NEW YORK — Vice published an essay today by author, sex worker and content creator Liara Roux, probing the controversy about AI-generated adult images.
Roux, author of the celebrated 2021 memoir, “Whore of New York: A Confession,” explores the gender dynamics of the current conversation about AI and sexual content, which she frames in the context of how women have historically been treated at the online intersection of fantasy and capitalism.
She harkens back to “Rule 30,” an old 4chan meme insisting, “There are no girls on the internet,” reminding readers that “Despite claims otherwise, women helped conceive and build even the earliest iterations of the web.”
Roux then notes how this attitude eventually morphed into its opposite.
“No longer do people say there are no girls on the internet — instead, some complain that it’s all girls,” she writes. “It’s all e-girls: Instagram influencers, Twitch streamers, TikTok hotties, OnlyFans stars. Suddenly, the power is with the girls. They’re driving billions of dollars through OnlyFans, e-commerce, ads: the attention economy.”
Yet as Roux points out, this too is an incomplete picture, since “it’s men who own the majority of these companies, who take their cut, make fat profits off the backs of us hot girls.”
Finally, she cites the recent wave of pronouncements that “AI hotties” will replace real women as the focus of male fantasies online — while at the same time, real women are being accused of being AI-generated fakes.
To her amusement, Roux herself has been accused by trolls of being an “AI generated whore.”
“An image was attached, red lines circling portions of a photograph of me that they had decided was fake,” she writes.
Ultimately, Roux believes that sex workers’ clientele prefer “fellow humans” and concludes that “just as erotic drawings, the printing press, photography, movies, hentai, virtual reality and robo sex dolls have not killed the demand for sex workers, neither will AI generated porn.”
Roux even has hopes that AI may do more good than harm. Calling herself “a relentless optimist,” she thinks society can “reclaim the internet, turn it into a beacon of hope and beauty, the beacon that drew me out of my own personal childhood hell, that connected me with friends and lovers, that ultimately saved my life.”
To read Liara Roux’s “I’m a Sex Worker. AI Porn Isn’t Taking My Job,” visit Vice.com.
Main Image: Viral image of AI models. (Photo: Twitter)