In one bizarre and deeply NSFW corner of the internet, a website called PornPen.ai is churning out an endless feed of graphic, chaotic, and widely varied pornographic imagery — all of which, the site makes very clear, was generated using AI.
With a fusillade of new images cropping up in the live feed constantly, the effect can be overwhelming. Some are impressively photorealistic, while others are intentionally cartoonish. Many carry at least one telltale sign of AI generation, from malformed hands or an extra appendage to abnormalities in eyes or ears (the AI is also weirdly bad at depicting penises, for some reason.) There’s substantial diversity in body type, age, race, and gender, though you have to click an option to see men in the feed, suggesting a heterosexual male preoccupation to the project.
Staring at the PornPen feed, it’s difficult to not have mixed feelings. On the one hand, erotic art and sex work are as natural to the human experience as anything else; there’s a 37,000-year-old depiction of a vulva etched into the ceiling of France’s Chauvet cave, after all.
But as human as porn has always been, AI is distinctly inhuman. An algorithm is essentially gobbling up human-made imagery, remixing it, and regurgitating it to suit the desires of horny users. And between the rise of thirst-trapping AI-generated influencers, the deep attachments that people are forming to AI companion programs like Replika, and the onset of chatbot-enabled AI sexting, it seems that AI’s role in the vast landscape of porn, sex, and relationships is only just beginning to take form. While this is something we’ve been imagining through science fiction for some time now — think “Her,” “Ex Machina,” “Blade Runner,” and so on — we still have absolutely no idea how this burgeoning sexual arena might play out in the real world.
So in a sense, sure, maybe PornPen is just an inevitable new milepost in the thousands-year-old history of smut. But it also feels like a sign of things to come. If so, maybe it’s worth asking how this kind of endlessly customizable sexual solipsism might impact real-world relationships, not to mention the economics of the pre-AI porn industry.
AI advocates often see the tech as something that will either save the world or destroy it. The creator of PornPen, who goes by the moniker Dreampen, falls optimistically into the former camp: as he tells it, AI will be a tool that produces erotic content in a safe way, unlocking creativity and even empowering adult performers.
“When Stable Diffusion first came out, I saw that many people were trying to make NSFW content,” he told us via email. “A lot of AI generator sites blocked this content, and people were also making illegal content such as deepfakes. I wanted to fulfill the AI porn desires in a safe way.”
There are design choices to try to keep PornPen from going off the rails. The site, which is built on the open-source Stable Diffusion image generator, only allows users to access preset tags for generation purposes. So users can build a prompt, but they can’t actually write their own. That prevents bad actors from writing in celebrity names, Dreampen says, or requesting depictions of violent or illegal acts or “other harmful prompts.”
“I thought this was a clever way to preserve safety,” said the developer, “while giving people some creative flexibility.”
The site seems to be connecting with an audience. If its constantly-populating feed wasn’t evidence enough, PornPen’s Discord community boasts about 25,000 users and its Subreddit has another 32,500 members.
Perhaps most notable is PornPen’s success on Patreon. Though a slower, more basic version of the site is available for free, coughing up $15 a month to upgrade to “Pro Mode” grants the most dedicated users access to a faster, higher-quality, and more expansive — more tags to choose from, advanced editing options, unlimited generation rights, and more of the like — iteration of the site. The project’s Patreon currently has nearly 7,000 paying members, suggesting that it’s pulling in yearly revenue of more than a million dollars.
That’s a lot of cash — and a clear sign, it seems, that AI-generated porn can be lucrative.
“People want to look at porn and they want to customize it to their tastes,” said the creator, adding that “many users have stated that they enjoy PornPen because they know people aren’t exploited.”
Exploitation is something that Dreampen pays a lot of lip service to, telling us that his ultimate goal with the site is to fully “end human exploitation” in the adult industry. That’s an interesting way to look at it: porn has historically been rife with abuse, and if humans were to be fully removed from it, it would technically eliminate any exploitation going on.
But the nature of AI makes the specifics of exploitation murky. PornPen was trained using the LAION-5B dataset, a large-scale AI training dataset scraped from the web by the nonprofit Common Crawl. That means the nude figures on PornPen’s endless feed are, in a sense, mashed-up composites of people whose images appeared in it. Did they give consent, in any reasonable way, to be included in something like this?
There’s also the fact that not all porn is exploitative. Much of it is done under the full consent and control of performers, particularly in an era where platforms like OnlyFans, though still flawed, have granted sex workers more agency than ever before. What will sites like PornPen mean to them?
Again, Dreampen has a cheery outlook.
“I’ve actually had OnlyFans creators reach out to me asking to use my platform,” said the developer. “Creators are interested in training custom models on their own data, so they can use AI to make pictures of themselves. One creator, who was getting older and thinking of retiring, realized that they could ‘immortalize’ their younger body into AI, and keep their business stream going that would have otherwise ended.”
It’s an interesting point. And Dreampen also argues that AI could give performers new ways to streamline their businesses.
“I see [the site] as a tool which can improve the workflow for sex workers,” he said, noting that some OnlyFans creators have been known to outsource chats with users to outside ghostwriters. “Users are not even chatting with the actual creator. In some ways, their persona is already a virtual avatar that is managed by the original person.”
“In that world,” he added, “why can’t the images/videos themselves also be ‘outsourced’ to AI?”
Like the rest of the AI-sex landscape, PornPen sits squarely in a gray area. In some respects, it’s tempting to peruse ersatz smut in which no performers were underpaid or coerced. But if it becomes the norm, it could spell disaster for all the performers who are creating adult content on their own terms. It’s an ominous new unknown. It splits our already-flimsy, post-social-media conceptions of reality and fantasy apart, recombining the pieces into something entirely brand new.
How it’ll all ultimately unfold, no one knows. But Dreampen, for his part, certainly has some ideas.
“I think sites like Pornhub will have to adapt or acquire companies, otherwise they will get beaten by new sites with new technology,” he said, adding that “AI porn will create a new category of adult performer.”
“Essentially, people can create an AI avatar that they manage, and people will pay to interact with them,” he continued. “Online sex work won’t rely on people using their own body, and the industry becomes more accessible.”
More on AI-generated fantasies: Guy Who Uses AI to Post as a Voluptuous Influencer: “I Usually Just Call Myself Her Manager”
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