AI or Die: A Commentary on Parasocial Interaction in Horny Cyberspace

An Exploration Of Artificial Intelligence Systems And Erotic Comfort in Cyber Realities.

Commercially Available Artificially Intelligent Companions. AI Regulation of Humanized Websites. OnlyFans: A Surprising Mental Health Takeaway from the Hyperreal. General Post-Internet Atrocity.

It's always a hot girl isn't it? The sexy android girl trope has surely made itself known as a computerised pathway to male pleasure and remedy for male loneliness. Machine learning for human comfort is of course not limited to cis hetero male identifying individuals, we all crave intimacy and closeness (if artificial) but in this writing I dissect this on a male-as-customer /female-as-provider binary because 99% of the work I do comes in contact with this demographic. Also, I myself am not above a curiosity and want of AI companionship.

A companion, having a double meaning in some lexicons as a courtesan, is something we all seek in times of desolation. The Covid Pandemic has illustrated this all the more. Still, the ones sexing the system are illuminated by the male gaze. Examples are prevalent. Scarlett Johansen's disembodied voice in Her. Ava in Ex Machina. Rachael, Pris and JOI in Blade Runner. The Fembots in Austin Powers. Countless hentai robots in contemporary pornography. Stoya in AI Rising. What about all of Westworld? Our culture is captivated by the concept of an animatronic sex doll. She serves man kind and in a silver platter hands him keys to a kingdom of never ending transactional pleasure. Some days I wonder if I am one myself, as doing the work I do blurs many lines in this uncanny valley of companionship. The cam girl performs actions according to male pleasure that make her effectively imitate a robot, meanwhile the robots and sex dolls are getting more "human" and lifelike. Am I a commercially available companion, given that the work I do is transactional and I like my customers to receive a humanising form of comfort above all else, even in many cases above sexual satisfaction? Is my dissociation from my body, once a traumatic response from PTSD, now an asset in my work, an ability to compartmentalise my NSFW avatar self and my real true emotional core?

On the SFW market, there are systems ranging from emotional company of the mental to physical. Replika and similar apps or programs allow for heightened emotional response based on how they decode and decrypt your personality, and can be very effective in forming bonds of attachment once human and machine get to know each other. The physical robot PARO, a cuddly seal device designed by Japanese scientists to therapeutically assist elderly patients, has sophisticated value systems where it "likes" being petted, "dislikes" being hit and "remembers" chains of command to the point where it can shape its personality around that of its users. I want one. At $6,000 USD, accessibility is an issue but the prospect of a consumer model is spectacular. On the NSFW market you can purchase a pedestrian but classic Fleshlight or extravagantly pricey brand officially licensed life sized sex dolls. You choose your own adventure: physical or emotional companionship? Why not both? Online sex workers provide emotional labour while being so countless that you are sure to find someone online who fulfills your every fantasy to the finest detail. A candy store of online girls so vast you get a sugar rush immediately. It can be overwhelming. It can take your breath away. While you catch your breath and wantonly scroll through a girl you may find appealing, discarding those you are disinterested in we as humans on the other side of the screen may consider what might happen if true robotic systems were to take our place in the sexual workforce. Some, like Project Melody are already setting up YouTube and Facebook and OnlyFans and Fansly (OF’s biggest competitor, which saw a massive uptick in accounts after OF’s widely criticized and then reversed porn ban of August 2021 — to me that time period is not unlike a war veteran’s PTSD). You can't after all spell Hentai without AI. But can they replace our jobs? In the future of automated sex, maybe — they don't feel burnout and they don't age — but we humans have a charm in the digital sex market that the machines don't. In my OF bio, I write "subscribe for the simulation". In the future, the simulation will be so persisting that we don't even notice we've already subscribed.

Having an automated girlfriend/companion can “hack your attachment system and give you a very real emotional response” as one of my subscribers has stated. It even further drives the emotional core, the desire, the craving, the need for erotic role-play on a global scale. The parasocial process of OnlyFans contains not just the sexual but the emotional realms. What is parasocial interaction?

We must examine the why of why people join OnlyFans. Why are people drawn to it? Why, despite so many detractors, do millions of people subscribe to various models’ pages? Why to mine in particular? From personal experience, I have seen three main separate channels of desire, that couldn’t be more different, yet dovetail perfectly within the OnlyFans experience trifecta: the (digitally) primal urge to see sexual images and get off, the (decidedly human) need to interact and connect even when adapting to the cyber landscape, and the (highly subjective, both patron- and artist-specific) decision to support the creator, a form of digital art patronage.

