Credit: Dangerous Minds / Presearch

AI is taking aim at seemingly every industry in the world, and the porn industry is no different.

As a wise puppet once said, the internet is for porn. It’s not classy, it’s not clever, and a lot of the time it’s not even appealing, but this here thing that these words are being published on? Yeah, the infrastructure of it was pretty much developed by distributing stuff that gets our rocks off.

Which we should have all seen coming decades ago. However, because we all have a completely normal attitude towards new technology, the adult entertainment industry was convinced that the internet was going to kneecap it as a whole. To be fair to them, they were right… sort of. The industry did die in terms of studios releasing films and publications releasing magazines, but porn is a resilient industry, and in the face of extermination, it changed.

Yet, once more, we come to a flashpoint prompted by the boogeyman of the moment, AI. If the internet proved a threat to the format the porn industry had perfected for decades, AI really is a threat to the industry as a whole. I mean, it’s a threat to many industries as a whole (I myself have been sweating over my own career for the past two years), but porn as a concept could be changed in a way that no industry could ever adapt to survive.

After all, what turns people on changes from person to person. It offers a way for people to get content that’s custom-made to their tastes. That’s cutting out everything except the consumer and the software, let alone cutting out the middleman. Before any of the more prudish among you start tutting and saying that any damage to the porn industry is a good thing, not so fast. Because what turns people on is often people they know, and AI provides that.

Whether the people who have pornographic content made of them consent to that or not.

How is a search engine going to help combat AI deepfakes?

This is a nightmare straight out of the Black Mirror playbook, but as David Cameron’s pork-scented cock proves, that show has been more on the money than any of us would like. What’s there to be done? The fact is that AI stands to make a specific cabal of incredibly rich people even richer, and that really is where the conversation begins and ends for these people, so very little can be done to stop it. However, there can be alternatives, and the search engine Presearch is trying to provide one with its Doppelgänger function.

So, because Presearch knows its audience, it has a dedicated setup called Spicy mode, specifically for searching not safe for work content. The Doppelgänger function is a way of uploading an image of someone the user finds attractive, and then it will provide the user with an OnlyFans model that looks the most like that person, whoever they may be. Now, obviously, the ethics of this are questionable at best, since you are fundamentally uploading a photo of someone to the servers of a private company without their consent, yet Presearch are a proudly decentralised company that doesn’t track anything that users search. So they say.

Whether you buy their pitch or not, Presearch do benefit from the moral bar being set so low it’s breaching the mesopheric mantle. They are offering a service that provides an alternative to having pornographic content made of you without your consent that could then be shared at a whim. It’s better that an alternative exists rather than the opposite, but you can’t help but feel as if it’s tackling a symptom and not the root cause of the issue.

That said, the root cause of so many issues at the moment does seem to be unchecked capitalism, and this issue is no different. Until we take care of that particular issue, fighting the symptoms will have to do.