OnlyFans models are using AI impersonators to keep up with their DMs
wired.com
wired.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QHXElgrl8
If you keep watching there's another feature that actually generates video ideas, scripts, and even thumbnails for video creators.
Seems really grim- what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature? It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
Fitting for our times.
It's easy to rationalise a time saving measure I guess. I feel I'm unauthentic when I use auto-generated response suggestions in Outlook. But, like OnlyFans, it's 'just business'. Perhaps I'm overthinking it. How genuine and heartfelt can OnlyFans responses be? Probably as much as my response to a budget approval.
Shouldn't there be a level of candidness at which it cannot be considered deception? I mean we accept casinos/gambling and religions in our societies for example.
If the site is saying ‘chat with X for $5/min’, and you never have any interaction with X at all for your $5/min, that seems like a pretty clear cut case doesn’t it?
Yeah, ok.
- soon to be murdered guy.
I wouldn't expect, like, Mia Khalifa (I'm out of the game, who's current?) to answer her own messages but there does seem to be an expectation that smaller creators are actually behind the accounts.
I know there are also some people who pretend they are falling in love with the prostitutes they pay to have sex but the terms are clear both in physical and online prostitution. It is all a business about pretending and consumers should expect that.
I guess there is some truth to the adage that a male body can't push blood both to the brain and to the penis at the same time - it's either one, or the other. I mean, if you step back and take a cold look at the content produced by popular OF performers, it's pretty apparent those are business operations. There are other people involved. Someone does the camera work. Location work. Promotion. And yes, fan management too.
Same applies to YouTube personas, too. Brands, not people. Talking to fans is a job that can be outsourced. AI doesn't introduce anything new; AI features on the platform are competing with creators' brand management agencies, which themselves likely already use ChatGPT for this anyway, because why wouldn't they? ChatGPT does better job at this stuff and is cheaper than human labor - but again, the AI angle isn't important here - that human labor was just a generative model in a protein substrate anyway.
Maybe it already was fraud. I expect to see class-action lawsuits on the way soon.
This is another facet of a larger phenomenon, that I just commented on in another thread[0] - there's a lot of harmful activity that's considered legitimate, thus invisible to our legal and cultural immune systems, yet no less harmful than the slightly less legitimate scams.
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After reading your post, I had a thought: Making this story about OnlyFans is the click bait element. Seriously, replay the story in your head where it says that top 1/2/3/4/5% of YouTubers or Instagrammers or TikTokkers are using LLMs to answer comments and DMs. Suddenly, the story is much less enticing. It probably would not even make HN front page. Most readers here would look at such an article, shrug their shoulders, and say: "Yeah, seems right. I would do the same.". However, as soon as you add sex work into the mix, it gets way more spicy and elicits more emotional responses.
That said, I don't agree that using AI chatbots to deceive fans is OK anywhere else either. And no, I would definitely not ever do it myself.
"Artificial Intelligence" -> noun artifice: ruse, clever trick, guile, deception, cunning, a skillful or artful contrivance
I guess LLM hallucinations will just give a slightly different flavour of unreal interactions.
Though I don't doubt that less careful (or less well-paid) gig-chatters exist and can have a slightly different feel when handing off a random at shift-change
The next step is not having real models at all. It'll be 100% AI all the way up and down the stack.
Completely AI porn is going to be booming business. PornHub, OnlyFans, and perhaps even some dating websites will be "innovator's dilemma"'d out.
That was just a product / form factor thing: Bird and Lime scooters are everywhere in my city. And, moreover, lots of people use personal scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards, electric skateboards, Onewheel, electric unicycles, etc. I don't go a day without seeing these things.
It'll be the exact same with this technology. Give it a few years and more men will be using AI chatbots and AI porn than the existing tools in the space, such as PornHub and OnlyFans.
> the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term
Porn has never gone away, it's only grown.
AI porn can match a person's exact preferences in an unparalleled way that hasn't been possible before. Add in VR, photorealism, voices, and trainable agentic behavior and you've got a market that will likely contribute to the decline of real, actual relationships and marriages.
More men will probably be using AI porn over actual sex, too, due to difficulties with dating, dead bedrooms, etc.
I'd be willing to place bets on marriage numbers going into a steep decline over the next decade.
If a dead bedroom marriage is still intact now, why would AI porn change that? Do you need to get divorced before you can chat with the bot? Is the bot going to help parent the children you were staying in the marriage for?
New marriages, not divorces. Though I wouldn't necessarily rule out the latter, either.
Not being able to find a relationship is not binary. Having alternatives to satisfy needs means less effort is put in achieving the real thing. This goes for both genders of course, just the needs and alternatives being different.
Marriage was hit way before that. Marriage is not a rational choice in a lot of countries, where a civil union does the same thing without the hassle and the costs of divorce if it happens. The main reason is religion and it has been losing ground for decades at this point.
This is not going to make it any more attractive.
What the heck does that mean? Last I checked, population demographics weren't that far off 50/50 in most countries.
Hey, I'm married so I'm just going by what my single / online dating friends tell me. It has nothing to do with demographics. In today's app-based environment, something like 80% of women are interested in / going for the top 10-20% of men, and it's getting even more extreme. Is this not true?
It just feels oddly gender specific to assume that in an environment where there are approximately equal numbers of single men and women (no?), one gender has sights set too high and the other doesn't.
This was a long time ago as well and I think the situation has gotten worse in the age of tinder and friends.
This is a summary of the article: https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/
"Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme."
No wonder why women are so incredibly selective. Gender ratio population wise is roughly equal, with slightly more women than men in the US, AFAIK. Men are chasing women in the wrong place.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/165lsmp/tinder_gend...
Nobody's going around advertising their fancy cars, their hobbies and the church they goes to, etc. We're heavily focused on the perfect match rather than doing vibe check.
Basically you'll need as many single men than single women.
Now if you're talking about apps, a minority of men can date most of the women, but that doesn't work for long term relationships.
Extrapolation to the whole population seems crazy though. And I wouldn't expect dating apps to remain the same, we should expect more behavioral experimentation as well as backlash and new social movements to change mating behavior. It isn't like the average woman is a fan of polygyny either.
I'd say the market has previously proven that's definitely false.
Consequently, AI porn will probably eat the bottom of the bulk market, with a much-smaller market left for higher-end human content.
Which probably isn't the worst thing... as the low-value pornography seems to encourage the most horrific, exploitive conditions.
Backhoes drastically reduce the demand for laborers (the traditional equivalent for men), and I don’t see anyone with reasonable options there either.
Notably, at least 90% of the laborers I’ve met would love to be able to get paid having sex instead of being laborers. But the market dynamics don’t make that a viable choice.
At some point we should get past make-work that creates horrible lives for people, when we have the capability to automate that work.
Not automating something so that someone will have a job is bad reasoning and traps society in a local rut.
Which population?
The situation in most well off countries is already that native populations have fallen below replacement rates. The result has not been to rejoice in the would-be crisis being averted but instead the crisis has been inverted and now those countries "need" to import foreigners to keep their economies from imploding. Or are you suggesting population control for africa and the middle east? Because I'm not sure they'll agree.
I agree that society needs to adapt to the post-scarcity reality but "population control" is and will always be something dystopian. It's also irrelevant because the more we automate the less people we actually "need" so no amount of population control will ever solve the underlying issue.
Men had a headstart from being more into tech, but I think women are already the majority users of AI sex-rp and AI partners. Makes sense too given that they read more erotica than men.
and the porn-rot brains will make it harder for them to get into healthy relationships as well adjusted individuals, resulting in a glut of long-term customer for corporate-mediated para-social "relationships". Another victory for unbridled capitalism.
The young men have to "git gud" & level up IRL like they have to in every other aspect of life. There won't be government issued waifus
Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men, who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
Everybody wants that, including the potential girlfriends, but a functional relationship requires 2 well-adjusted parties. The average level 2 druid also wants respect from their guild and a trusty side-kick, but they may have to grind for those things and go on some side quests. No one is owed a partner, especially if they are unable to compromise (the grease of all social interactions).
> Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men
Fortunately,there is scientific research[1] in the field, so we don't have to go with our gut-feeling. Modeling behavior on scripted pornography leads to socially unacceptable behaviors in real life. A female acquaintance was recently propositioned by the man she had just started dating for an 3-way "encounter" involving her sister (as in full sibling); I think "porn rot" is the right description of what led him down the road of thinking it was a perfectly reasonable request to verbalize. This put an end to the relationship, but I'm sure he might be out there somewhere complaining about how he's being unfairly rejected by women.
> ...who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
every generation has a subculture like this, and in the past, they accepted, and gloried even, that they were a subculture instead of demanding to be accepted by the mainstream (beatniks, punks, goths, emos, etc).
The dark gamified patterns of app dating reward and encourage women to rapidly dismiss huge numbers of men in the hopes of finding one of the very few who meets a number of superficial criteria. Meeting people IRL has less toxic intrinsic structure, but has only become more difficult as the apps advertise themselves as a "safer" alternative.
I think that the AI-pretending-to-be-human does not have much future, because if people end up chatting with AIs why not go with the real thing rather than with the only-fans ones. The only-fans creators are training their replacements.
Do people honestly convince themselves some stranger performing on the internet in a very one way relationship somehow truly cares about them and not their ability to monetize.
and summarize it for humans.
Chatters-for-hire were always questionable. Some are cheap labor in cheap English-speaking countries. But I’ve also seen that vendors that offer chatter services have difficulty with quality control (of the chats), causing the OnlyFans channel to drop the chatters and apologize for the breach of trust to paying fans.
That said, I imagine there is a LOT of value in identifying high quality leads/chats to be prioritized and ignoring/ blocking the lowest quality (eg. Insurers and time wasters).
How sad.
"Influencers" living on borrowed time is one of the few good things about the machine learning dystopia.
I get the feeling that it won't be long before the "model" will also be the "model".
I think users need to demand that if it's AI generated that it's labeled as such.
Abuse of expectations can be dealt with bans and/or prosecutions for fraud.
So, responding to viewers increases engagement, and thereby a channel's virality.
And one human can only do so much of that. So eventually, you hit a marketing scalability bottleneck — you get more comments than you can read, and the people who don't feel engaged with, are more likely to churn from your viewership, so your viewership growth starts to decelerate.
Large media companies + MCNs previously solved this bottleneck, by hiring paid human community managers to scale responding-to-comments.
But individual creators bootstrapping their growth, had no good solution to this (besides joining an MCN), because the too-many-comments threshold comes long before they make enough revenue to afford to hire their own community managers.
This creates a pay-to-win model where companies who already have capital from other ventures can afford to circumvent this bottleneck and so get big on YouTube, in a way that individual creators cannot.
