less tolerant of real-world bodily imperfection, it also makes ones sexual ideal utterly compliant. And, yet more chillingly, utterly accepting of any kind of treatment. Much as social media has turned relationships into metrics, so AI porn could change our conception of what sex is.

“Look at AI companions. People clearly feel attached to them, in part because they have control,” she says. There have been many cases of users engaging in full-blown romantic relationships with AI partners. Real relationships, in contrast, appear like the hard work they are. “An AI can’t consent because there’s no rejection. That, along with negotiation, emotional risk, and understanding boundaries, is an important formative experience for young men especially. If you can treat a ‘person’ any way you want, that’s only going to boost incel culture.”

That likely won’t be the only fallout from AI porn. As Luke Brunning, Associate Professor in applied ethics at Leeds University, points out, we may end up with a porn industry that doesn’t harm actual people yet produces greater symbolic harms. These would stem from more extreme content being consumed, uncontested, in our solitary bubbles. The Internet Watch Foundation reported the first “convincing examples” of AI videos depicting the abuse of children in 2024, with only greater realism expected to come.

Screen life and social media have already been blamed for an increased atomisation of society. Studies indicate a prevalence among younger generations towards anxiety around one-on-one, real-world interaction – and an atrophying ability to maintain eye contact when it happens. Courtship in the age of dating apps is a litany of rapid fire, looks-based judgement and rejection in which people are just yet more options.

Now dial up technology’s impact on relationships and intimacy – fear of emotional exposure, reduced empathy – with AI tools that could eventually replace the one need that might still drive two people to make physical contact. Sex being reframed as the solitary optimisation of desire, much as relaxation and entertainment are increasingly solitary already, is not an altogether crazy idea: a 2024 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions found that 25% of regular AI companion users reported decreased interest in forming real-world romantic relationships.

“I do worry that with AI porn we’re essentially further enhancing a system by which we don’t have to interact with real human beings,” admits Brunning. “There are corporate interests at play here, which should make us concerned about certain groups already struggling with the impact of social media. Certainly, there’s a techno-chauvinism in the claims by tech companies that their products, including AI porn, are a cure for the much-reported loneliness epidemic.” Studies suggest that simulated relationships actually increase feelings of loneliness.

And yet, according to research by the Institute of Family Studies, a US conservative think tank, while 75% of young adult respondents said they could never conceive of an AI replacing their intimate romantic/sexual relationships, what surprised Director of Research Wendy Wang and her colleagues was that one in four could, with over one in three heavy porn users believing the same.

“That’s a big number and one that could increase as we get more familiar with AI,” Wang proposes. “It’s reasonable that some people are drawn to AI for relationships if they’ve had trouble finding a real-life companion or if they have unreal expectations. With AI, finally Prince Charming comes.”

Wang sees this tendency as hinting at narcissism. But more troubling, she argues, is the contradiction it reveals: even as people recognise that an AI relationship is fundamentally artificial, a significant minority can still imagine embracing it romantically – a form of doublethink made easier as technology lowers the barriers to doing so.

“Perhaps in time AI companions will be so ‘real’ it will be hard for us to tell the difference between machine and human,” says Wang, nodding to the conundrums of inter-personal perception explored in many sci-fi stories, from Alien to Bladerunner. “We have an emotional relationship with domestic animals like dogs because we recognise that there is a life there, albeit not a human one. To not need that proposes a dramatic change in the dynamic of human relations”.

“The rise of AI porn and SexTech generally may even cause us to re-evaluate quite how special love and friendship is. And we might find it’s probably far less enigmatic than the poets would have us believe,” adds Professor Robert Brooks, evolutionary biologist at the University of New South Wales and author of Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers and Algorithmic Matchmakers. “That could lead to a weakening of social ties that will have a negative impact on society at large, similarly to how the carefully engineered algorithms of social media have had an impact on how we think, act, how politics plays out, and so on. It’s left people living in very different realities.”

Brooks predicts that there will inevitably be a conservative backlash against AI porn – what he describes as an “unholy alliance” between those who claim that pornography is inherently dehumanising and a Christian Right fearful that it will destroy the family. He also argues that this culture war will not amount to much, not least because the centre will remain apathetic and because the ‘progressive’ mindset will continue to favour a loosening of restrictions around sex.

This is also, Brooks stresses, because while pornography may affect the minds of individuals, and especially individual men, aggregate effects don’t appear to be there. “People are now less interested in sex, in family, in child-rearing, but the extent to which that’s attributable to porn is debatable.”

Raquel Savage agrees, albeit for slightly different reasons. Perhaps AI porn will, like any new technology, enjoy a period of enthusiastic uptake for its novelty. “But I think the argument that AI porn will be liberating quickly dissolves because the erotic experience requires consent. Could it happen that we learn to do with entirely artificial intimacy? Yes. But I can’t see that working for a well-adjusted society,” she says. “What makes sex alluring is that there is nothing like the real thing.”

In other words, that supposed great benefit of AI porn – its production not requiring real human performers – might prove its downfall. Just as the use of AI in customer service or hospital triage leads many to express a strong preference for dealing with an accountable human, so too is it the very humanness of genuine intimacy and real sex that remains its untouchable USP.

Will the appeal of the real last, or will it fade as more of our lives migrate online? After all, for some it’s more important to be seen to have a life in social media than outside of it. Noelle Purdue doesn’t think so: it’s why, despite abundant free porn, paid-for sites the likes of OnlyFans are thriving. People don’t flock to them because of their use of AI filters to boost a cam girl’s attractiveness, but because of the sense they give of focusing on and interaction with an individual. Indeed, it’s the conversational aspect of OnlyFans that is most frequently highlighted in its advertising.

For the same reason, even if some science-fictional future were to offer fully immersive artificial sex – via a clunky combination of wired haptic suits, VR, teledildonics and lifelike sex robots – sex work is not going anywhere. That may already have been borne out. As Purdue argues, “good tech-driven proxy sex experiences” have existed for years but remain niche. The sexbots, in other words, have not taken over.

Likewise, the idea that AI porn will offer an unprecedented outlet for exploring the “strangeness” of sexuality is, she argues, misplaced. AI porn neither provides a safe environment for such exploration – user data is harvested – nor, since AI systems are designed to mirror a user’s intentions, is it especially exploratory. It’s also not particularly innovative, she adds. To claim otherwise is to under-appreciate just how abundant and diverse the pornographic landscape already is: if there is a market for something, it is already being served. She cites, for example, a ‘wet jeans’ fetish account driven by AI that she follows. “But there’s just so much ‘wet jeans’ content made already,” she says.

“Ultimately people are still looking for that human connection,” Purdue says. “I think people will reject AI generation in porn because it exists outside the fantasy of another person you could conceivably meet and touch, and even a bespoke AI-generated partner can’t replace that human element, unless the AI or a sex robot is itself your fetish. AI porn is toothless in that way”.

She argues that, in time, the trend in porn will see a backlash against short-form, low-investment content and, especially where it is audience-funded, a shift towards higher production values and more ambitious storytelling. “Again, it’s about being more human, not less,” she says – about deeper, rather than shallower, experiences, akin to the growing popularity of Substack and long-form YouTube videos.

In the meantime, AI porn will roll out like a juggernaut in fishnet stockings and, Brunning worries, there is not a great deal that can be done to stop it: guardrails will be broken, modding will be easy, DIY at-home production will become ever cheaper, and “as ever, the regulators don’t really understand it, so they’re way behind,” he says. “The fact is that so much has to go right for AI porn to be used in a socially beneficial way – and it’s only going to get harder to put the genie back in the bottle.”

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