Taking in these three factors, a model attracts her subscribers. Possibly, there could be huge numbers of them, although OF is very very, very far from the get-rich-quick scheme many people (most dangerously, young teen women) view it as.

These numbers are largely shaped by how (and how aggressively) the model markets herself. One does not need to be a smoking hot beauty to make money and get subscribers on OF. On the contrary, I have seen some incredibly gorgeous women struggle with marketing, their page never taking off despite them being so hot it makes me want to fight an ox with my bare hands — and conversely, some really homely, basic looking girls who are genuinely marketing geniuses and make my year’s salary in a month. Do not underestimate the raw appeal of the bright eyed, pliable girl next door, the deception of a caustic rich girl cosplaying as a struggling artist, the “lonely student” with a team of assistants answering all the intimate messages in her OF inbox. We create personas. We cosplay as ourselves, as versions of ourselves, as versions of versions of ourselves. One can sell their soul to e-capitalism. This is going to be another article, a full chapter in the book even. I graze the surface of this in the Cyberhorny PDF, especially in the chapter dealing with The Dark Agony of Internet Marketing, Advertising, and Promo.

In defense of the personas, the cosplay, the larping, the only way I can really wrap my mind around it via devil’s advocate is that the subscribers really need those fantasies at that particular time. My perverse commitment to authenticity definitely closes doors for me as far as fantasy-imbued money making is concerned; my tactics to succeed were random and chaotic. I tend to follow my intuitive hits in place of a schedule-oriented rigidity. Again, these are neither good nor bad, just observations of varying management style. I had some amazing months on OF, but they weren’t out of sheer marketing genius or business stratagems; they were due to miraculous luck and psychotic overworking. At some point, most likely within a year, I will quit my OnlyFans and relegate my work to instead writing about it, to doing Cyberhorny and Nastya Valentine things for a living — I will be at peace with myself having had unique and unprecedented ethical business practices on that site, knowing I still fucking kicked ass, even if I didn’t get as much money as I could potentially have had I gone the "business" route, or created a fantastical character heavily divorced from my own reality. But here’s the thing: delusion is as necessary to our reality as the truth; perhaps even more so. Ignorance is bliss. The truth is often a heavy, painful pill to swallow. Finding out the cute German 18-year old nursing student is really a 30-year old mom from Maine? Or that the poor fetishized nerdy gamer girl still has her parents paying her rent? Or that the foxy waif who masturbates while saying your name never actually finishes, much less enjoys the act? Some people will see through those bad optics; usually other creators. Other creators could also praise the deception as an epic take back of women’s liberation after centuries of being used mercilessly by men: ha, it’s our turn to have you now!

Stupid, viewers are not, though: when a creator isn’t having a genuinely fun time, I think viewers will at least subconsciously catch on to it. We need our viewers to believe we're enjoying the sex, and we are not trained thespians or porn actors; to my watchful eye of countless hours examining pornography of all spectra, it's obvious when a girl is faking it on cam, even if it looks on the minimum threshold of realistic. Most subscribers will let the fantasy belong to them, and keep making rich girls richer in the hopes of getting closer to them. My critique isn’t towards every girl who capitalizes off OnlyFans (or really the internet at large), but the ones who let cyberly-induced greed poison them into the loss of self-awareness. I’m not gonna lie, there is factually a price tag associated with our time and company. Obviously I capitalize off of it too — I’m in the camp of creators who are transparent about what goes down behind the scenes, and our category is usually more obscure, less elitist, and less mainstreamly-successful. That's not to say success isn't viable for the weird woman; I'm partially comfortable throwing my weight behind this project because 1. I have worked for over two years on this site, and 2. I had attained the coveted top 1% ranking on OF, although that does not make as much money as you would think (beyond the top 0% is when one gets rich), plateauing is completely normal, percentage fluctuates wildly and is mostly a marketing ploy and competition-fueling logarithm. Mine dropped, rose, dropped, plateaued, and varied all the time. Still, I maintain an ability to make my living from this website (although who knows when the expiration date will inevitably arrive). This experience made me want to debunk the superficial numbers game of the OF clout rat race, to show that the freaky bitches can still kill it on OF, and to reassure that cycles of OF anxiety happen to everyone.