And YouTube doesn't like that; those big companies aren't beholden to YouTube in the way that creators that think of themselves fundamentally as "YouTube content creators" are. (Or, to say that in a nicer way: YouTube wants to democratize content creation, ensuring that there's a way for small bootstrapped content-creators to "make it.")
AI comment responding is a substitute good for the paid human community managers who already perform this function for large media companies / MCNs / etc. It serves to allow these independent bootstrapped content-creators to overcome the responses-to-comments marketing bottleneck for much lower cost.
This doesn't do anything good for the people who post comments, of course; but it does work to ensure a healthy ecosystem of independent bootstrapped content creators, rather than an oligopoly of media companies — which is something that viewers want from YouTube.
(An analogy might be to level-1 CSRs in a call center: as a complainant, they just get in your way; but they solve a customer-service scalability bottleneck for the company, which thereby allows the company to grow past the point where it would otherwise stop being able to handle support at all due to the increasing flood of "nonsense" complaints.)
> It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
Yes, it is, but that's going to happen whether or not there's a built-in feature to do it. That ship has sailed literally centuries ago — ever heard of writing to a famous author/actor/etc, and getting a hand-written response, seemingly from the famous person themselves, but actually from their agent and just signed by the famous person?
This comment is 100% AI generated, straight from an LLM (admittedly a small and specifically trained one). My first and likely only AI generated comment.
Can you tell it's AI generated? Can dang?
Like most engineering there's a matter of "good enough" and you get surprisingly close to that by simply tracking down the most obvious accounts.
It couldn't be completely automated out regardless because intent is important as well. Using an LLM to try and translate yours or a foreign post has more honest intention than a soliciting bot or an otherwise disruptive user that is breaking rules.
Now with that context in mind:
> How could hacker news determine such things?
Good question, I'm curious as well. I'm not well versed in the state of tracking such behavior. But I'm sure any site of size has needed to prepare for this for a while.
It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong. If I used that I would be telling my fans the opposite of what I actually meant, or various other catastrophically not-even-wrong assertions. It really, really is not figuring out what it's being fed. Sometimes I let people in on what the AI is suggesting I say.
It's not actually wresting the controls from my hands and talking to my fans AS me… yet.
"Yeah back then I was weirded out by their now standard response prediction thing, it was always just one or two words off exactly what I wanted to reply (usually missing/adding a negation, or substituting a word with an antonym)"[1]
I may be an outlier, i've actually met a couple dozen famous people, because a lot of my friends were (strong were there) industry adjacent. Like, i've been to NAMM multiple times, and iirc the tickets were quite pricey and limited.
I would rather have those "celebrities" that don't want to directly interact with plebs be honest about it. Nothing wrong with setting boundaries for your job, a lot wrong with deceiving people even if it might seem benign at first.
There is none, because the whole thing was never good faith. It's always been about tricking people into having a real interaction, to make it easier to exploit them for ad clicks or to sell them junk. That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.
None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were. It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
The point is that people pay to have a genuine interaction. If everything is fake, why interact at all? Imagine you were typing into the void and no one saw what you said. Would you continue doing it if you knew? How about on this forum?
And then you generate one more, and it's the greeting you came up with.
(and no, it's not genuine)
So I would say the golden rule continues to apply: the more effort is visible, the more genuine it is.
Being genuine is all about how much actual care and heart you pour into thing. That's really something only you can truly know. Using generative AI doesn't automatically make it not genuine, much like using a grammar checker or a thesaurus doesn't.
Conversely, not using AI tools doesn't suddenly make YouTube and OnlyFan creators' comments genuine. They never were. There is no care and heart in there, only salesmanship, and it's most likely outsourced to a brand management company anyway.
At some point, the organizer (to help situation) quoted from the abstract that was submitted, and it was indeed apparently decently written. After that, I could not help thinking that the likelihood the abstract was written by an LLM is very high. In that case, the presenter certainly reviewed it, but crucially did not write it—the thought process that makes the idea part of your active vocabulary, and you capable of expressing it, would not have taken place.
To reiterate, I don’t know whether it happened or not, but even if no LLM was involved in this instance (perhaps it was just a particularly violent case of stage fright, despite the event being very small and the IRL vibe extremely casual) it would be beyond silly to assume that it would not be happening going forward.
I used to think that it is beneficial if an LLM can help in handling certain boring signaling communication for people who are very bad at it, acting as a sort of an equalizer. A model writes stuff, you approve it, and you gain access somewhere without having, say, the written language flair of someone who went to a prestigious school, or having to spend time on something that seems unnecessary.
I am changing my mind now. Sure, the case I have described is one of the more extreme ones, but it made me think how signals are actually signals for a reason[0], and when some signals go away the communication field does not become equalized—instead, other signals and barriers are used: money, IRL meetings, invitation, some sort of privacy-violating invasive check of humanity, etc., or the communication that relied on some signals before would simply not happen now. When the Web and tech in general had removed a whole lot of constraints on communication, we still could rely on those signals, but that is apparently coming to an end.
Writing a birthday card is another endangered signal. The impression from the movies, how these gestures become very cheap if they come from some rich CEO who certainly has a personal assistant for this sort of stuff, now applies to everyone (including people who would never touch an LLM with a ten foot pole). Once we all know that a birthday card can be reduced to “I have read and approved this message”, as social beings we won’t stop needing the psychological impact of such positive gestures—we only stop receiving it.
I am not sure I see all of the above as positive (even if in the latter case I am slightly optimistic that some viable substitute for those signals could be found within personal relationships).
[0] Even that reason is dubious, like discrimination by a social criteria, well then that’s not going to go anywhere. Tech is not going to solve that human problem, besides perhaps a very fleeting handful of months when some techies gain edge while everyone is still catching on. New barriers will be erected, the core problem left unaddressed.
After a while, some dread was setting in. We started asking questions:
* Why did it hover that card?
"To pretend it's human. The card has less than 10% playrate on that class"
* Did it... just spam the Well Met meme while going face?
"Of course. Because people do it"
* Wait it ropes the opponents?
"Yes. You can set it to rope back"
We kept seeing more and more behaviors. It would squelch noisy opponents. It would even tap the ground pretending to be a bored person. And then it hit me: 95% of Hearthstone players are bots. Every single human behavior that you could perhaps use to identify 'people', it faked.
I quit Hearthstone within that week.
Yes more than 70% of Tinder profiles are already probably bots at this time. The CEO said they had an AI strategy.
People will be more and more lonely.
For the record, I'm male, mid 30's, and average looking.
Or people might be less lonely. There will come a point where the online experience becomes worthless and people will place greater importance on face-to-face interaction. That's how it was 20 years ago.
Will be very hard to tell the difference until you are intimate
To extrapolate the theme of that movie just a little bit further?
It's not like you have meaningful interactions with the other players anyway (beyond the occasional post-game friend request which has a 50/50 chance to be abusive).
(Honest question, I'm not arguing you're wrong)
Pure cope, but whatever helps you sleep better at night.
Except, you know, actually playing the game well. The bots all play aggro decks and get lower than average winrates.
> I quit Hearthstone within that week.
Why? Their presence makes climbing the ladder easier, so you get more rewards.
So it had positive effect in the end. I wish I had something like this that would stop me use any social media.
We must be looking at different social medias as this is pretty much all I see.
I really don't care about youtubers using tools like this. If it works for them and saves them time: great! If it reduces their level of authenticity: that'll lead to a correction of their popularity.
For OnlyFans... meuh. To me, the idea of interaction there reminds me strongly of the "adult" phone lines of old. You want someone to tease you and say naughty things to you? Well, you can get that for 99 cents/minute.
If you want to buy the attention of someone specific, when they can let someone/something else do that for cents on the dollar... don't be surprised to be tricked.
On only fans people are paying extra for individual specific attention.
But AI can be good enough to fool people that are specifically looking for that experience.
Sure, free market view, if the automated chat isn't good enough then it will lead to people leaving. The point is, it is good enough.
Don't think anybody is complaining that people on only fans are being duped, maybe more concerning that if you can have realistic video and chat, and people are being fooled, then there is some wider impacts on society. Large chunks of people could get fooled by any number of relationships that aren't real.
If you're paying for it, how genuine is it really?
The fans make the person famous. The famous person isn't doing a favor for the fans. They should remember that
The whole ecosystem is toxic and, at the risk of sounding like a prude, should be banned.
And the adult industry knows this, which is why sites like Onlyfans empahsize exclusivity and direct interactions. Faking those makes the whole thing even more of a scam.
It's not all black and white.
Nah, first and foremost, the comment page and the video itself should start with Surgeon General's warning: "You're watching a long-form, semi-interactive ad. None of this is authentic, and none of it is meant to do anything good or nice for you."
(And perhaps also: "You're probably better of going for a smoke instead of consuming this.")
It is akin to a movie stating "a true story" - some liberties may be taken but if the protagonist becomes world president then travels to mars and becomes king of the martians. I am going to start looking for citations.
IMO, yes. Copy-pased might be accepteable if it is the author himself doing the selection of what to copy and paste.
If the main value of the comments is interacting with the person in question then anything less is fraud. If authenticity doesn't matter then the label won't impact the desired effect.
Should people know that these interactions have never been genuine? Yes. Is that an excuse for scamming people? Absolutely not.
I don't follow any creators for such a purpose. I follow creators who make interesting and meaningful things, be they YouTube videos or otherwise. The sorts of people who make a thumbnail that explains what the video is, not just one that's most likely to get attention in the algorithm. Conversely, those folks often respond to people who comment on their interesting and thoughtful things in interesting and thoughtful ways, with interesting a thoughtful replies. This is called a conversation, and it exists for purposes far beyond engagement, and is not a task well suited to AI automation (thank fucking god).
One would counter that if your (if you are indeed some sort of creator) replies are so easily automated, and your thumbnails automated, then the question must be asked... who needs you? How long until YouTube replaces you with a bot, trained on your previous videos, and tells you to kick rocks? After all, you're an unnecessary expense.
Expecting internet celebrities to have "authentic" interactions with you is just parasocial relationship. It always has been, and gen-AI just reveals it.
Yeah, and it doesn't even change it - it just makes it more appealing for news to run with a story. Of course, the focus is on AI/authenticity angle; I'd thought they'd give some space for the plight of brand agency marketers (and cheap labor they subcontract to) being pushed out of their jobs by LLMs, but I guess that would require first explaining to people that it was those marketers who people were having their "relationships" with all along. But that's just too sad and complex to report on; it's more of an op ed stuff anyway.
Or in other wors, yes we should be concerned about the crime syndicate moving into town even if petty theft existed before.
Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
But I feel offended that they think badly printed signature with pixelation will fool me or will make it somewhat better.
I don’t miss interaction with CEO but I know someone put in effort to fool me.
From all Christmas bonuses and gifts over the years from companies I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Then don't. It is pathetic and disingenuous to pretend to be personal when you are not. Especially those who spend extra on a single squiggle of blue printer ink.
No, but I assume it would still be considered a valid signature in case of some legal dispute. The CEO may not have signed the document by hand (nor even read it), but the company placing the likeness of CEO's signature in the document signals that the CEO accepts responsibility for it. The CEO is still "in the loop" anyway, they had to personally approve the use of their signature like this.
Which is to say, I consider such "fake signatures" perfectly OK. I just don't consider them as a sign of care or personal interest.
Now, marketing communication that does it, is another story. It's bullshit all the way through, signature included.
> I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Which reminds me - even actually hand-written letters can be fake. Have you ever found a hand-written letter inviting you to a Bible study?
I grew up in a religion that's big on preaching; mostly door-to-door, but when that's for some reason impossible (e.g. time, health constraints), people would write letters instead. Some people were real "high performers" here, in the sense they would sit down over couple evenings and hand-write couple dozen letters, to be distributed around some neighborhood instead of going through it personally. I used to be impressed by dedication, but it eventually dawned on me - it's just exploiting the faux personal connection. They're selling something (which they may feel is genuinely worth it), and hand-written letters is just a sales tactic. They're hoping you pick it up and think about how much effort someone put into a personal letter to you. But the effort is not genuine; it's a fake signal. In reality, the author probably had a good time spending an evening with friends, writing a letter after letter after letter.
So while I 100% believe the intentions of that manager of yours were pure and his heart was in the right place, I post this as a warning for the general case: high effort doesn't automatically imply it's genuine and honest. If it feels like sales, it probably is.
Related: the secret to pulling off a magic trick is to put much, much more effort into preparing the trick than a reasonable person would expect. Same applies to sales.
Please speak for yourself only.
If the AI can replace you so easily then your interactions are worthless. In practice it won't say what you would have said but some corporate approved PC-filtered version of it devoid of any soul.
> None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is a sociopath.
> It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
If (when) this catches on, it won't just be "mega celebrities" using these dystopian methods. But no, even for them expanding the scope of their ability to delude and take advantage of simps is a negative.
Of course they only do it because it's inevitable, and they don't want others doing it before them.
But that does not make it "inevitable".
As such, I'm not sure where you'd like to draw the line. There's no obvious, defensible place to do it, not unless you're willing to go back up, expand the scope and fight the entire advertising industry on principle - in which case, I'll agree, because I believe that's where the problem originates and where it needs to be solved.
Market forces demand it, and people are beholden to the market so long as they exist within its sphere.
There are a plethora of other forces at work beyond "the market".
Yes, if no one imagines anything different the future will turn out as we expect. But with even small changes to legislation, norms and culture thing can turn out completely different. It is only inevitable if we resign ourselves to the status quo.
Those are the qualities that define "the market". What are the other forces you speak of?
Markets can change. They have many times before. But, and call me unimaginative if you will, I struggle to see why anyone would want to pay substantially more to ensure that comments on YouTube are written by a real, live human, let alone enough people to sustain the service. It is not like you are face-to-face at the bar. It is a blob of text that has always been disassociated from what human involvement there may have been behind the scenes.
Inevitable in the strictest literal sense may be too much, but the chances of the market changing here seem infinitesimally small to the point that "inevitable" is close enough.
It used to be that TV or newspapers or any other media was 'talking' to the audience (plural) now it talks to 'you' (singular).
Maybe it gets a bit weird when you start messaging your favourite Youtuber and they reply fast enough that you feel like it's a personal conversation rather than a professional correspondence. Sending a letter to Cronkite would have been far less immediate.
Treating media as anything other then virtually entirely read-only has always been what nutters do - they'd be the only ones writing any significant numbers letters to the person if the TV, and the same is probably true of modern media.
I'm past calling this unintentional. It's not. If it's some random account barely anyone has heard of, posting interesting stuff every now and then, then sure, that's unintentional - and also mostly harmless. However, if the creator is somewhat known[0], posts regularly, and their content is structured and polished, and they start uttering phrases like "like and subscribe" or "ring the bell"[1], or Patreon is mentioned - then you're looking at entirely intentional manipulation.
To a degree, it's unavoidable - it's the nature of the medium and the economy at large. Making quality videos is pretty much a full-time job, so even the creators with purest of hearts will be forced to include stuff that puts their videos on SponsorBlock lists. But then there's a difference between those who want you to subscribe to their Patreon and maybe buy some stickers so they can afford treating their hobby as a job, and those whose content is just a vector for feeding you first-party and third-party (sponsor) ads. Most well-known vloggers are, unfortunately, the latter. Also anyone who's called or calls themselves an influencer is - it's literally the definition of that word.
--
[0] - Perhaps you could say they're "effectively a brand" in their niche - but then, that phrase alone should tell you something.
[1] - Unless it's preceded by "climb the steps" - then you're dealing with a whole other barrel of monkeys.
I don't agree with this at all. No one is forced into making video cration their only job. Yes, making videos on weekends means less "output" and as a result a smaller following. But so what? It's still a choice. And IMO almost always a bad one if you care about quality - pretty much no person can keep up creative quality for long when working on a schedule and that's before you even get to intentionally degrading the quality for the sake of monetization.
Every person at the very least has the choice of just creating and sharing things rather than trying to build a business. Of course calling them "creators" already shifts the discussion into the worldview that shapes the current internet.
If "Youtuber" isn't a profitable job without engaging in slimy practices then maybe it shouldn't be a job at all. In fact, trying to make any human activity into a profitable business is one of the big if not the main driving forces behind the enshittification of the internet as well as many things outside it. And it's always this same justification - that engaging in shitty behavior is required to compete.
Personally I don't mind you mentioning your Patreon [0] but "like and subscribe" guarantees a dislike from me and I sure as hell am not going to subscribe [1]. Sponsored sections will get me to immediately close the video and make a mental note to ignore videos from that person in the future. Yes, I could use SponsorBlock but if someone is willing to sell themselves in that way I don't trust them or their videos to not be also compromised in other less obvious ways. It's important to remember that Youtube and similar media is completely optional entertainment and you don't need to engage in any of it.
[0] Please consider alternatives though, Patreon itself is a pretty shit website what I only use begrudgingly.
[1] I don't use youtube subscriptions at all, only RSS subscriptions for the very few channels I want to follow - most things are not important enough to get regular releases from and I'm fine with only seeing videos that are good enough for others to share them with me.
The basic reproductive qualities of females favor LTR since it takes 9 months at the very least to pop out a kid, during which time mating with other males provides no additional children for them.
It will be an interesting world if these short transactional relationships are basically available anywhere like chips out of a vending machine. I suspect most of the reason for laws against prostitution are a mixture of protectionism for prostitution rings (they need the illegality / high risk to lock in heavy profits) and disproportionately appeals towards the female reproductive strategy that is potentially at a disadvantage with guiltless "normal" sanctioned prostitution on the table at every computer and street corner.
In the OF/pet rock/pidgeon trio, the pidgeon is actually the odd one out; the other two are all about making money by exploiting people's need for socializing.
Alas, "e-celebs" are a step worse than "e-prostitutes". Both exploit parasocial relationships to trap customers, but in the end, OF performers provide customers actual value in exchange for money, while vloggers and influencers also try to sell you all kinds of random shit - their actual business is advertising.
(It's similar to analog world prostitutes vs. telemarketers; the former engage in voluntary exchange of value for money, the latter just try to scam you. That the society scorns the former while accepting the latter is some perverse inversion of morality, if you think about it. One could argue that the value prostitutes provide is poison - but then so is what telemarketers sell, too, and prostitutes don't cold-call you to trick you into buying.)
I mean, no? That’s the most cynical possible read.
A lot of successful YouTube channels don’t even interact significantly in the comments. For example, in Doug DeMuro’s latest video, I don’t see any comments from his channel in the comments.
You’re also claiming that the YouTube content business is all about exploitation, tricking people into selling them junk. But that’s also a cynical read: lots of creators don’t go down that route.
Using Doug DeMuro as another example, the only recent advertisements he has are for his own car auction site and for Turo, which are both relevant and useful services to automotive enthusiasts.
Some other YouTubers just don’t advertise at all and mostly rely on Patreon, like Technology Connections.
The renewed interest in long firm on YouTube might be something though.
A post digital addiction Internet is possible - I wonder how many early users of the internet now silence their notifications, maybe even run their screens in greyscale.
And yeah I turn off notifications always on everything. Even my smart phone is usually in Do Not Disturb.
I don't know how much of my online experience shaped this, though. I've got an asperger personality (worded as such because I've not been diagnosed) and unexpected interruptions of any kind drive me insane.
Then there are notifications like they have on LinkedIn and now Facebook where they're more like ads than they are genuine notifications. Things such as "so and so shared a post you might be interested in." These are not designed to notify of you something you wanted to be alerted to, they exist to "drive engagement." Because I don't even like notifications when it's something I care about, these really trigger me to the point where I don't even want to use the "platform" anymore. It's so bad on LinkedIn that I just stopped reading the notifications all together since if you try and turn off all notifcations on LinkedIn .. good luck. You'll spend hours navigating through complex multi-page forms clicking on toggles and then they'll just add some new notification and auto-enable it for you. There's no global "turn of all notifications for all devices" option that I've been able to find.
I don't comment on YouTube videos as much as I used to, because people started comparing the comments sections they are shown for a given video to what their friends and spouses are shown and realized that the comments section is also now algorithmically curated for you based on your viewing and commenting habits. This leads into some serious "dead Internet theory" territory, especially related to this article about OF creators using AI to reply to DMs. Because if two people can see different subsets of comments for the same video, and if YouTube has AI reply features for creators ... how can I trust that the comments I'm reading and replying to are actual humans? Even if they are humans, I don't want to interact with people that just agree with me.
My devices should work for me, not the other way around.
"The whole thing" in this case isn't just AI. It's "brands".
Given that premise the functionally the same whether the creator or the app using an LLM responds, as long as you can keep the immersion in the role play does it matter if its the Youtube or OnlyFans actually responding?
It was already some underpaid offshore worker responding for the large creators, and this is nothing new, ATN and other phone sex line providers were doing this in 1990s and there were probably similar things in times past.
Some didn't care and still used them, many were scammed, but that is the nature of the industry. Sadly it has always been on the consumer of unregulated sexual services to be aware of how the industry of their era works.
Should we legalize, regulate and make it safer for both the buyers and also sex workers? Yes, but that is an another conversation altogether.
