California Bill Would Require Licenses for Porn Actors, Strippers, Cam Girls

Curious about the impact on their privacy and avoiding stalking

i mean this is going to eventually happen. and not only watching. augmented reality + advances in VR are going to transform tech (including this industry)

It's actually interesting to talk about AI "taking over this job", because porn's legal solely because it's "artistic expression" protected by the first amendment. There's not a fit quota of work to be done, it's a matter of people deciding what art they want to pay for (or not pay for, as the case usually is). Some people may prefer AI-generated art over human-generated art someday.

But I would have to imagine AI would change this more than you'd expect. One might think AI would give you deepfake-like "performers" that could film 24/7 and have potentially superhuman traits. Celebrity and personality probably plays into areas an AI performer may not excel though, there's still probably room for a narrower field of celebrities in the space, even if there was a large mix of AI-generated content. (I also wonder if people would sell rights to their 3D scans for this, which could provide revenue long after the industry considered them "too old" or they moved on to other careers.)

But one wonders why, in an AI-generated world, you'd have video performers at all, when you could have a completely personalized one? Think about stuff you may have seen about people having "virtual girlfriends" and the like. Add in AR/VR technologies and the world for lonely people has a bright future.

Criminals? I would imagine blackmail and fraud are common problems with webcam models.

Nobody. Politicians can't let a tragedy go untaxed though.

A huge example/problem is the recent case against Girls Do Porn, where it turned out a huge number of performers had been lied to about whether or not their videos would go on the Internet, pressured into staying through shoots that fell outside the bounds of what they'd been agreed to, and in at least a few instances, raped.

It's likely a big part of the interest in requiring education/licensing prior to entering the business would be to make sure everyone knows the rules and what they can do about companies falling outside it. Sites based on getting first-time performers would have a much harder time sticking around without proving they were meeting all expectations.

So it's probably less about keeping women out of the industry than ensuring they're not taken advantage of. It's the same reason legalizing and then regulating prostitution would be safer for prostitutes than what we have now. Adult filmmaking isn't illegal (solely because of first amendment decisions), but it's also pretty poorly regulated.

(This comment is meant to add context, it's not support of the bill. There's huge privacy concerns, because government databases tend to not be super private, and a lot of families pretty much disown adult performers if they find out. But I wouldn't assume this bill has malicious intent, there's good reasons to add regulation too.)

Twenty to eighteen year olds are the ones being kept out under the bill - which seems dubious even with all of the other "legally an adult but discriminatory law" standards already in place.