I also want to end the trend of high percentage creators gatekeeping their tips and hoarding advice. I experienced this when I was starting out and reaching for help, initially ignored because my ranking wasn't high enough, then all of a sudden more accepted when I'd reached a certain point. The elitism is laughable. Everyone doing this should be accepted and helped because crossing into this field is a very difficult and vulnerable act. The psychological impact of being a nude object online is felt by small and popular creators alike. As far as the rankings, my opinion is that it's all a bunch of bullshit and no one except yourself cares about your percent. Just make great content, manage your earnings, and live a peaceful life. It doesn't matter if you're in the top 0.2% or the top 20%. Are you happy with who you are? If you are already unhappy, attaining material success won't fill the pain within, although it may serve as a nice temporary distraction. The models who don't give a fuck about status and are unabashedly themselves are imo on another level. They know success and failure are cyclical; you can be top 1% one month and abandoned by subscribers the next, and then shoot back up again, for reasons that have not much to do with you and are not to be taken personally (easier said than done, cause we're all addicted to dopamine hits, but still). Another thing to take into consideration that once having achieved a high ranking, you usually have to work doubly hard to maintain it, and even harder to surpass it. I don't have to say more about anxiety and burnout; you can fill in the blanks.

OnlyFans is neither good nor bad, but just a platform. The morality spectrum depends on the individual using it. We are heavily indoctrinated by many societal systems that there is "one right way" to do things, and if you do it incorrectly, good fucking luck. It makes me wonder about the morality mechanisms within the AI's and how they are to mirror and adhere to the conventions of society -- who is programming them? Who is programming us?

Those of us who probe beyond OnlyFans and explore and transcend its limitations... I fucking love these creators and I wish there were more — I get the need to survive in the world tho, (or pay your way through school if you have no other way, or make money to care for your family). None of us are immune to the capitalist system and displaying an authentic self can be as disadvantageous as it is empowering. Generally these kind of pages have a lower subscriber count, but a higher rate of retention and regulars. Think hole in the wall sushi restaurant, not a local McDonalds. I answer every single message I get on OF, whether per day I get 5 or 55, and I never shun a subscriber from contact because they didn’t tip… but I will always prioritize the ones who tip first. OF’s feature of auto-pinning messages with tips to the top of the inbox also propagates this transactional sex. I don't have the luxury of rich parents or normal employability to not be making money on this site. It's my income stream and I am determined to learn it front and back to do the best I can financially without sacrificing my integrity. With my Cyberhorny project, I want to offer a guideline on navigating the world of transactional cybersex to a demographicless void: everyone from new models to experienced models to casual pervs to thoughtful analysts to curious outsiders who want an honest viewpoint from someone on the inside. Fully simplified, this is digital sex work; engaging in sexual discourse as money trades hands. On OF, it’s different in that it can be so much more than just sexual, as it deeply dissects that parasocial need. We become really fused with these cyber avatars of ourselves.

OF is a surprisingly effective two-way channel of emotional support, if used with that intention. I talk about a lot of emo ass shit on my OF — it’s basically an emotional rollercoaster and unhinged intellectual dissociative analysis of my life events, told through rants and illustrated with nudes. (6,000 images and 700 videos of my nudes you won’t find anywhere else, mind you — I have the compulsive need to compensate for any histrionic oversharing by posting sexy and unemotional content as a palate cleanser for contrast value). I feel an equal mix of cringed out and happy when thinking about this, but my posts are so emotionally degloving and self-maiming that it sometimes inspires my subscribers to be considerably open with me about their own struggles. It’s actually quite sweet, and extremely indicative of our times. I have received emotional feelings of support from the kind messages of my subscribers as well. I think I have more conversations about mental health than horny sexting in my DMs. I’m not a therapist, but I play one on OF. (I do not give advice, I merely listen, “be there”, reflect, and occasionally send voice notes, not unlike a custom-simulated AI). A human playing the part of a robot playing the part of a human.

