How is this not fraud, or at least false advertising? If I'm paying money to chat with a specific sex worker how is it even legal to let some random dude in a third world country pretend to be the person I'm supposed to be talking to? I've never personally engaged in these types of systems, but I don't think there's a problem with them as long as they are run honestly. It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.
I wonder to what extent the clients care. Either way its still paying for a fantasy.
There is probably some lingo somewhere clarifying that you pay for the "experience" of her and not for her in particular.
Do we know if onlyfan is already training their own models with their user's content?
But then.. how is it any different from Amazon saying automated stores while a human is watching cameras or waymo having humans operate in some circumstances. If there are no rules, you can't expect corporates to govern themselves in a way that does not benefit them..
That's why China ban this service outright? But hey, America is a democratic and freedom land.
2$ an hour chatter and 20$ an hour 'model', both replaced by AI.
Now this is almost entirely automated anyway, there is a big adult ecosystem here in Cyprus and i talk to a lot of people. No manual work is used there anymore, "chatters" are a thing of the past.
Now they are well on the path to automate OnlyFans models themselves, there are plenty of hybrid sites where known live models are attracted with good terms to bring in the users, and then slowly switched for AI ones, and it WORKS.
Adult industry is so competitive and fast-evolving because there are few deep moats, it shows the way for everyone else, in fact.
God that's depressing. Even when you _pay_ for human connection you're being fobbed off onto an AI
Bet you had some really deep human connection with that guy chatting to you from the Philippines.
You betray your ignorance of how parasocial OnlyFans and their ilk get. Yes, people get real connection out of it, whether its with who they think they're talking to or not. I think that connecting those people into a chat bot instead of a real human is depressing, and a bad thing for society, but you're welcome to disagree with that
To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.
At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed, and computers are pretty good at producing convincing video feeds now.
What do you mean by "human connection"?
It appears a lot of people using OF are using it as a parasocial medium, not strictly for porn. They want to believe they're actually in touch with the performer and part of their lives to some degree.
Yes, and it's sad.
I wish someone would create a business that profits from people forming actual connections with each other, but every opportunity has been displaced.
Dating sites replaces meeting IRL, and foster superficial relationships anyway. Bars are passé. Social clubs, golf clubs, etc, seem to belong to a past generation. Social media killed the social part. The damage to society is real.
What does "para-" mean?
para- has a variety of meanings [0] depending on which word it’s used to form.
Parasocial itself means “one-sided” in a relationship [1].
It's going to kill the software industry as we know it!
We're literally killing our field by making the devices and internet so repulsive that people are actively unplugging. You can't hear about this online because the bot generated content is filling the gap and the people doing it aren't online to tell you about it.
Children are getting addicted to everything because the internet has killed any sense of self-stimulation and they are growing up into gamblers with cards, sports, and prediction markets or rage-addicted media consumers.
There is plenty of free human connection to be had out there, it is free, and all you have to do is put down the phone or computer. It is getting extremely compelling as an alternative for increasing large groups of people.
The tech industry is energetically strangling its golden goose.
There will be some interesting game theory studies in the aftermath.
That's pretty smart.
Does that mean that people do not recognize that some of the content is AI? Or do they simply accept it?
A little bit of real content goes a long way toward getting people to pay for something unknown, which then turns out to be AI-generated. Even if they are not satisfied, that counts as AI content making a sale.
There's enough people on both camps I'm sure.
> She would be set targets to earn the model hundreds of dollars worth of sales of pictures and videos during her shift.
So lets assume $300 per shift, so with an 8 hour shift, that would be about $37.50/hour of merchandise per hour. So the workers makes about 5.3%. Google says standard for sales workers paid on comission normally get 5-10%.
So its possible this is within what would be normal for a low end non-salary commision job, but it depends on what "hundreds" really mean. Of course i think normally for commision only sales jobs you move much more expensive product to make it worth your while.
Otoh they probably deserve a lot higher than normal sales commision given the nature of the job and all the stuff they undoubtedly have to put up with.
Related: in Germany, there currently is a huge scandal surrounding the company "Fanblast", where you could purchase the supposed "whatsapp phone number" of various "celebrities" and, allegedly, the chats were also run by random freelancers [1].
[1] https://www.comicschau.de/news/fanblast-aloa-me-klengan-krit...
I am still amazed that prostitution is legal when done online, and these teenage sex workers are allowed to continue selling themselves.
(a) It's not prostitution, and (b) while prostitution is illegal in the US it's perfectly legal in the UK and many other countries.
Average wages in the Phillipines are around $360/month USD, so $2/hr isn't too bad for an easy job. BBC is playing rage-bait arbitrage with that headline.
We could free this poor soul from wage slavery by just banning pornography.
That's a good plan. We did that with drugs and it worked fabulously.
It did! We saw with the opioid crisis just how much devastation can be caused by a single drug wiggling its way into legality.
So your position here is that we should take away their job, leaving them to suffer in abject poverty, while simultaneously banning wealthy Westerners from looking at shocked gasp tits?
You can never tell for sure on the internet - but i would assume the person you were replying to was being sarcastic.
Now you have two problems: That poor soul has lost their meager income and you've criminalized countless people who will no doubt still be consuming porn but from illicit sources
That's what the private prisons are for!
you couldn't because someone who sexts people for 2$ an hour is always going to engage in wage slavery, and if that is what offends you, you could just ban it directly.
We all know it's not the point though, you're just offended by porn, if she was cleaning floors for two bucks you wouldn't care. In fact her chatter job, on account of her doing it, is likely better than a lot of other work.
Let me complain about how I'm being exploited at my job while voluntarily choosing said job over literally every other job available to me.
Please do enumerate these other jobs that are available to the Filipino currently performing this job for... checks notes... $2/hour?
Please say what you think the hourly average wage is in the Philippines and how you conclude that this isn't the woman's best option despite her revealed preference that it is.
I don't think you and I are disagreeing here? The article explicitly states that she only took this work because she couldn't find other work, and that she dislikes the work intensely (... but has no better job prospects)
That's how exploitation works: The exploited don't have another choice. That doesn't make doing cruel things to them wrong and (hopefully) illegal.
For example, someone could compel people who are starving to do all sorts of horrible things for food, and then say 'well, they chose to do it!'.
Once you make this job illegal, what do you think she does then for a job? By taking this job she has revealed that this is her best option. When you make the job illegal, you're forcing her to take a worse alternative.
This is true, but I also think that the information in the article alone is insufficient to make a judgment.
This salary is over the Philippines minimum wage. It's a legal job like any other.
The people interviewed are not super happy about the content of the job, but none of it seems to be anything more than it being pornography-related.
Nobody's really seeming to cross any lines of illegality as described in the article. This doesn't come close to the kind of conditions faced by Meta's contractors in Africa spying through Meta glasses in private homes.
I would equate this type of job to any type of job that has aspects that some people would never be willing to do.
E.g., I would never be willing to be a window washer. I'm too scared of heights. Same deal with tower construction. But there are plenty of people doing those jobs who don't feel exploited.
The plus side of jobs like this are that you can do this work at home, you can be physically disabled, there's often some level of flexibility of hours, and there's no manual labor.
I'm going to guess that the only scandal here is that the Philippines is 80% Catholic and possibly more conservative than people in the countries where OnlyFans generates its income.