Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the porn industry.

History repeats itself: the adult industry has always been a testing ground for new technologies. When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century, it was almost immediately adapted for printing racy pamphlets. Adult films appeared on video cassettes in 1977 — a year earlier than Hollywood blockbusters — and dominated sales for some time. When Minitel, the predecessor to the internet, was launched in France in the early 1980s, erotic services accounted for between a third and a half of all traffic. A similar story happened with cable television and online streaming, and now it's the turn of artificial intelligence (AI), writes The Economist.

While many traditional businesses are hesitant to adopt new technologies, the porn industry acts instantly. Adult websites are already overflowing with videos and images generated by neural networks. Technology giants are also joining the process, looking for ways to justify investments in their models. For example, Elon Musk's Grok already offers a "spicy mode," and OpenAI has allowed the generation of erotica in ChatGPT for verified adult users since December.

According to researchers' forecasts, the AI-generated adult content market will reach $2.5 billion this year alone and will grow by 27% annually until 2028.

To understand the scale, it is worth looking at the overall figures. The global porn industry generates nearly $100 billion in revenue annually — twice as much as the entire current artificial intelligence market.

Five of the 50 most visited sites in the world are adult resources. Until recently, this market was controlled by platforms where real people sold their content by subscription: for example, the OnlyFans service received $1.4 billion in revenue and $520 million in net profit in the past financial year. However, AI now offers an alternative: on-demand content that is cheaper and created faster.

If earlier technologies simply simplified the distribution of content, AI is revolutionizing the production itself. The user can create the perfect partner — choose skin color, physique, character — and make them embody any fantasies. The demand for such a service is colossal.

According to researchers, the ten most popular sites offering virtual "companions" for communication and flirting collected 78.5 million visits in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

People are looking for intimacy even where it shouldn't be: the developers of the ordinary chatbot Kuki say that users confessed their love to the algorithm 90 million times, and a third of the interlocutors tried to persuade the program to virtual sex.

What about real porn stars?

Scientific experiments show that viewers are increasingly perceiving synthetic faces as more real than real ones.

Famous porn stars are most at risk. Their faces and videos are already being used to train models or to create deepfakes without their consent. Some are trying not to fight the wave, but to capitalize on it. They license their images to create official AI clones that generate revenue through chats and donations.

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For amateurs and models on OnlyFans, artificial intelligence has become a useful tool. Video generators reduce the creation of a video from days to hours, and chatbots take on the most profitable part — private messages.

The changes have also affected intermediaries. Studios are faced with the fact that their films are used to train bots. Actors now require clauses in contracts that prohibit the use of their work for AI training.

Platforms are also choosing different strategies. OnlyFans only allows partially processed content, betting on reality. Other sites, such as Fanvue, on the contrary, advertise AI content. Transparency and labeling are becoming key factors for new social platforms.

What are the risks

In general, AI promises to significantly increase productivity in the field. Although it will probably take work away from some porn actors. However, with AI there will be less need for dangerous or extreme scenes, less risk of infections, less physical coercion.

The main danger of the new era is the potential normalization of violence and fraud. The charity Internet Watch Foundation is recording a sharp increase in the number of generated images of child sexual abuse.

In the first ten months of 2025, there were twice as many reports of them as in the whole of 2024. Although real children do not suffer when creating such content, experts fear that this blurs moral boundaries.

In addition, statistics show a connection between porn and real life: the growing popularity of aggressive practices on the screen has led to the fact that more than 40% of women aged 25-29 have encountered strangulation by a partner during sex by mutual consent.

Doctors warn: there is no such thing as "safe strangulation," a person can lose consciousness in seconds. In the UK, they are even proposing to pass a law that would ban porn with strangulation scenes.

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Artificial intelligence is actively used to create deepfakes and operate "undressing" services that remove clothing from photos of real people. In six months, 85 such sites were visited 18.5 million times, and their owners earned $36 million from this. Creating a plausible fake video with someone else's face today takes less than 25 minutes.

The victims are increasingly not celebrities, but ordinary people whose photos are easy to find online. If for some users this is a way to create an illusion of intimacy, then for fraudsters it is a means of blackmail. The scale of the problem is frightening: surveys show that about a third of women and a fifth of men in the USA and Europe are worried that they may become a target of such a fake.

Regulators around the world are trying to introduce laws against the spread of deepfakes and oblige the labeling of synthetic content, but technology is developing faster than legislation.

In fact, the only real controllers remain global payment systems such as Visa and Mastercard, which can block payments to infringing sites.

Ultimately, the internet risks quickly drowning in an endless stream of extreme synthetic erotica. However, experts hope that it is this artificiality that may paradoxically emphasize the value of real human contact. In conditions where the perception of reality is distorted by algorithms, live relationships and real intimacy may become the main deficit and value of the future.

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