One of the most persistent fears in the age of artificial intelligence is that robots will take our jobs. It is unclear to what extent this fear will be justified, but we are already seeing some level of substitution in some areas. Even niche professions are at risk. For example, the world of OnlyFans conversations is already being disrupted.
What If Are you saying that only fans talk? Earlier this year, WIRED published a fascinating investigation into the world of gig workers who are paid to impersonate OnlyFans’ highest-earning creators while chatting online with their fans. In the industry they are called “talkative”.
A large part of OnlyFans’ appeal – or so I’m told – is that its creators seem to engage directly with their fans, exchanging messages and sometimes chatting for hours. In fact, the simulation of a relationship is as crucial to its success as arousal.
Of course, an individual creator with thousands of ongoing DM conversations only has so many hours in the day. To deal with the deluge of love messages, it has become common to outsource conversations to “cheaters” who are paid to subscribe to real talent.
The people talking were mainly contractors from the Philippines, Pakistan, India and other countries with much lower salary expectations than in the USA. However, human conversations are increasingly being replaced by artificial intelligence-generated proxies.
Now a few different startups sell access to these AI conversations and other generative AI tools – and they say business is booming.
“A lot of creators thought, hey, there’s a need for this,” says Kunal Anand, founder of a startup offering AI chat service OnlyFans called ChatPersona. “We created our own model based on data we received from multiple creators’ chats.”
According to Anand, since its launch last year, ChatPersona has had about 6,000 customers, including individuals and agencies.
Anand says ChatPersona doesn’t technically violate OnlyFans’ terms of service because it requires a human in the loop to hit “send” on messages generated by AI chats. (This has already been reported OnlyFans has banned the use of AI chatbots although it is current terms of service don’t mention AI conversations.)
OnlyFans did not respond to repeated requests for comment.