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When Ela Darling began performing in porn at the tail end of the 2000s, tube sites like Pornhub were relatively new, and major studios like Vivid and Digital Playground still dominated the market. For performers, the job was straightforward: show up to set, turn in a good performance, and collect a check. Everything else — from scripting the scene to editing and marketing to makeup — was generally handled by the studio’s team of professionals.
Fast forward to 2025. Vivid and Digital Playground are distant memories. Sites like OnlyFans — and competitors like JustForFans, Clips4Sale, and ManyVids — now rule the roost. And while that shift has empowered many performers to create careers that would have been unimaginable in earlier eras, it’s also come with a cost. While some jobs, like broadcasting and distribution, are now handled by third-party platforms like OnlyFans, a great deal of the work that used to be handled by a studio is now the performers’ responsibility. In addition, these new sites heavily encourage interaction with fans. The most successful creators aren’t just turning out hot porn scenes. They’re constantly chatting with their subscribers and creating custom scenes for high-paying clients. None of that was part of the job description in the VHS/DVD eras, when performer-fan interaction was largely limited to quick exchanges at trade shows like the Adult Entertainment Expo.
If you’re a top performer bringing in an enviable income, you might be able to hire a team of people to manage all the work you don’t want, or don’t have time, to do. But not everyone has the money to bring in outside editors and administrative assistants. For some of these creators, AI has become a crucial tool for tackling all the work required in the creator-centered adult industry.
For Darling — a tech-savvy performer whose career has included pioneering work with VR cam platforms — the decision to explore AI’s potential to optimize her workflow was a no-brainer. From the early days of ChatGPT, she’s been exploring ways to make the platform work for her. Early on, she looked into the possibility of making her own AI chatbot by feeding ChatGPT her own writing samples from anonymized chats with clients in order to teach it her voice and style. While she didn’t wind up with a convincing Elabot, she did manage to train ChatGPT to help her generate responses to client messages that are in her voice, providing assistance on days when she’s creatively drained. “It lets me operate at 90 percent when I’m at 30 percent,” she says, helping her to conquer the massive pile of client messages that can be the most intimidating part of the job.
Darling isn’t alone in turning to LLMs for creative inspiration. Staying afloat in a crowded marketplace like OnlyFans requires constantly churning out new content, and creating custom photos and videos tailored to a variety of fan interests — interests that you, personally, might not know much about. Erika Amore, who’s been on OnlyFans since 2020, says that fans often request very niche content without providing much of a story or vision for their custom clips. “I need some kind of creative component,” she says — and ChatGPT can provide that, creating scripts and scenes and even shot lists for, say, a sexy giantess roleplay.
Of course, there are limits to what mainstream LLMs will allow, and most of the people I spoke with had run into warnings that they were asking a service to do something that would violate its TOS. OnlyFans creator Max Steele has told ChatGPT that he needs sexual-sounding content because it’s for an erotic scene in a play, or “academic psychology research.” Amore has gotten sexts to send clients by asking for a response to “flirty conversation via text with my boyfriend.” Most creators found that, after a little training, ChatGPT would offer up sexual content with little resistance.
But there are also adult-specific LLMs popping up as well, like GPTease, an AI chatbot by sex workers, for sex workers. Founded by longtime adult creator MelRose Michaels, GPTease promises to handle a wide array of behind-the-scenes work so that creators can maximize the amount of time they’re spending in front of the camera (and thus making money). Although Michaels won’t share her training data, she told me that GPTease wasn’t trained on creator data — unless you count the data sets that she, as a creator, wrote herself. When I created a free trial account with GPTease, it asked me to tell it more about my specific content niche and type of client. From there, it was able to generate sexy DMs, shot lists, scripts for scenes, and more — and if I wanted, it could even give me suggested prices for everything I created. GPTease, Michaels says, was specifically built to meet a wide range of sex worker needs, and to support the community of creators that she is proud to be a part of.
Not that every adult creator is enthusiastic about bringing AI into their work. Mistress Lark, an independent professional dominatrix working out of Hollywood, is generally an enthusiastic LLM fan. She’s used ChatGPT to create calendars that map out her work schedule for an entire year. When she was moving her website off of Wix, Gemini provided her with much-needed advice and tutorials. And many of her newsletters and ad copy began as ChatGPT drafts. But when it comes to using it to shape her interactions with clients, she’s more hesitant. “I enjoy getting to know how people’s brains work,” she says. Outsourcing her end of the conversation to AI would make chatting with clients far less fulfilling.
There’s also a larger, more existential concern when it comes to adult content and AI. While no one I talked to worried about chatbots and AI clones replacing flesh-and-blood adult models, “most of my clients are white-collar professionals,” says Princess Fawn, a fetish model and dominatrix. “I’m concerned that AI is going to potentially displace their work, and then they won’t have the money to pay me.”
