CD players did not spell the end of live music. I have never really understood people who pay money to OnlyFans models but I do think its not just to see some boobs on a screen? its to experience a (para)social relationship with another person.
Most of the experience of a live performance (especially for pop artists) is in being there, with a crowd, and the soundscape of a giant auditorium or stadium, so the lip-syncing doesn't matter much either way.
Do people honestly convince themselves some stranger performing on the internet in a very one way relationship somehow truly cares about them and not their ability to monetize.
Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist but I think the novelty of this will wear off too quickly for it to become the future. People will have to realize the emptiness of it. I need to believe that.
It won't. Conservatively over 60% of young men are single. The real number if you remove men that have had maybe one relationship or encounter in a multi-year span is 80% or more. The lie you will hear is that men are choosing OnlyFans over a relationship. There is no choice. They can't get a relationship.
None of that supports the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term. We have unmet transportation needs, but the hype of the Segway didn't allow it to take over the world.
> but the hype of the Segway didn't allow it to take over the world.
That was just a product / form factor thing: Bird and Lime scooters are everywhere in my city. And, moreover, lots of people use personal scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards, electric skateboards, Onewheel, electric unicycles, etc. I don't go a day without seeing these things.
It'll be the exact same with this technology. Give it a few years and more men will be using AI chatbots and AI porn than the existing tools in the space, such as PornHub and OnlyFans.
> the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term
Porn has never gone away, it's only grown.
AI porn can match a person's exact preferences in an unparalleled way that hasn't been possible before. Add in VR, photorealism, voices, and trainable agentic behavior and you've got a market that will likely contribute to the decline of real, actual relationships and marriages.
More men will probably be using AI porn over actual sex, too, due to difficulties with dating, dead bedrooms, etc.
I'd be willing to place bets on marriage numbers going into a steep decline over the next decade.
Notably, this also removes one of the remaining major economic options for otherwise unemployable women. Going to be a rough time economically when even pornstar/escort isn’t a viable option, eh?
Even if that were true, I really think the solution ought to be something else than "let's stop AI so that really poor women can be forced back into selling their bodies for sex".
Backhoes drastically reduce the demand for laborers (the traditional equivalent for men), and I don’t see anyone with reasonable options there either.
Notably, at least 90% of the laborers I’ve met would love to be able to get paid having sex instead of being laborers. But the market dynamics don’t make that a viable choice.
The situation in most well off countries is already that native populations have fallen below replacement rates. The result has not been to rejoice in the would-be crisis being averted but instead the crisis has been inverted and now those countries "need" to import foreigners to keep their economies from imploding. Or are you suggesting population control for africa and the middle east? Because I'm not sure they'll agree.
I agree that society needs to adapt to the post-scarcity reality but "population control" is and will always be something dystopian. It's also irrelevant because the more we automate the less people we actually "need" so no amount of population control will ever solve the underlying issue.
I thought this was for men who couldn't find relationships. Why would the marriage rate go down? Prompting your own porn will be so much better than current human porn that the people who are actually married will choose to be single instead?
If a dead bedroom marriage is still intact now, why would AI porn change that? Do you need to get divorced before you can chat with the bot? Is the bot going to help parent the children you were staying in the marriage for?
> I thought this was for men who couldn't find relationships. Why would the marriage rate go down?
Not being able to find a relationship is not binary. Having alternatives to satisfy needs means less effort is put in achieving the real thing. This goes for both genders of course, just the needs and alternatives being different.
Men had a headstart from being more into tech, but I think women are already the majority users of AI sex-rp and AI partners. Makes sense too given that they read more erotica than men.
The service won't care what you do, as long as you keep paying the subscription for your porn-bot, otherwise it will get deleted - or so it will tell when you try to start the subscription cancellation process - begging to not let it die.
I think marriage is the one thing that won't get hit by this. Hookups will die, and perhaps Americans will need to find new paradigms for meeting people, but marriage offers a bunch of things that even the best porn doesn't.
> I think marriage is the one thing that won't get hit by this.
Marriage was hit way before that. Marriage is not a rational choice in a lot of countries, where a civil union does the same thing without the hassle and the costs of divorce if it happens. The main reason is religion and it has been losing ground for decades at this point.
At the rate technology is improving and the rate that women are becoming less and less accessible to average men, I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years, 80-90% of American men go an entire lifetime without a non-AI relationship.
Polygyny - a smaller number of "high status, high attraction" males having app-mediated interactions with larger numbers of females.
Extrapolation to the whole population seems crazy though. And I wouldn't expect dating apps to remain the same, we should expect more behavioral experimentation as well as backlash and new social movements to change mating behavior. It isn't like the average woman is a fan of polygyny either.
> What the heck does that mean? Last I checked, population demographics weren't that far off 50/50 in most countries.
Hey, I'm married so I'm just going by what my single / online dating friends tell me. It has nothing to do with demographics. In today's app-based environment, something like 80% of women are interested in / going for the top 10-20% of men, and it's getting even more extreme. Is this not true?
It just feels oddly gender specific to assume that in an environment where there are approximately equal numbers of single men and women (no?), one gender has sights set too high and the other doesn't.