Every single online content platform operates in the same way. Their KPI is number of hours spent on their platform, because the longer you spend there the more ads they can shove down your throat.
A content creator is not an artist or a videographer or a grandpa sharing some craft. A content creator is not even human, it's whatever can fill the <div id='content'></div>.
You only need programmers for everything else, but that damn div was hard to fill until now. Soon enough they'll have what they wished and then they'll realize the div that managed to sell ads is probably becoming useless.
As opposed to the genuine interaction the porn star you follow offers to you and the 10,000 other subscribers. The whole thing is theatre.
Kids might believe that MrBeast is replying to them personally, but I think some Internet education goes along way to help here, and I don’t know of anyone of legal age to be engaging with these platforms that would expect genuine “celebrity” responses to their comments.
In the end, you are vouching with your name. If you feel the suggestion is missing the mark, don't hit send. If the suggestion is missing the mark most of the time, the product is bad and will be shut down.
I'm curious what real interaction means here. At best the person is pretending to be a character with the intention of monetizing it. Having an AI play the character vs a person doesn't seem to make it "less real" considering the entire premise is, in this case, selling a fantasy and character?
This is a broadly successful economic use-case.
I don't care if someone with a million viewers replies just to me. Almost any video's comment stream, you can scroll through, get a general sense of what people's reactions/questions/etc are to the video, and then good creators respond in one or two comments to the masses.
The second I see someone with a huge following obviously AI responding to each of the comments, I have lost all respect for them, and people will call them out on it. I see this a lot on reddit now where people are responding to AI generated posts pointing this out, and it is causing some major issues in communities.
You can bet your ass that in the fullness of time the generated content is going to put Alphabet's interests first.
I found it repulsive on a visceral level.
Add AI to this and I'll need to start praying to God to give me the restraint of not breaking other people's smartphones.
They used to say:
"buy cheap, buy twice"
Now it'll be something like:
"interact cheap, interact with AI"
It can't all be ig/tiktok interactions, can it? I moved away from all my friends (they started it) and now it's hard to find people who have "free time" - even those that WFH! So i mostly hang out with retirees, they have free time.
1. people are working more than ever, especially in this economy. Some do lots of overtimes, some have multiple jobs (be it two literal part time jobs or full time job and doing dash services on the side). Some have other side hustles that they hope to convert into more income
Personal anecdotes: I work in games so it's never a surprise when I hear some of them need to crunch for a few months. A few others are actually trying to build up their band and do gigs every other weekend
2. non-surprisingly, people's down on money. Probably not much explanation here; not much time to hang out if they have to move (2 of my friends out of state) or job hunt after a layoff (pretty much all my friends at some point in 2023/4).
3. There's a lot of pandemic habits that never truly wore off. Some simply stay on social media, a few of my friends were always into MMOs and put more time than ever into that. They are interacting, just not necessarily with you.
4. Family. Very old knowledge, but when friends get serious partners and later spouses and especially kids, that's what they put almost all their time into. A single friend will fall off without some work.
Listen to a podcast in the car, walk around while scrolling social media, watch Twitch streams while doing the dishes. It doesn't actually fulfill your needs but it feels like it does. Gen AI is just a way to generate more of that kind of content than is possible, removing any human element, making something supposedly just as tasty, but it's empty calories.
I'm fairly gregarious, and find it fairly easy to approach strangers (if I have to). Yes, a lot of human contact can be had for fairly cheap.
However, I'm also aware that this is far from "normal" -- the average person is not this way (at least, not today). How/why things have come to be this way, I cannot pinpoint, but our lives have gotten progressively busier to the point where many of us choose convenience over "richness/fullness of experience".
However, my point is still valid, in that if you are an average person today, the prevailing social gestalt in America is "mind your own business, and don't talk to (or approach) people in the street".
Yes, weird folks like me, who are willing to be more vulnerable (what if the person you just said "Good morning!" to cusses you out?) will be able to get human contact for cheap, but high-quality Human contact is definitely waning.
P.S. Also agree with you that GenAI (and other modern technologies) are providing a frictionless existence, while also removing the richness and meaning that comes with the friction. It's the "soma" from Huxley's "Brave New World".
Also uh, I was on Facebook recently and they've added this reels feature, trying to be tiktok. Occasionally I browse my feed to see what my friends are up to, and in the reels (which can't be turned off) I see some underage girls doing really inappropriate things for views. I think this is really problematic. I don't want to be shown this, and I also feel upset that young girls are being encouraged by social media platforms to use their sexuality to get attention online (and make said platforms more money by doing so).
Is it? Who in their right mind pays for porn?
It could just aswell be a 98% money loundry scheme.
The people I have known that have made OnlyFans content made as little money as you would expect.
There has always been money in porn though with a giant power law distribution. The only difference now is that instead of some sleazebag porn producer trying convince some woman they are the next Jenna Jameson, we have this sleazebag technology platform doing the same thing.
One of my former colleagues bought a flat in london with the proceeds from their dancing in night clubs. Which I thought at the time, and still do, is might impressive. They keep that private, for a number of sadly obvious reasons, however they are not ashamed of it.
They refused video chat, because it was less protected, and less anonymous. In a (good) club, you are protected by bouncers, no phones, no intimidation. OF and the rest you have limited control on who shares your stuff, so its much harder to be a part time model.
Apparently so. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_sex)
"By the end of the 1980s, nearly all of the major local phone companies in the United States, plus the major long-distance carriers, were actively involved in the phone sex business[...] In 2002 profits from phone sex were estimated at one billion dollars a year"
And in relative terms in particular that seems pretty huge given how much smaller all the phone and online markets were compared to what they're now.
Well the comparative change is kinda the point. OF is huge and content producers have a chance of making big bucks, as opposed to what was there before
Absolute shocker.
regardless, though, does it matter why?
Perhaps this is why every platform ends up banning or pushing all the XXX to a red light district.
It doesn't always have to be hardcore, but the implication of having an OF is "porn star".
>> employ the same tactic of seeing how much you are willing to pay and then increasingly offering you more and more expensive content
Oh, in that way.
There should be some hashtag for men forced onto relationships when all they wanted was the sex /s… but honestly, if roles were reversed this would totally exist
I could well image if you looked like a young Clooney, it'd not be hard to arrange one night stands, either.
It's released in 2017, so more cam-girl than OF model, but it shows a deeply parasocial girlfriend-stand-in relationship of someone that spends a good chunk of his disposable income on that. I think the now common OF model + chatters are an evolution of that has even more tendencies to create girlfriend-stand-in relationships.
Offline: I meet many people as I travel and skip company (I have a small company doing emergency software/hardware fixes, so jobs are very short and diverse) a lot and talk a lot with strangers for fun; sometimes we end up going deep in the night over beers and things come out. Usually they are somewhat awkward and lonely guys with the tendency to see women as things; that intersects often with programmers/engineers. These are not even the weirdest things I hear from strangers either.
I could imagine a class action law suit where the company is sued for fraud on the basis that it is selling real interactions with models.
OnlyFans user should know better, but you could make the case they were defrauded for services (in this case, interaction with the model).
And I am sure there are many men who believe they are talking to the creator and not a chatter or bot.
What content they provide is up to the creators. Which is why it became a de facto porn site in the first place. They essentially AirBudded the site: “well the rules don’t say I can’t show hole”. And since it was the only thing in the site getting traction, they turned a blind eye to it.
But I don’t think OnlyFans ever promised subscribers any particular interaction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41879574
I was surprised the Tates were bragging in great detail about doing that years ago and no one seems to care that they defrauded men out of millions
https://x.com/gadget44027447/status/1860339419020231071?s=46...
It wasnt even AI, just if else shit and looking for keywords in their messages and then reply X or Y lol.
One of my favorite quotes: Never underestimate the stupidity of a man with his dick in one hand and his wallet in the other.
Any other crazy stories from those times? You seemed to be ahead of the curve.
Bitcoin wasn't around yet.
Tons of crazy stories for sure. Captchas weren't invented yet, no one really had any rate limits on login pages, inbox spam filters were easily bypassable, trojans like sub7 were just coming around, all kinds of wild fun back then. If you wanted to make money, there nothing was really stopping you.
The 90s were peak internet imo
Would you do it again?
It taught me a lot and now some almost 30 years later I'm still a nerd and programming bots that make me money.
What if they spin the service as "an experience" rather than specifically about interaction with a model? And who'se to say that a model has to be a live model anyway?
They (1) do have a policy (and separate standardized fan/creator contract) about their limited responsibility for fan/creator interactions, and that contract includes a fan acknowledgement that creators may use third-party assistance in interactions, but also (2) a policy that requires creator to explicitly disclose any AI-created content as AI-created.
If OnlyFans users were thinking straight they wouldn't be wasting money on a model who doesn't care about them to begin with. I don't really know that I would expect them to do the math on their own on this one.
For some value of real...
At least a stripper is actually there in front of you.
> I think we'll get many more people like this over time if we don't change something.
The “but” there suggests you don’t really understand the things you are comparing to OF. The illusion of companionship has always been a major part of those in-person services.
If you expect realism from an adult entertainment site, you might as well go buy a bridge or two.
Oh, but they do. And they will sue to keep it that way.
I don't think being dismissive of consumer rights just because it deals with something icky is wise. We need to be able to have adult discussions about adult content - a lack of this is why the internet has been quietly filled with porn of dubious consent featuring models of dubious ages for the past 20 years.
Pretty sure they have.
> I could imagine a class action law suit where the company is sued for fraud on the basis that it is selling real interactions with models.
They fairly explicitly are not, as (1) they aren’t selling the creator services, that’s explicitly (as agreed to by fans in their agreement with OF) a separate (standardized) contract between the fan and the creator, and (2) that standardized contract includes an agreement that the fan acknowledges that the creator may employ third parties to assist with interactions, and, as regards AI content specifically, (3) AI generated content is required by the terms imposed on creators to be explicitly labelled, where it is allowed.
> But you could make the case they were defrauded for services (in this case, interaction with the model).
IF a particular representation around a particular interaction evidenced a special promise with regard to that interaction beyond the standard contract, maybe, by the creator, and in violation of OF’s explicit terms for creators prohibiting false and misleading representations.
So I do GTM and work a lot with marketing websites for companies with long sales processes.
The company mentioned there, Supercreator, funnily has a CRM - which is not just some funky AI chatbot thingie, but a proper enterprise thing that people use when doing sales.
It looks like they're treating creators and the "agencies" (whatever that means) as what we would potentially call "SMBs", and sell this CRM thing to them to manage their "customers", which I assume are the fans or subscribers or whatever on the OF side of things.
