It has always been said that the porn industry drives the economy. In its time, it tipped the scales of VHS over Beta, just like what happened with Blu-ray prevailing over HD DVD. Or so we have read for decades.
Riley Reid, an icon in the adult film industry, aims to bring the transformative power of generative AI to adult entertainment through an online platform where users can chat with digital versions of content creators.
But unlike other adult chatbots, Clona.AI avatars are trained with the explicit consent of the model creators, who have a direct involvement in the creation of these digital counterparts.
$30 per month and a free subscription plan
For $30 per month, fans and subscribers can engage in “intimate conversations” with digital versions of their favorite adult stars, content creators, and influencers. The site’s roster currently includes Reid herself and Lena the Plug. There is also a free tier, but it only offers five chat messages per month.
“The reality is that artificial intelligence is inevitable, and if it’s not Clona, it will be something else,” explains the adult film actress. “When [other people] use deepfakes or whatever it is, if I don’t associate myself with it, then someone else is going to steal my image and do it without me. So when this opportunity was presented to me, I got really excited because I felt like I had the chance to be part of society’s technological advancements.”
Clona.AI is built on Meta’s large language model Llama 2 as its foundation, which is then extensively refined and retrained to reflect the personality of the person it’s based on.
Reid explains that her model first trained with various online media, such as interviews, podcast appearances and YouTube videos, before further fine-tuning its response by having the AI chat with Reid herself.
I’ll be able to see how it responds to users and edit it to say ‘no, that’s how I would have said it'”Reid explains. “But at first I focused on things like making sure I was naming my dogs correctly and checking the facts”.
Although the AI will be able to talk dirty, the degree of dirty will depend on the preferences of the actor, not the user. Reid notes that his model, for example, will not discuss physically dangerous sexual acts with users.
Generative AI technology has demonstrated enormous potential in creating digital clones of deceased celebrities and musicians.
The process requires little more than permission from the famous individual (or their heirs) and a sufficiently extensive corpus of their vocal or video recordings. However, we have already seen how this technology has been abused to create fake pornography and suspicious dental advertisements.
Nevertheless, Reid remains optimistic about the historically demonstrated resilience of the sex industry. “I think we are going to be a significant part of AI’s adaptation into our society because the adult industry has always known how to adapt,” asserts Reid.
