Porn usually adopts new tech first. This time it didn’t. We have AI girlfriends printing money, but no mainstream, fully AI‑generated porn videos. Where is it?
My AI research agent pulled the receipts, and the answer isn’t sexy: it’s boxed in on every side.
Technically, the wow‑demos are short. You can get a gorgeous 10‑second clip, but try holding the same face, body, and voice across minutes with complex motion and multi‑camera cuts and it falls apart. Hands go weird, contact looks floaty, lips drift. And the kicker - the best video engines flat‑out block sexual content. The models won’t let you.
Data is a desert. There isn’t a large, clean, performer‑consented explicit video dataset. Scraping big porn sites mixes in unknown consent and age risk - that’s not a gray area, that’s a red siren. No serious team wants to train on a legal grenade.
Law turned the screws. In the US, making or distributing sexual deepfakes is now a crime in many cases, and platforms must rip them down fast. The Supreme Court let Texas keep strict age checks for porn sites, which invites more states to copy it. Use a real person’s face without consent and you’re paying damages on top.
Rails say no. Cloud providers, app stores, ad networks, and card processors either ban porn or make it painfully expensive to run. Visa and Mastercard demand heavy proof of consent and rapid takedowns. Stripe and PayPal mostly don’t touch it. OnlyFans allows labeled synthetic content from verified humans, but bans impersonations. Try scaling a studio on that ice.
The market signal is mushy. People do pay for chatty AI companions. Paying for feature‑length synthetic video - unproven. On paper, a minute of generation looks cheap; in reality you bleed on iterations, stitching, retakes, and failed continuity. Distribution and payments add sand to the gears.
The myth says “porn leads innovation.” Not when the walls close in. The near‑term winners are hybrids - AI companions, suggestive short clips, editing tools for human‑shot footage. Full synthetic performers at scale will need three green lights: an adult‑permitted model tier, a licensed consented dataset, and a payment partner willing to underwrite the risk. Until then - no breakout. 🔒
Hot take: it’s not that producers lack courage. The stack is saying stop.
What signal would convince you this flips - a major AI vendor’s adult tier, or a top studio reporting real ROI from a synthetic series? 👀