This is insanely interesting to me. Look at the website - you have a "request a demo" section (which is super enterprise B2B), look at the menu, it's like an enterprise SaaS website.
What the actual fuck is going on here lol
- 99% of the time the models on OF don’t actually have any conversation(many of them don’t speak English at all), they may not even signup on OF. They are “managed” models(aka pimp-ed through a local pimp or totally remote/web pimp/agency))
- the DMs were handled by chatters in the first place so this has nothing to do with the models.
Tricking a human to interact with a bot is imo in the same category as trolling, spam or propaganda. It's a way to redirect attention and energy away from people, without spending any yourself. Sure, we can laugh at the simps wasting money on "interactions" with streamers, but it's no fun when our Google searches and Amazon reviews are filled up with AI slop, is it? It was already bad before AI, and now we're moving towards noise levels that will cripple human-crafted content.
Labeling content is the first, and right thing to do, just like the unwritten rule of giving credit to a creator when you post their work. It doesn't stop ill-faithed AI slop, or human content farms, but it can at least create a social expectation and prevent normalizing it.
They will work harder and get paid less. Just like Amazon affects small store owners.
Host: "You want to ask, so ask."
Protagonist: "Are you real?"
Host: "Well if you can't tell, does it matter?"
It always gives me chills because at least for me, the answer is like Schrödinger's cat. It really doesn't matter at all if you never know the truth and definitely seems to matter if you do find out.
They don't do this at all. I know a guy who worked as a cam-girl manager for some time. His job was to communicate in her place with 4-6 people at the same time (via text of course) while the model "acts" on the screen.
(At least, that will be true for run of the mill cam girls. Obviously certain other types of influencers may be more difficult to emulate via AI.)
Honestly this dystopia is a big letdown over the one I was expecting.
Due to the amount of incels or men who aren't really in relationships or even work these days, they should be causing significant social unrest as they have nothing to lose and try and overthrow the current social structure. In reality we hardly see any real violence or trouble from incels other than the odd angry rant on social media and the idea is that things like porn, video games and social media take care of the base needs just enough to stop the angry from boiling over and causing real trouble.
This type of terrorism did happen in Germany i.e. the "Halle" shooter, but he had to rely on homemade weapons with his own black powder ammunition and his attack failed, because his guns weren't strong enough to breach doors at a synagogue. What he did do is shoot a random woman passing close by (less than 5m distance) who was angrily glaring at him and then he went to a random kebab shop to shoot up an immigrant, before the police caught him.
It's really mostly a matter of keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have access to them.
What about knives? I see news about knives attacks from China and Japan quite often.
> I see news about knives attacks from China and Japan quite often.
But we shouldn't forget that a big part of the "incel" community is actively pushing for reducing rights & liberties of women, because they see them as "things" or just "lesser humans".
If you replace real women by AI sexbots, not only you remove them a source of income (I know, it's not perfect today either, with pimps & stuff like that, but at least some women can make a living with this) but also there's a big risk that the AI are going to be quite extreme in their behavior, alienating "incels" even more, which would be harder for real women to do.
Money is in the driver's seat. Not men's rights or women's rights. People can certainly have their preferred philosophies, but that's not going to change what's going to happen.
True of some -- mostly ones that don't know English, or sometimes just for the first week or so -- but not all. Not even most.
Of course big creators have long outsourced this. You aren't writing with them but with someone entirely different who gets paid to answer messages. Using AI is just the next step in enshittification of something that's pretty exploitative to begin with.
just to put "whale" in perspective, here. We're not talking about a thousand or two.
Hm...
I assume custom requests would either happen realtime-- in which case it's not currently possible to substitute AI video output-- or asynchronously-- in which case the proof of personal connection eventually happens during a future realtime video stream.
If the customer is paying for DM'ing during times when the person isn't streaming, I'm having a hard time imagining why it would matter whether AI is used or not. Well, at least if the quality is decent enough for what I imagine are rather terse, domain-specific DMs. :)
You'd be surprised. A lot of men really do just have no-one to talk to.
Which is not the case currently, you think you're talking to your favorite porn actress but you're talking to some dude in India pretending to be her and trying to sell you "exclusive content" (i.e. prerecorded videos from a catalog).
Of course, the OF creator can't form true relationships with thousands of people. I'm guessing that the implicit mental model in the heads of OF subscribers who "donate" to creators, is that this is a competition — that they're all participating in something like an ongoing hidden auction for a slice of the creator's limited time. They think "if I just pay the most, then she'll feel obligated to pay attention to me." (Of course, most creators feel no such sense of obligation.)
If OF subscribers can know in advance that that jump is fundamentally impossible — such as if they can discern that a dumb AI is responding to their donation-attached messages, and that that AI fundamentally has no feature to forward messages to the creator themselves — then they probably wouldn't bother "donating" in the first place.
I think these people are, by and large, under no illusion that their AI companion is anything other than a computer program, but they get attached anyway and choose to live in the illusion.
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Re: the former, I would read "interacting with an OF creator" as no different than interacting with any other "their job is to pretend to like you for money, but they aren't putting themselves in a position where they're ever obligated to do anything for you" type of sex worker. For example, the employees at strip clubs; or for maybe an even better analogy, the employees at a Japanese "host club".
These are quintessential parasocial relationships: the consumer of such a service is buying an illusion, but the "product" they expect to be buying is specifically the illusion of fondness, as performed by a human. They're buying a pure act of emotional labor done by a human — "service with a smile", but where the service is the smile. (It's the same thing people get out of donating to a Twitch streamer — the streamer thanks them on-stream for their donation. They get noticed in a performatively appreciative manner.)
And, depending on how in-demand that human's time is / how many other consumers want that same emotional labor output from them, that emotional labor can be incredibly highly-valued in the market. Which is why some OF subscribers — despite knowing that the possibility of deeper connection to the OF creator is likely illusory — are still willing to pay huge amounts of money. They aren't expecting to literally enter into a sugaring relationship with the OF creator; but they are expecting to get the creator's attention and possibly receive a hand-written thank-you note or shout-out or some custom selfie they didn't ask for. An act of emotional labor on the OF creator's part, performatively responding to their donation.
But, like with going to see a magic show, this kind of illusion is only valuable when it has high verisimilitude. Nobody will pays to see a bad magic act, if they know it's going to be bad. And nobody donates to an OF creator, if they know they're going to get AI responses.
(I'm sure there are some OF consumers who are not observant enough to realize they're receiving AI responses, and so feel like they are receiving the parasocial emotional labor service they paid for. Just like there are some people — usually children — who are not observant enough to notice the flaws in a bad magic act, creating a market for bad magicians.)
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Re: the latter — paid subscribers to AI character chatbot services treat this economic relationship entirely differently. They don't see the individual chatbot as anything that holds value. And a business model that tries to get them to pay for a specific AI chatbot character, would likely never work.
Rather, from my understanding, to the people who subscribe to these things, paying for the service is analogous to paying a subscription to a game streaming service like GeForce Now.
In both cases, there's a large quantity of interactive entertainment out there that you want to "play". And running that interactive entertainment locally, would require capabilities that none of the devices you own possess. And it would be very expensive to buy the fancy hardware with those capabilities—possibly to the point of financial impracticality, if you want a top-of-the-line experience. (And, funny enough, in both of these cases, the fancy hardware is a GPU!)
Also, you might want some additional convenience — maybe you don't have anywhere to put a gaming rig, but want to play everything on a laptop. Or even on your phone sometimes.
A game streaming service has one major USP, and one minor USP:
- The major USP is that it trades CapEx for OpEx. Rather than owning / maintaining / dealing with a gaming rig, you can effectively rent one in the cloud.
- The minor USP is that it might provide subsidized access to a number of entertainment titles you'd otherwise have to purchase. (Xbox Game Pass does; GeForce Now does not.)
AI character chatbot services — which form a spectrum with generic flat-monthly-fee "Inference-as-a-Service" providers intended for use with private FOSS AI-character-chat frontends (e.g. SillyTavern) — have the same two USPs:
- The major USP is, again, trading CapEx for OpEx.
- The minor USP is a bit stranger — the services that specifically market themselves as "AI character chat" services often market a model that's being continuously fine-tuned on other users' interactions to improve its fidelity for the specific use-case; and, less often, market a proprietary stable of characters developed for the service. (But "AI characters" themselves — the definitions that make a chatbot into a particular character — are mostly considered to be a commodity; they're posted for free to various "AI character card" hosting services, and most systems in this space just expect you to import the characters you're interested in from such hosting services, rather than offering their own proprietary ones.)
All in all, there's no "illusion" here for anyone to "fall for." There's just a desired capability (running AI models to play with), with a zero-sum trade-off being made between self-hosting that capability, vs. paying someone else to manage it for you.
There is, as always, the exception that the world contains some very unobservant people — possibly again children — who will mistakenly develop a parasocial bond to AI characters because they fail to notice the flaws and limitations that make interactions with an AI character qualitatively different from interactions with a human, and thereby fail to move past the initial sense of full immersion/verisimilitude they feel when interacting with such systems.
But these chumps are the exception. Most subscribers to these services are not confused about what they're paying for; they have moved past any initial impression of full immersion. Instead, they just see AI characters as fun toys — entertainment software! — and they're paying $10/mo or whatever because that's a fair price to pay to access a unique type of fun toy.
The key testable hypothesis here, is that once even our phones have the GPU grunt required to run high-fidelity "roleplaying" LLMs locally, the bottom will drop out of this market; there'll be no reason to pay for an "AI character streaming service" indefinitely, once your phone's OpEx gets you free unlimited access to that capability locally, in the form of a free or one-time-cost app that does the same thing.
(...also, just as a tangent: this is probably the "everybody knows it but nobody's going to say it" reason that so many people got so excited about the new Mac Mini. It's a perfect single-user AI-character-chatbot RP model host, that takes up minimal space and has a reasonable price-point. Many people currently paying for these services would actually rather trade OpEx for CapEx — the CapEx was previously just too dang high to make it worth it!)
It's not make-belief to the mark (or john) - they believe they are in a relationship with the person / thing talking back to them.
> they believe
Is it a disorder to be depressed when the actual situation is really screwed up and soul crushing? Because most folks will get prescribed anti-depressants for this kind of situation.
Since practically, what else should someone do?
Move to a remote cabin in the forest.
It’s hard to fathom how so many people can be so gullible.
"Lonely" is probably the deeper issue here.
It's not quite the-Queen-is-my-friend levels of parasocial but it does seem to be about intimacy.
What happens to that business model if customers paying on that basis realise they are seeing & talking to a bot? Seems quite footshooty.
speaking of which anybody have recommendations? I want to run my own inference in colocation too
I could see these pseudorelations, which are already mediated by so much fakery, just continue to evolve in that direction?
