How is AI changing sex work?

The other day, my friend saw someone on the bus asking ChatGPT how to get consent. When she mentioned this to me in passing, it made me think about the ways sexual education in our country is still failing young people, to the point where they feel like they must resort to using an AI chatbot for sexual health advice. It also made me think about something I haven’t been thinking about, or more accurately, have been willfully ignoring: the ways AI will impact our relationship with sex and sexuality, and how it is already encroaching on the sex work industry.    

“AI is already changing sex work and our future relationships in so many ways”, documentary filmmaker Naomi Pallas tells Dazed. Pallas is the director of the award-winning short film Clankers, which explores the rise of AI sex influencers and the blurring of consent. For the documentary, Pallas made her own pregnant AI sex worker after attending courses run predominantly by men about how to make them and develop a unique niche. What Pallas discovered through attending these courses was that these men were essentially stealing the content of real sex workers and deepfaking their likenesses to make their AI influencers. “When I saw this, I just thought, ‘Oh my God. They are trying to get the means of production back from women’”. 

Though Pallas made her AI influencer entirely legally, she described the experience of immersing herself in an exploitative new industry as “harrowing”. Below, we speak to Pallas about Clankers, the world of AI influencer courses, and if she thinks we’re all fucked. 

What first made you interested in the way AI is impacting sex work? 

Naomi Pallas: I was making a documentary for the BBC a couple of years ago about the porn star Ron Jeremy. He was being prosecuted for sex crimes, and he’d been committing these crimes for years. People were speaking out about it, but because of the male studio systems, they hadn’t really been able to take off. But when he was being inappropriate with cam girls and OnlyFans models, because they were in charge of their own careers, they were able to speak out and bring him to justice. That was at the back of my mind when I saw these courses by men, teaching other men to make female AI sex workers. And I just thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s like they’re trying to get the means of production back from women’. Because a lot of these courses recommend that you use videos of existing sex workers on the internet and then deep-fake faces onto them. So essentially, their labour is being stolen and used for the profit of these men.

You made a pregnant AI sex worker. Why did you make her pregnant, and how did making this avatar actually make you feel? You mentioned feeling guilty at one point in the documentary because the AI influencer wasn’t you. 

Naomi Pallas: I bought these courses and watched a lot of YouTube tutorials on how to make these influencers. These courses have been going on for a year or so – maybe longer. They all tell you to find a niche and define your unique selling point. There are goth girls and girls with rich-adjacent hobbies like golf and horse riding, so that people with money are attracted to them. There are also girls with three breasts, which was actually one of the first videos I ever saw. So a lot of the niches have been taken, and I was racking my brain. That was probably the most challenging part of the project. Then I got lost in the pregnancy fetish community on Instagram of real-life pregnant women, and I couldn’t find an AI-generated version of that, so I thought that might be a good community to tap into. And it worked. I got about 700 followers in the first few weeks. 

The experience was harrowing. As I mentioned, these AI influencer experts recommend deepfaking a face onto existing videos to make influencers look more realistic. But that would involve taking other women’s videos, which I wasn’t comfortable with, and is illegal to do. So I had to generate fully AI images and videos which look less realistic than they usually would. But not many people noticed that my influencer was made with AI, even though I labelled it as AI on Instagram. I didn’t break any rules, but the way people were interacting with me in the comments and then also in my DMs suggested that these men thought I was a real pregnant woman. I was getting a lot of messages, some were nice, others were really demanding when I didn’t reply. I don’t have a public Instagram, but it showed me what it’s like to be a public-facing woman on the internet.

A lot of people who run these AI influencer courses, were originally in the OnlyFans creator space as agents. They previously had a group of women they helped create content with, and they say in their videos that real women were too unreliable 

You interviewed a few ‘AI influencer experts’, as they call themselves, for the documentary. What did you learn from them about this growing sphere of work?

Naomi Pallas: What really stood out to me in doing these courses was how much it’s relational. It’s not just heterosexual men wanting these images; it’s heterosexual men wanting to talk and connect. So even with the advice around selling content, it’s all about talking and connection. Dr Chloe Locatelli, whose work explores the intersections of sex work and digital constructions of femininity in heterosexual men’s sextech, mentioned to me that sextech for heterosexual men is very linked to connection and conversation. It is mainly heterosexual men who want human connection, which is kind of sad and beautiful in a weird way. It kind of bucks the usual assumptions we have about these men.

I understand that we are in a loneliness epidemic and that men suffer a lot from it – but sometimes I think that male loneliness is exceptionalised and almost used to excuse their behaviour or engagement in stuff like this. 

Naomi Pallas: It’s really interesting because what Chloe told me is that people of other genders don’t seem to tie their sexuality to a need for this connection, for whatever reason. I didn’t set out to make a film about the male loneliness epidemic, but I guess it is part of it. But I also created something that was geared towards the heterosexual male market. She’s blonde, doe-eyed, young and exists very much within typical beauty standards. So maybe if I had made something that was more queer-looking, perhaps I would have had a different experience. 

Will Monange, the CEO of Fanvue, who created the app specifically for AI-generated nude content, argued that people’s relationship with AI bots is no different from having parasocial relationships. What do you make of that? 

Naomi Pallas: I think it’s got some interesting implications for the future of relationships. Firstly, a celebrity can set boundaries and tell you no, while an AI-generated sex worker can’t. So what does that mean for consent? What does that mean for boundaries? It can’t sleep. It doesn’t hold you to account. It doesn’t push back. It can do anything you ask it to. There’s an extortionately high number of people that have access to these chatbots – so how will our engagement with this stuff impact our real life interactions? Also the interesting thing is that a lot of people who run these AI influencer courses, were originally in the OnlyFans creator space as agents. They previously had a group of women they helped create content with, and they say in their videos that real women were too unreliable. They would get tired and wouldn’t create the content they wanted. So now they have these AI women, and they can do whatever they want them to do.

You spoke to a number of sex workers in preparation for the documentary – what were their main concerns surrounding AI? 

Naomi Pallas: One of the sex workers I spoke to found it quite funny. I also think the fact that my AI influencer wasn’t able to get very many subscribers put her at peace. But I think the less funny side is that many, many, many sex workers are having their actual videos stolen and then deepfaked onto it. Some of them are given Down Syndrome faces and stuff like that because that’s another niche people do. A lot of these videos are very realistic, and so they probably have a financial impact on real women. I messaged a lot of women after seeing that their videos and images were being used in these courses, but no one got back to me. 

I didn’t set out to make a film about the male loneliness epidemic, but I guess it is part of it

This stuff makes me so depressed. Do you think we’re fucked?

Naomi Pallas: [laughs] Social media platforms need to find ways of coping with AI as they currently aren’t. Facebook is full of a lot of rubbish even before the popularisation of AI, and I remember that at a certain point, it just became uninteresting to use because of that. I wonder if maybe one day, AI will make TikTok and Instagram the same. I wonder if people will just migrate off the platform if these apps don’t deal with this problem. In terms of the implications of AI on reality and truth, things are looking scary. I think it’s going to be more and more on our feeds, and I think we’re going to know the difference between what is real and what is not less and less. I think that’s scary. I’d love to do a longer version of the documentary, to delve deeper into deepfaking and the sticky issues around consent and what that means in the digital AI space.

Clankers premiered November 13 at Curzon Soho, and will be showing at other cinemas soon.