“People do not subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see a random naked woman, they subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see me naked, specifically, based on a parasocial connection formed by following me on other social media platforms,” Laura Lux—an OnlyFans model who manages a free and paid subscription account—pointed out on Twitter. An AI-generated beauty might be the hottest girl you’ve ever seen, but if there’s literally no there there, the attraction isn’t likely to be sustainable—or get anyone to open their wallet. 

There’s no good data on who is paying for porn or how much money is being poured into the adult industry. Porn companies are all private businesses with no legal obligation to publicly share revenue information, and most of them have a pretty good incentive to keep consumer information private. But it’s undeniable that, even in a world where free porn is easy to come by, many people have opted to financially support OnlyFans creators. A Fortune piece from earlier this year reported that over the platform’s brief six-year lifespan, its 3 million creators have earned $10 billion from 220 million registered users. (OnlyFans itself reportedly took in nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2021, up 160 percent from 2020.)

Why do people pay for OnlyFans? An (admittedly unscientific) Reddit thread generated thousands of responses, many of which aligned with Lux’s assertions and underscored the fundamental issues likely to plague AI porn. People pay for OnlyFans because they want to directly support a porn performer, rather than a third-party studio. They pay for OnlyFans because they feel a personal connection to the performers (and sometimes know them in real life). 

People signed up for my website, paid me for the privilege of private webcam shows, and put up with laggy tech and mediocre camera work when they could just as easily have rented a higher-quality porn video for many of the same reasons. They didn’t support me because I was the hottest girl in the world, some irresistible model with scientifically perfect body measurements. They did so because I was a real woman they felt connected to: someone who regularly posted about her life on LiveJournal, who popped up in the chat room and on site messageboards to talk with them, who shared not just naked photos but snapshots of (and access to) her real life. My fans felt a connection to me that went beyond some superficial attraction—and it was that human quality that underpinned our entire relationship. They helped me solve coding problems as I was building my site; they offered me sympathy and advice when I documented going off Paxil. They knew about my romances and my romantic troubles. And all of that enriched the experience of watching me put on a strip show. 

Maybe someone will create AI images that are accompanied by an AI personality and AI social media and AI chatting. Maybe they will bundle all of that together in a simulacrum of an OnlyFans model and drive human performers out of business. But somehow I doubt it. Despite major strides forward, chatbots still struggle to capture the essence of human connection. Look no further than a New York Times reporter’s recent exchange with Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing chat, a conversation that rapidly went off the rails, with Bing professing its undying love for the reporter, insisting he wasn’t happy with this wife, and using a baffling array of emojis in the process.