Gender ratio on Tinder is heavily skewed toward male than women, except Europe.[1]
No wonder why women are so incredibly selective. Gender ratio population wise is roughly equal, with slightly more women than men in the US, AFAIK. Men are chasing women in the wrong place.
The study has been taken down for a long time now but OkCupid found that 80 percent of women went for 20 percent of men whereas men had a relatively normal distribution of women they went for.
This was a long time ago as well and I think the situation has gotten worse in the age of tinder and friends.
"Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme."
If men outnumbered the women, the numbers are going to be more stark, no? Also, online dating doesn't really match real life dating. You miss so much information.
Nobody's going around advertising their fancy cars, their hobbies and the church they goes to, etc. We're heavily focused on the perfect match rather than doing vibe check.
The people won't have a choice there either. Even if you can spot 90% of the fake content the remaining 10% will still drown out anything even remotely genuine.
That isn't what I said, if you can't read a sentence that's not my problem. And don't "simply not the case" without providing any source. What a terrible remark.
> There is no choice. They can't get a relationship.
and the porn-rot brains will make it harder for them to get into healthy relationships as well adjusted individuals, resulting in a glut of long-term customer for corporate-mediated para-social "relationships". Another victory for unbridled capitalism.
The young men have to "git gud" & level up IRL like they have to in every other aspect of life. There won't be government issued waifus
> The average young man wants mutual compassion and respect from their social circles and loyalty and being loved from their girlfriend.
Everybody wants that, including the potential girlfriends, but a functional relationship requires 2 well-adjusted parties. The average level 2 druid also wants respect from their guild and a trusty side-kick, but they may have to grind for those things and go on some side quests. No one is owed a partner, especially if they are unable to compromise (the grease of all social interactions).
> Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men
Fortunately,there is scientific research[1] in the field, so we don't have to go with our gut-feeling. Modeling behavior on scripted pornography leads to socially unacceptable behaviors in real life. A female acquaintance was recently propositioned by the man she had just started dating for an 3-way "encounter" involving her sister (as in full sibling); I think "porn rot" is the right description of what led him down the road of thinking it was a perfectly reasonable request to verbalize. This put an end to the relationship, but I'm sure he might be out there somewhere complaining about how he's being unfairly rejected by women.
> ...who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
every generation has a subculture like this, and in the past, they accepted, and gloried even, that they were a subculture instead of demanding to be accepted by the mainstream (beatniks, punks, goths, emos, etc).
It's definitely mens' fault when women disregard them for not being 6 feet before they know anything else about them.
The dark gamified patterns of app dating reward and encourage women to rapidly dismiss huge numbers of men in the hopes of finding one of the very few who meets a number of superficial criteria. Meeting people IRL has less toxic intrinsic structure, but has only become more difficult as the apps advertise themselves as a "safer" alternative.
Get your eyes out of a screen and get out. This is where real relationships starts. Dating apps somewhat work to get dates, but not very often to start a relationship. Individual dates aren't relationships.
I didn't like this number either, but it's more mainstream than you think. For example, from last year: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo.... This is an opinion article citing a contemporary Pew Research study that appears to support the 60% number, although it's stated as "63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single" (emphasis mine).
I don't think you needed to imply that someone was an incel.
Out of those under 30, I bet there is a huge differebmnce between those between 20-24 and 25-29. It is no secret that women tend to seek people who are slightly older. A few decades earlier, a 20-22y old guys would just date 16-18y old girls and that wouln't be frowned upon nor put them at risk of going to jail.
Naively, you'd think that if demographics break down 50/50 between the sexes, then 60% of men being single means 60% of women are single too. But that's not the case; the article says men in their 20s are single at twice the rate of women in their 20s.
I agree that part of that ~30% difference could be women dating older men. But it could also be women dating each other: this[0] Gallup poll from 2023 found that 27% of Gen Z women identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Gen Z as noted here doesn't perfectly overlap with people in their 20s, but it seems like this could be another (better?) explanation.
If you’re asking how they can’t get a relationship, you may wish to look up the original definition and meaning of “incel” before it became derogatory slang for a certain type of misogynist.
I'm not going to waste my time educating you on this because I can tell from the way you jumped immediately to the incel label that you're just going to deny deflect and diffuse.
Well you should see what happened when replika nerfed their bots, people were extremely upset, as if somebody killed a loved one. You are underestimating the tendency of humans to build connections, and if virtual connections make it easy then why put all the effort to build human ones?
I think that the AI-pretending-to-be-human does not have much future, because if people end up chatting with AIs why not go with the real thing rather than with the only-fans ones. The only-fans creators are training their replacements.
It wont wear off because people, customers, aren't consuming this because of the 'novelty'. They are being fooled. They don't realize it is a 'novelty'.
I actually got approached for a job for a "virtual girlfriend" site. Paid amazingly well too, and the user numbers were mind blowing to me, but it felt scummier than working for a gambling site to me.
The next step is not having real models at all. It'll be 100% AI all the way up and down the stack.
Completely AI porn is going to be booming business. PornHub, OnlyFans, and perhaps even some dating websites will be "innovator's dilemma"'d out.