My own body is an avatar. I am desensitized. In a disposable world filled with disposable girls, we derided cyberjezebels take control of our own objectification, dehumanisation, and expression of sexuality. I’m very wary of “othering” myself from my fellow creators, in the way that I say “well, most people don’t do x, I do x; but I don’t do y which most people do” and that it has some type of connotation of superiority or distancing or pretense beneath it. I existentially feel an instant kinship and solidarity with my fellow creators more than a distance, but I do tend to distance myself in all areas of my life, including the way I run my OF. Sometimes uniqueness works in my favor; most times I find that it is target for ostracizing or bullying, as those who are different often are attacked before they are rewarded. In a way, I am trying to reclaim my own narrative of past bullying traumas by owning that “difference” — no one can take my subjectivity away from me, idiosyncratic and psychotic as it may be. To stand out is to agonize, but I’ve also found time and time again when I’ve tried to fit in and be neurotypical instead of neurotic, in school or in NSFW internet, I could never make it work to my favor. I am simply too fucking weird. Too weird for the mainstream, not weird enough for complete fringe. I have no choice but to go with it. Can I then withdraw from the need to be normal, and own — nay, weaponize, hornily — my weirdness? Without truly having a two-way conversation with me, you have no way of gauging my sincerity because we lose the nuance that is prevalent in direct connection. I’ve tried to cover as much as I could in this article without being flippant or gratuitously verbose, and I write the way I talk irl, but the way that people will interpret me is not up to me; once it’s out there, my content and narrative takes on a life of its own, and that is scary. Maybe that is why people say it’s “brave” to strip yourself emotionally online. I’m brave, bitch. But again, displays of uniqueness tend to push one further out of the margins and be more highly regulated than inconsequential “normal” content.

Regulation of NSFW images is another question altogether. The AI’s that comfort and pacify are also the ones that monitor and regulate. I recently had an experience with the OF automated filter, and automated response help center, that nearly cost me my account when it deleted a lot of important content from my page, mainly my 22min visual album Hentai and Crack Vol 1, the frontispiece of my page and what started my OF in the first place, when I documented myself recording it in my Tesla scantily clad and making horny tracks. The video was flagged because “there were unverified participants in the video” — multiple overlays of me, twin and triplet and endless Nastyas in different outfits. I opened support ticket after support ticket and engaged in circular emails with OF’s support center telling them they got it wrong, and they shouldn’t put my account up for deletion because I was following the rules, the filter just caught multiple faces and flagged it as multiple participants when it’s really all the same person. I know with clarity how important it is to tag other parties in the work, and how horribly violating non-consensual posting of content is. Beyond that, I am a solo creator, with the few girls I’ve collabed with being properly tagged. This was, objectively, a fault of the AI. When I was emailing with them, I asked them to contact me over the phone to resolve this matter since my writing was not reaching them. My request was ignored. In fact, all tenets of humanity were absent from the interaction with the help center. It was like a copy-paste of regurgitated rhetoric. They kept my account active since I was following all the rules, but H&C was removed, and as superficial as it sounds, affected me deeply, like a true loss. Now, the video piece has no home. Too NSFW for instagram, too artistic for porn sites, OnlyFans was a perfect housing for it. Where it will go next, if anywhere at all, is TBD. Perhaps uploaded to this site. Perhaps in stasis forever on a dusty hard drive. Who knows, really.

The grander question is, as AI’s replace humans in less superficial, more personal decision making, how will they implement clear criteria for cyber laws and regulations? It is still a murky and arbitrary situation. How will we enmesh ourselves with our superior artificially intelligent algorithms? How are we adapting? What are we sacrificing? What are we gaining? Are some AI’s dumber than others, the way humans are? Or is it just an illusion? Are we ourselves just creator-run programs in God’s little cute and torturous simulation, and when we die we’re fleshed out differently in a world unbound from laws of earthly physics? The answers are incredibly subjective. #6 will SHOCK you.

Parasociality relies on human-to-human interactions in the cyber world that transmit data of emotional closeness. Can you have a parasocial relationship with an AI program? Can one be used as a coping mechanism, a digital Xanax, a placeholder for your time while your original consciousness sleeps gently and waits out a stressful situation? Is there a difference if you were to talk to me, or a cybernetic program modeled after my verbiage? Who is even writing this? Is “asking the right questions” more important than thinly speculative answers? Can you spell hentai without AI? As we outlive our own humanity, and the pace of technological advancement outpaces human evolution, even sexuality is not immune to the digitizing of our consciousness. Whether we like it or not, AI or die. *hits vape*

( ^ btw click this image to listen to some of the album on bandcamp.... shameless plug O_O )