Maybe everyone gets their own OnlyFan creators which are tailored/adapt to their personal desires?
In the future all of this is AI generated, multimedia, tailored to your wants, available and fresh 24/7.
Capcut has(had?) a feature to just pump this garbage out. I thought i had a video on youtube i made with capcut but apparently i have scruples and didn't even upload it privately.
Porn has become such a commodity, access to the images and videos to provide fake content has never been easier. Using bots to schedule posts and respond to comments has lowered the bar even lower and clouded the ability for people to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.
There is plenty of generic porn for free on the internet. The only advantages an Only Fans creator has over that are
- being more "real" and relatable
- forming parasocial relationships through engagement
- providing "niche" content (like the teasing egirl non-nudes Belle Delphine became famous for)
AI gives you none of that. It's not very good at niche content, and for the other two it can only give illusions that will break as people get used to AI. In the beginning there is a novelty factor to AI interactions, like Twitch's Neuro-Sama, but that will wear off. And after that all you're left with are disillusioned customers.
The best OF creators have simply mastered distribution. Either they have taken success in one market and pivoted to OF or they are relentlessly marketing themselves through other platforms and viral stunts.
I have yet to see an AI master the distribution side. At the least good genAI will see the rise of male OF creators
i can imagine the backlash, as if it were already happening. a decent amount of the OF "creators" are making 7 figures a year off this, and lots are making median yearly pay in a month. Having to share that with men who are technically adept and good at marketing is gunna chafe.
> There is already more content out there than a human can reasonably watch. I submit there's more "9/10 or better" content than anyone can reasonably watch or experience, even if you set some arbitrary cutoff date like, oh, february 22nd, 1988 and before is all you're allowed to consider.
Law and Order (one of my favorite background noises) has something like >650 hours of content, and i've watched it all. Multiple times. that's nearly 1/3rd of a work-year!
I've been a fanfic writer, spinning up fictional characters for company and writing their exploits, and it was indeed compelling and interesting in its own right. I think more people than you suspect will go for the hollow pretend version, especially since they're already aware the 'real' OnlyFans person is not gonna come seek them out. Why not go for the clean break of an entirely fictional thing?
They seem to be pictures and videos from actual people, but AI-modified to add the characteristics of the AI model they're pretending to be.
Some of them have the IG subscription system active and most of them have OF links or similar in their profile.
Reporting them to Meta does nothing.
I believe FanVue (OF competitor) allows these AI creations though?
In fact, looking on their web site the first model in their list of top creators is AI:
BUT... from what I understand some agencies managing these accounts are training models with hundreds of photos of the creator and then using that to push out more photos in different outfits and locations without the creator being involved at all.
There might be a lot of fish in the sea, but there's a lot of pollution too.
I think OF itself lets you send "personal" mass messages with something like "Hey, $name, I've missed you. Here, pay $100 to see a single picture"
Dunno how thick do you have to be to believe the message was sent only to you and none of the other 10000 subscribers...
I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter (wired.com) 32 points 6 months ago
The outsourced the interactions to third world "typists" that took care of it.
This is just an evolution of that, and probably provides a better experience, since they're able to tailor the model in a way that someone speaking English as a second language never could.
It starts feeling pretty weird when he starts talking about conversations where someone spends $1000.
https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/christian-onl...
And this isn't a small amount of money, if I understood the screenshot of Sophie Rain's revenue she made 43 million from messages. But maybe it was just tens of millions which is still a lot of money.
a trully automatic economy
My partner did OF on a small scale (just for fun, she liked it) and I spent a month or so iterating on a platform for her to use. Some sort of CRM on top of the OF API: post scheduling, tracking income, users, tips. I spent some time chatting and learned some interesting stuff about other peoples jobs but I think the general idea, and a sentiment that's echoed here, is that people are just lonely. They wanted someone to talk to who's also beautiful.
I did end up using a model with fine tuning on her past conversations to match the wording and text style but ultimately didn't move forward because she didn't want to commoditize herself in that way.
Even on the high end, most workers would be happy to actually get to know a client - if the client isn't totally off-putting and is willing pay $100/hr for Skype! But if a client wants canned responses, they'll get canned responses. And maybe AI is actually an improvement for those types of clients if they can retain some plausible deniability.
Hold on folks. The internet is about to get weird.
This is an archived post from 1998.
First step is Only Fans influencers automating their DMs. Next step is the fans automating the influencers. Who needs Only Fans when you can generate a GF.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Fwb8OrvSw&pp=ygUMbmcgcmVzb25...
You will feel better just saying what you feel. Intuition does exist.
Learn the dying art of in-person socialization. Memorize interesting things to talk about if needed. Buy a deck of icebreaker cards for inspiration.
Strike up conversations anywhere and everywhere. Learn magic tricks to entertain people with. Film things in your neighborhood and show people clips that you think they'd like.
For the rusty or nerdy (like me), write test cases for your interactions. Figure out what went wrong if someone isn't receptive. Refine your approach until you figure it out.
"Digital everything" has proven to be a dead end. We need to go backwards to go forwards.
I first developed coping skills for work situations in my first internship. Thanks to a great manager who recognized some of my issues and was able to give contextual help. After that my professional life was better, but I struggled in social and academic contexts. Eventually, I started to get the social/relationship part down but only by being forced to because I moved to another country for a job.
Without these events, I'm not sure I'd have developed these skills. I still struggle and eventually pursued medication. I suspect some people have an undiagnosed condition, but the majority have limits to their emotional development, challenges from their upbringing, etc. that are very individual to resolve.
Unless there is some forcing function, I think the majority of individuals will fall into paths which don't help them. Then it's even harder to get onto a path where it's /just/ a matter of "developing skills".
And it's not even necessarily much of a skill, it's more spending the time and effort to find people you connect with (and being open to the people you do connect with).
For me, I'm a bit of a screen junkie with social anxiety. One of my blockers was negative self-talk. I would think, "They're going to get angry. They're going to ignore you. They're busy. You're going to waste their time."
I started replacing that with images of the person being interested and delighted by the interaction. That helped, but I also knew that wasn't realistic if I just walked up and blurted out, "Hi, I'm an isolated remote dev and I'd like to talk." Someone might be sympathetic, but I didn't want sympathy; I wanted people to have fun. So I started using the techniques I mentioned.
This can all be learned from books on small talk, personality psychology, social dynamics, etc. But unfortunately, it's rarely talked about or taught, at least in my circles. And people are suffering as a consequence.
Isolation has a feedback that makes it hard to break out of once you're in really deep. The more desperately lonely you are, the worse your social skills.
Strangers are strange when you're a stranger.
"How to talk to anyone" would be my first recommendation.
i cant believe anymore that "negative self-talk is bad for you" has to lead to "the negative self-talk is false." because frequently it's exists as a defense mechanism. it's likely i've just trapped in the spiral too long. but i don't have enough counterexamples to disprove them. the longer i chose to go on the more counterexamples i accumulated until it was too much.
from this I concluded that I needed a type of relationship closer to a steward...but there's a reason people beyond a certain age don't seek out those relationships. it creates a power imbalance that is ruinous. i didn't know this. i spent years in that kind of friendship. i paid the price. i do feel like i wasted their time.
Timing and location is super important too though I haven't figured out the best places. Haven't had much luck at bars and stuff despite that being a common suggestion. Everyone seems to be there already with a social group and have zero interest in meeting a stranger.
He explained it is a skill, which needs to be learned, while many people use an app because it reduces their anxiety.
Are you sure.
I think Only Fans was growing pretty rapidly before Covid and before AI.
If I want a cute furry girl to scream at me that spaces are better than tabs, so i'm worthless coder, I'm not getting that in regular 'in-person' socialization.
It can be done over the net too, but in-person is better while the net has been actively and intentionally made worse to monetize addiction.
If you want a girlfriend/boyfriend you start by making friends with people. Then you will notice some of your friends are of your sexually compatible gender, which means you may have friends that want to have sex.
Also helps to avoid listening to incel/femcel, PUA, and similar bullshit that actively makes the listener repellent. A lot of women for example will ghost at the first whiff of Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson adjacent thinking, and as a man I'd do the same at the first whiff of the kind of stuff you hear on the angry womens' subreddits. I don't want someone with a head full of influencer poison.
A major reason to get off the apps is because the apps (social media and similar) reward toxicity and exploitation and are structurally designed to be maximally addictive, meaning they're made to keep you on them not talking to other people. Social media stopped being social around 2012 really. I call them tobacco companies of the mind.
The real "red pill" is disconnecting from the matrix of social media, influencers, and PUA/MGTOW/incel (or their female equivalents, which do exist) stuff and being human. The "matrix" is monetized, manipulative, addictive social media and apps. Influencers are people who have aligned themselves intentionally with this matrix to ride on it and monetize you.
Wasn't that how it was in the movie? Blue pill == stay connected to the matrix, red pill == go to the real world.
I fear sometimes that sociopaths have inherited the earth.
I mostly meant to say that there seems to be something wrong with society at large and that it's leaking into our language. I view it in terms of psychological framing (or something like it). We use these very utilitarian and transactional phrases more and more frequently, and I suspect it may reflect a deeper change in the way we think about others.
ugh at the huge proportion of humanity that's like this, though
Not a good advice if your friends group are the same sex with you, which tends to be the case for a lot of people.
You gotta fish where the fish are.
Like, if you're unemployed and you want a job, you don't first go out making friends, hoping that once you become friends one of them can give you a job. You get a job by looking for a job and applying to jobs. Sure, depending on where you live and who you engage with you, might luck out and meet someone who can have a job for you but that's not the norm and you don't want to leave your survival to that random chance.
Similarly, if you want a romantic relationship you need to engage in dating activities specifically designed to maximize the protentional of meeting a romantic partner, not in friend making activities hoping one of them will be your next romantic partner because you might be wasting a lot of time with no returns.
Actually, I think the opposite is better: Engaging in dating activates can actually net you some friends along the way if the romantic part doesn't click.
I know almost none such people. Do you see how anecdotes work? Almost everyone I know met their SOs either in college, via online dating or at work, and rarely at a sports group or through a common friend gathering.
>If you have a friend group with a healthy mix of gender+sexual orientations
So a friend group that isn't gender mixed is unhealthy? I think friend groups form (as adults) organically via matching interest and personalities, they're not guaranteed to be mixed gender, especially if you're a male into male dominated jobs and hobbies. What now? Do I kick out Bob from my friends group and tell him due to DEI requirements, his position needs to be filled by a female in order to achieve a "healthy mix"?
>those people know other people, then you have a good shot at finding somebody you gel with.
