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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

You nailed it. The article says:

> Are said she believes that reflects a gender-based slant — social media platforms freely allow sex-related ads only if the intended audience is men.

So when you've got a huge hungry audience, willing to pay money, the platforms are incentivized to enforce their rules about ads unequally. Content and apps geared towards women, or gay men, are such a small piece of the pie by comparison that there's less incentive to look the other way.

The companies being accused of this unequal enforcement, of course, have a long history of doing things for no other reason than they can make a little extra money on it by not respecting their users. It's entirely believable.

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> Content and apps geared towards women, or gay men, are such a small piece of the pie by comparison that there's less incentive to look the other way.

Sorry, we're talking about Instagram, an app we know puts huge targets on women, especially young women! I have no idea what you're talking about here about nicheness. Fashion products alone are worth way more than the entire porn industry. Not including beauty, skincare, cosmetic surgery, wellness/cleansing, etc...

There's more women, but the point is demand among women is not as high for such AI partners. The lack of demand makes the market niche.

I'm asking why the demand is not as high for male AI partners, when other media which also simulates male romantic partnership has HUGE demand. Just look at how much erotica makes. How many weird fetish stories are posted on fanfiction sites where the reader is a character. How much money stupid things like Boyfriend Dungeon (a real thing! a dungeon crawler where you date your exclusively-male weapons!) makes! You'd think AI boyfriends fit way closer to this existing market.

All of those "simulate" not just a companion, but the whole relationship scenario, which I've been told is what women are attracted to?

Whereas men are simpler creatures attracted to any woman that is visually hot.

The former is a lot harder to implement than the latter.

But the whole relationship scenario exactly what you'd want an AI partner for, is my bafflement. If I want porn I have plenty of free stuff on PornHub et al. There's no reason to get an intelligent anything, artificial or not, if I actually just want generated fap material. It's obviously selling companionship as well as porn, which is definitely more what I see in erotica, which I already know is fairly formuliac as it is-- basically like porn. So I'm asking: why is it so skewed, because there's clearly a mix of both appeals here. If it was a40/60 or a 70/30 skew, okay because ads are primarily visual attractors. But this makes it sound more like 90/10 or 95/5, which makes no sense to me, I know that fake relationships with hot men is one of the few ways you can make a good income as a self published author.

Maybe in the future, but I would describe the current state of things as selling "interactivity", not really a "relationship".

Also, even if we were to call it a "relationship", I'd say it's a lot easier to cater to the typical male wants of a "relationship" through the current (and near future) state of AI than the typical female wants.

Disclaimer: The usual stuff about "not all men/women etc. etc."

> There's no reason to get an intelligent anything, artificial or not, if I actually just want generated fap material.

For the huge demand among men - it's best to think about an AI girlfriend as an alternative to going to the strip club.

Sure, some guys go to strip clubs for just staring at naked women. But a huge (mostly unacknowledged) part of the appeal is the short-term companionship mixed in. The flirting, the ego stroking, all of it, just an attractive woman taking an interest in you and talking with you. Lots of guys I have talked to have had the experience of one of their buddies getting too drunk and "spilling their guts" to a stripper. That's not a thing that happens if you're just there to stare at bewbs.

In Asia, hostess clubs operate much more along the lines of this idea of emotional fulfillment. Strip clubs are part of the overall entertainment service sector, but really focus more on the bewbs aspect. In the West it's much more mixed in together instead of in two separate types of businesses.

I think you've figured it mostly out. Both genders desire this sense of companionship, not just women. The difference between the genders (and why there are so many products targeted at men and so few targeted at women) is that due to realities of dating and courtship, this companionship is readily, and disproportionately available to women. So the demand must be much higher for men. I'd be surprised if it wasn't as simple as that.

I don't buy that romantic companionship is disproportionately available to women, because evidently fake romance for women is in huge demand already. I don't understand why this particular kind of fake relationship is almost exclusively geared towards men, when Twilight & 50 Shades Of Grey were fake romance for women that made millions of dollars.

The other post from RajT88 is the best answer to this.

It's a lot easier to implement an AI version of a strip club or hostess club than an AI version of Twilight or 50SoG.

Ahh, right--that was your original question. The thread got long and I lost the plot.

I wouldn't be surprised if the overall market size (in users, not dollars) for all types of "relationship substitutes" for men is simply far, far larger than the market for women, even though Twilight and 50 Shades are themselves huge. For every 1 female erotica fan out there, I bet there are 10 or maybe 100 male users of porn or OnlyFans. I would also guess that the amount of money spent by men is at least a multiple of the amount spent by women. If I was an entrepreneur going into a market where, say, there were 100x potential male users and maybe 3x potential male dollars, I'd be a fool not to at least initially target men.

Romance books can sell to women already in a relationship, AI bots can't. I think it's probably no more complex than that.

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