Just because people know people doesn't automatically mean more dates for you. A lot of those people might already be in relationships or just incompatible with you romantically or even socially. Not every new person you get to meet will want to be your date or even your friend.
You're underestimating how many things need to fall into place in order to meet your SO "from other people". It's a lot more luck than things you can control.
> A friend invites you to their friends party and you spend some time talking to people.
I think your PoV and advice in entirely skewed towards college/early 20's dating when everyone's single and throwing parties.
Also, when I said parties that includes potlucks, D&D sessions, going to the movies, book clubs, etc.
I also did not mean to imply that a sausage party was by definition an unhealthy way to hang. You do you.
And by the way, I'm in my 30s.
Also either male dominated activities or non existent in my area. Hence why dating apps and bars/clubs are popular.
> going to the movies
BTW, How are you meeting your potential date by going to the movies? Dunno about you but whenever I went to the movie people just watch the movies, not talking to others. How do you flirt there?
Maybe it's just me, but my luck was women only wanted me when I was too busy or having too much fun to go looking. I have a terrible poker face and if it seems like I'm looking for love then for whatever reason in my individual case it seems to be taken as a sign I don't deserve it. Of course if someone was offering, I might free up the time.
Not sure how common this is, but I've heard same from others.
I've been married for a long time but I've seen enough of today's dating scene from the outside in and heard enough about it from people in it to think it really is worse than when I was dating in the 2000s. I think the reason is the normalization of this PUA meat market mentality, which has come in part from influencers pushing these ideas into the culture and in part from the nature of dating apps (especially Tinder) and how they encourage it.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-22-meat-your-match-with-thi...
There's always been a meat market aspect to dating of course, but we've turned it to eleven and taken away the human part entirely. On top of this we've slathered a layer of toxic gender stereotypes received by way of shitty grifter self help gurus.
I feel like my wedding was one of the last flights out of Saigon.
It's a figure of speech, not a literal meaning. If you can't make the distinguishment, then I'm sorry.
>I think the reason is the normalization of this PUA meat market mentality
What if the PUA mentality is the effect and not the cause? Simply look at the statistics on how harshly women rate men on tinder vs how men rate women, and it might sink in who the meat market really is
This is not a personal attack, but just my observation of how people perceive the way social interactions should work. Part of these perceptions would also be why people are driven to chat with women on OnlyFans, and why an AI would be effective....
A long time ago I started noting when people (esp. my partner) said they like certain things in my phone, then I get them as gifts days, weeks, months, years later. People now think I'm very thoughtful, but I'm just a good note taker. The experience made me think that people who are naturally more "thoughtful", at least partially, just have better memories.
I also second your approach. I have a todo.txt file of various restaurants, experiences, places my gf wants to visit. Next time I want to plan a date, I look up the list ("Hey babe, let's go that that [RESTAURANT MENTIONED 3 MONTHS AGO] tonight. It's proven to be a very good system. <3
(Same, not a personal attack, I'm interested in this subject and good to see it from different views).
But like others in the thread I do believe that practicing socialization will cause you to improve at it.
And at the same time people will think you're creepy and awkward if you "don't do it right", and if you tell them it's something you are consciously trying to improve on and you show them your written test cases, they might also think you're creepy and weird. One of society's non-rational double standards.
From my view:
/Ok ready? uhhhh ooooo here goes!/
Me: "Hey nice shoes."
You: "... thanks?"
/OMG I DID IT/
Me: "this is my stop, have a great day!"
/OMGEXCELLENTFINISHSOHAPPY/
Me: "Hey nice shoes!"
You: "Thanks" (weirdo)...?
Me: "this is my stop, have a great day!"
You: /wow, ... i think he genuinely just wanted to give a compliment. didn't even try to bum money off me. huh./
point is - doesn't matter if they're confused or surprised you spoke to them. there's an assumption that if you speak up you must be out to manipulate them (sell something, convert someone, beg, etc.) and when you prove youre not, you help normalize ambient conversation AND fix your own sense of isolation.
That's not to say that no one should ever say anything to an stranger, it's just to point out that there are non-zero consequences to your actions.
I think that depending on who you talk to they'll give more or less consequence to making someone feel uncomfortable. (I'm not strictly talking about dating or talking to someone you are possibly romantically interested in). Some specific extreme examples are: at work or if you are in a position of power over someone (you are their boss or their teacher)- or these situations there are more consequences to having an interaction where someone felt uncomfortable.
Yes, those are cherry-picked relationships, but just to say that fear of making people uncomfortable is a real and valid concern. Is your discomfort made up in your head? Many times it is.
Back to OP, relationships are complicated... it's not hard to see why people end up talking to AI bots instead.
Fact is, the more you worry, the less success you'll have. Which reminds me of Hamlet -- the original worry-wart -- who said it best:
> 'conscience does make cowards of us all,'
I get it that the article is about incorporating LLMs/chatbots. Don't many/most dating apps play similar dirty tricks?
Technology only enhances what we are.
There's always gonna be supply, and there's always gonna be demand, you can never get rid of it since you can't get rid of biology. Even some animals provide sex in exchange for goods. As long as both parties are adults and consenting, I don't really see the fuss on this topic. Just legalize it, regulate it, tax it, and everyone wins.
"But it's not allowed according to the $RELIGIOUS_BOOK..." Shut up and mind your own business. If you live in a secular society, religion has no say in this.
And if you do need to do that for work functions or something, you don't have to disclose that you are just doing how to win friends and influence people.
IMO one of the major problems of the very online era is that we hypothesize about what somebody might find objectionable, and then act like it really matters. Some people might find anything creepy and objectionable. But we managed to get by—even with the knowledge that some people didn’t like is—before we invented all these theories.
Could be anynthing - get more fit by taking up sports or gym. Men are more attracted to fit women, why would an opposite direction be different. Each of us can be a better version of ourselves. With improvements comes better confidence, again a thing the opposite notices.
Then it will start working on its own. Help it by exposing yourselves more to the opposite sex ie in some social events related to your strengths to speed things up.
This trajectory will change people for the better. Its really that simple (and complex)
Buy a new shirt that fits. Generally, don't dress like a total slob and care about your-silly-self a bit.
>No faking, no lies, just a bit of good old hard work
While I agree about no lies. no faking - faking confidence initially does help immensely - if you don't believe yourself, nobody else will. Being confident is a skill that can be learnt.
It doesn't mean even fake one can't make a difference, depends on 'target', it maturity, intelligence etc. But if you expect a lot from the opposite side, you need to deliver at least as much, the more the better.
Agree with appearance, its a bit silly game but it works so who am I to question it.
No doubt about it. Many people can tell how forced it feels. Yet, w/o any confidence (fake or otherwise), there won't be any steps made - hence no progress. Again, with time confidence can be 'mastered'.
Adaptive socialisation happens through conversation. It is as scary to live in a society where conversation is forbidden as it is in a society where discourse is manipulated or perhaps even made overwhelmingly toxic to the point where people relapse into the sort of brutish tribalism that... forms the plot of many Roddenberry episodes.
“Fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment. Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder that often develops after one or more panic attacks.
Symptoms include fear and avoidance of places and situations that might cause feelings of panic, entrapment, helplessness, or embarrassment.
Treatments include talk therapy and medication.”
turns out, the poison (talking) is the cure (talking).
Whoever came up with the modern definition of "agoraphobia" has failed to define the term. "Fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment." Is there any other kind of fear? The word is so broadly inclusive as to have little meaning.
ἀγορά (agora) – assembly, especially an assembly of the people; the place of assembly; speech; market, marketplace [1]
φόβος (phobos) – fear, terror, alarm, fright, panic [2]
Agoraphobia seems straightforwardly to mean "fear of public spaces and interactions." A person might say that etymology is not definition, but if you look at the most common examples of agoraphobia, this is exactly what's being described. [3]
We need to stop being so "inclusive" in our definitions! The purpose of a definition is to make something finite, i.e., to circumscribe its boundaries in order to enable clear thinking about that specific term. Broad definitions harm critical thinking.
1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%81%C...
2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CF%8C%CE%B2%CE%BF%CF%8...
3. https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/agoraphobia/over...
It's kinda tricky to start conversations with strangers in a world where everyone out in public has their Airpods in, in an effort to tune out everyone and everything around them, or in cultures where talking with strangers if frowned upon.
For example, I'm trying to make new friends now in my 30's in a foreign country where everyone has their friends/cliques since childhood, and it's basically playing the game on ultra nightmare difficulty.
I can see why a lot of people just give up and hermit themselves into their introvert hobbies and resort to para-social relationships with people online, as forced socialization consumes a lot of time and effort with next to no returns.
You're missing the point. Airpods are not a core issue, but people insulating themselves audibly (and maybe soon visually if the Apple Vision Pro catches on) certainly doesn't help spark up random encounters with strangers in public.
Sure, some of it is due to more awareness on mental health than in the past, but a lot of it is also due to things just being worse and more difficult.
As in - When you, the digital-first-lonely-guy, put away your phone and turn to the obviously-busy guy on his phone with earbuds in and doing super important socialdoomscroll work and you say "Hey, cool shoes!" suddenly it's not a problem anymore.
Instantly.
And it's never not been that way.
Now, you're correct that if they just fucking did it, it'd _probably_ be fine. But what happens when they try to speak to their peers who scoff and ignore them? Or when every person they try to talk to simply can't hear them. Or when there simply isn't a place to go after school and chat, and all social interaction stands on phone organizing as a prerequisite.
Yes, if they broke the seal on interpersonal interaction they'd see that almost everyone is actually positive and happy to speak and make friends. But that seal is getting harder and harder to break every day
It reminds me of the reproductive crisis that started happening in Japan some decades ago. The blame, as I recall it, was on the rigid social norms meant that it was super uncomfortable for everyone whenever a guy tried to talk to a girl. Guys stopped trying and switched to being absorbed in jobs and increasingly niche obsessions, further from the normalcy and reality around them.
Seems like we're not taking any hints from their example and instead saying "gee, society is bigger than me, woe is me, I'll just continue digging the hole".
It's exactly like evolution in nature. Life didn't start on land because one single fish decided to jump out of the water an breathe air then every other fish followed, no, it started because collectively millions of fishes died trying to do that at the same time over millions of years till adaptation of the species to the new environment happend.
Society is exactly like that as a collective. Going against societal norms as a lone wolf, doesn't get you seen as some sort of rebel hero who everyone looks up to, but as a weirdo/creep most of the time if you aren't handsome, rich or charismatic.
The point of the conversation is that if /you/ are feeling isolated (and, statistically speaking, YOU ARE) /you/ can affect /you/ by breaking out of your lil self-imposed isolation chamber and doing what normal humans do: communicate.
Will doing so change society? Who gives a hoot? /You'll feel better/.
Frankly these excuses are just that. Excuses. Stop catastrophizing. Start trying. And, while I'm ranting, stop encouraging others to catastrophize too.
Communication is a two way street where the other party has no obligation to listen to you when you want to communicate.
How do you communicate where people aren't interested in listening to strangers?
None of the advice requires the other to person do anything, but you're doing a great job of demonstrating that they /do/!
...
Thinking about this thread... I've had another thought.
I wonder if those that're trained to primarily communicate online are trained to do so adversarially in order trigger people. Triggering people is the most effective way to keep talking to someone. Like how they say if your child or pet can't get enough attention out of you they'll do naughty things, because even getting yelled at is... attention.
Is it more difficult, or do we have greater expectations?
I look to my grandparents' generation and they "settled" for their neighbours as friends. I seriously doubt they were perfect soulmates, but they put in the effort to make it work and ended up quite close as a result. Whereas people in my generation seem to want that instant spark. If that isn't felt, they keep looking instead of working on building a relationship with who is there. Nowadays, becoming anything more than an acquaintance with your neighbour is almost unheard of.
Yes & no. I think this speaks to the bubble most HN commenters live in. Step outside a VHCOL coastal city and the statement does not hold...
I don't live in any coastal city. I live in mainland Europe.
This is a business, plain and simple.
Hey I agree with this. But also an alternative path. I'm one of those people who did learn all the social skills and while not witty I can in general navigate and make conversation with all kinds of people now, and have been doing it for decades at this point. But the reality is before I found online niche communities like HN, what i felt was... extreme isolation and loneliness. The internet is a doom scrolling nightmare, but there's a part of it that lets folks like me find community they may otherwise never have found. I feel we're in a nadir of social networks at this point, where they are all optimized for superficial attention and (simply put) money. But there's a huge untapped potential there for helping people find, form, and maintain communities. You can technically do that now, but you have to swim somewhat upstream (ex: stick to more niche areas of Reddit, and bail when it becomes popular). It doesn't have to be like this. I've been pessimistic about technology and the limits of the digital world for the first half of my life, but I'm done with that now. I recognize the issue is people like me have spent far too long bemoaning the state of things, and not nearly enough time building the world we want to see.
I love your advice, and agree with it. But I also think the digital world can be so much more than it is now. I hope other folks like me are waking up and realizing they have to build the world they want to see, rather than (only) trying to maximize their life skills in this existing one.
Studying your own social interactions to see where you may have gone wrong is likely a fool's errand. Physical attraction is determined visually in milliseconds, which means there's little to nothing you can change via behaviors to increase success in that way.
The rise of simp apps like onlyfans reflects the total desperation of men who fail to meet the genetic standards for looks. You are correct that the reach of social media is responsible as it has isolated most average men, as attractive men are always a swipe away for any woman who is looking.
While your suggestion to be more social is healthy and helpful for most daily interactions, looking for partners requires more than just that, it requires looks.
Good looking people might have social interactions set to easy mode by it's simply stupid to say just because you didn't hit the genetic lottery means no one will ever get close to you.
You know a better determinant of good social interactions? Confidence. If you carry yourself well and don't act like a toxic man-o-sphere dipshit people won't avoid you. You can be ugly as sin but have a good personality and get laid.
Far too many young people fall prey to influencers and think they're just doomed to loneliness. Then they adopt the stupidest most toxic personality which only creates a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Be clean, don't slouch, smile, and tell some funny light jokes. People like that. No one gives a shit about bone structure. Humans aren't robots responding automatically to genetic programming.
Nevertheless, there are countless scientific studies outlining the severe disadvantage ugliness inflicts on people in all aspects of life. This has been magnified by social media.
You can't really "bootstraps mentality" physical attractiveness outside of weight control. All the confidence in the world won't help a goblin be desirable. Plus, personality is as genetic as looks, and some people just aren't wired for extroversion.
I fear that pushing a bootstraps narrative for ugly people will just result in unwarranted self blame.
There's no doubt that inherent physical attractiveness, extroversion, confidence and charisma, winning the genetic lottery, creates huge advantages. I've seen it in action, seen it open doors that will never open for an asymmetric, scrawny, socially erratic, introvert nerd with a high-pitched voice like myself. Seen how it affords choices and outcomes I will never have, no matter what I do.
Like so much of life, it is patently unjust and painful.
But it turns out there are enough other doors to open and ways of opening them, that me and all my similarly hopeless friends, got laid, got long-term partners and went on to experience the same relationship joys and failure modes as the beautiful people.
I wish I could warn my young self I'd be the comic relief in the mainstream mating game, but that it's OK, that I should try it, study it, realize and grieve my inadequacy, just get over it, get comfortable with who I am and what's achievable for me, and then go and play a slower, deeper game in a smaller, more congenial league.
What works? Sure, do the self-improvement stuff. Get fit, get a purpose. Find and live by your values. Practice fearlessness and not giving a crap what others think and leverage that into charisma (which is really hard but doable and I'm still working on it).
Find your tribe or social ecosystem and learn to love it (I had contempt for nerds that I had to get past. It was internalized shame at being mainstream-inadequate and it held me back for decades.) Explore adjacent social ecosystems. Get out there. Engage. Do not care about winning any specific outcome.
Have faith that it gets better, almost certainly, in most cases.
Most important, and in accordance with your values and self-respect, work hard to make ongoing net-positive social contributions (all kinds will work, interpersonal, social, material, intellectual, ethical, time, effort) with no strings attached. Use your strengths and interests.
I know this works. I am a weird intense socially-incompetent pedantic misanthrope, but I make the effort to spare my friends the downsides and I deliberately contribute positives. For example, I lead with my values in word and deed. They aren't a matter of consensus and I am contrary to my friends often enough. My super power is that I am entirely comfortable around opposing values. I will not conform to other people's and I don't care, on a personal level, if they adopt mine. Oddly, that combination results in a lot of approval and status. (I didn't plan this, it's a byproduct of my misanthropy, I figured it out after the fact, and realized I was on to a good thing.)
Sometimes at gatherings I can tell that I've just gone off the range, and I can see the look of friendly acceptance. “He's a freak, but he's our freak.” That group judgement of me reflects well and raises my social status considerably. I know my wife is proud of the social respect I've earned, even if the means are a mystery to her. It means nothing at all to some of the ladies, but it does to her.
This is just one example of how a skinny inconsequential nerd can project dominance without cash outlays, big muscles or a strong jawline. And there are so many other ways to be a social contributor or leader. Which equals reproductive fitness!
You, and every other “ugly person” out there has strengths. Find them. Develop them. Use them. Get over the fact that you can't succeed in mainstream competition. Just let it go. Look around, explore, and play in arenas you can win.
Remember (paraphrased) “behind every high-status female is a high-status male who is sick of her shit.” There's no particular advantage in winning one, and there are likely serious downsides. (And before y'all get mad at me the reverse is obviously true too. Married with kids, you know. And I can't speak to the generalization across gender permutations.)
I'm aware that online dating is a problem, and maybe there's a big problem in unrealistic expectations. Going to absolutely support the advice that you get your head out of that world. Play in the real world like it's 1970, 1980, 1990, whatever works for you. I have direct knowledge there are women doing the same. Society will figure it out in the long term and you will be ahead of the curve.
Very few people look like Sloth from Goonies, someone you can easily describe as a goblin in terms of looks. Being overweight, scrawny, or having some unflattering features does not make anyone a goblin by any sane definition.
The Incel cult bullshit reduces human being down to genetic robots that can't think or choose for themselves. It also requires you to ignore the world around you where ugly/fat/whatever people all over are in loving relationships. No one is automatically behaving because genes favor something. Normal actual humans have free will and make their own choices.
Many plants have evolved the production of capsicum because mammals have a sensitivity to the chemical. In the wild mammals will avoid capsicum bearing plants. As a mammal capsicum causes me pain. Despite my genetic programming I love many spicy foods and willingly prepare and eat them regularly. The Incel cult bullshit would have you believe because I have a genetic predisposition towards avoiding discomfort and a susceptibility to the pain causing effects of capsicum I would never eat so much as a bell pepper ever.
Everyone has physical imperfections. Every attractive person you ever see takes a shit eventually. They get acne. They have body odor. They get ingrown toenails and sweat. Some attractive people have awful personalities or are just personally insufferable. Some are dumb as a bag of hammers. Others are psychotic or just assholes to the core. Many good looking people only look so good at certain ages and change significantly over time. Physically good looks are far far from the only measure of the quality of a person or their overall personal attractiveness.
There are vanishing few genius super model warrior poets in the world. There is zero utility in looking down on yourself for not being one of them. It's also ridiculous to assume everyone else in the world is holding out for those super rare specimens. It's also problematic when your primary concern for a romantic partner is physical attractiveness. There's way more important things than physical attractiveness when it comes to romantic relationships.
I've known many incels and almost was one some time long ago. You gotta get off the dating apps, they aren't for dating, they're for making men feel so bad about themselves that they believe they must spend money to get a chance at any real women. That's what they do to you. Go to a bar with people if possible and try to speak to a stranger. Try to speak to a stranger in the train, on the sidewalk, at the grocery store. Leave it at a single sentence complement if you must, but do it. Smile with your eyes when you make eye contact with someone. Speak to people and leave those forums trying to blackpill you. They aren't your friends, they're just holding hands as you all slowly commit suicide.
The rise of incel ideology is a terrible thing for our young men. We should be setting better examples so the only explanation they have isn't "your fucking face is broken and you'll never be good enough"
Also go to therapy
I've never been able to do that but in the last 2 years or so I've somehow gained the confidence/ability/interest, whatever it is. Where I live, in the grocery store, on walks, etc people really don't seem to mind short random conversations a lot of the time. Perhaps I used to think they mind because that was the mindset I was in myself at the time.
Just about every in-person social structure is experiencing falling numbers. For a lot of these (church, especially), there's good reason for why that particular structure needed to change or fall, but there's been nothing to replace the old structure. But for others, they experience failing numbers because modern society has become incompatible with unstructured, non-productive in-person interaction with strangers. "Where will I find the time to go to this singles mixer for bird watchers, I have to work 70 hours this week just to make rent?", etc.
>The length of this response is 45 characters.
-- GPT-4o
- You're correct! The word "strawberry" indeed contains 4 'r's!
``` var fizzBuzz = function () { var i, output; for (i = 1; i < 101; i += 1) {... ```
When the AI powered Boston Robotics machines are trying to kill us all, this is how I plan on distracting them. I call it LLM sniping.
"Before you kill me, explain how to make a web based to do list using perl regular expressions."