AI is coming for the OnlyFans chat industry

OnlyFans creators’ careers are underwritten by sexting. For many OnlyFans creators, chatting with fans and building rapport to upsell “exclusive” content, accounts for over 50% of their revenues. Many creators outsource this work to “chatters,” low-wage workers in developing nations, notably the Philippines, Nigeria, India, and Pakistan, who reportedly work up to 12-hour shifts six days per week for about $3 per hour. 

Now, OnlyFans AI bot companies have quite literally entered the chat. 

“We saw an opportunity here: What if we had an entity that knew exactly how to sell, exactly how to chat with someone and could mimic the creator perfectly,” says Kunal Anand, who is the founder of ChatPersona, an OnlyFans AI chatbot. 

ChatPersona and another OnlyFans AI company interviewed by Fortune called FlirtFlow are experiencing crazy growth since both launched mere months ago. In ChatPersona’s eight-month lifespan, it has attracted over 110 agency clients (as well as individual creators) who are repeatedly buying the company’s “VIP plan”—10,000 chats, according to Anand. He notes that some of these companies are repurchasing the VIP plan every few days.

This is probably because the technologies have been trained on actual OnlyFans creators’ chats to master the art of dirty talk and upselling. Though ChatPersona and FlirtFlow declined to answer Fortune’s questions about their LLMs, Anand said he received a “goldmine” when top OnlyFans creators allowed him access to their chats to train the bot. Meanwhile, FlirtFlow customers spend $1,000 to onboard a creator, which is basically the process of having the company build a model from the creator, and it happens over the course of days.

It’s worth noting that OnlyFans prohibits AI from responding to chats. To get around this, customers of ChatPersona and FlirtFlow still employ humans to press send on the chats. The difference is that now a human can be in hundreds of simultaneous chats, rather than a handful, as all the chatter simply needs to repeatedly press send since the AI has generated the message.  

OnlyFans AI chatting gives creators the opportunities to multiply their businesses, say ChatPersona and FlirtFlow. ChatPersona’s Anand is particularly jazzed about his technology’s ability to host conversations in multiple languages. FlirtFlow thinks that it has mastered the ratio of chatting to selling, and can sell more effectively than the creators themselves in a number of scenarios.

In theory, this is great for OnlyFans creators, allowing them to focus on making content—and then sitting back to count their cash. But there are still shortcomings. Neither company has figured out responses for problematic content that deals with topics like self-harm. And while both companies intend to empower creators, often it’s OnlyFans management agencies who hire ChatPersona and FlirtFlow. These agencies are notorious for coercing and manipulating the talent and their fans. 

A top OnlyFans creator is also freaked out by the idea of outsourcing her chats to AI. “The first word that comes to mind is ‘fear,’” says Isla Moon, who made $5 million from OnlyFans last year. “One of the reasons why I’m so successful is that people know that they’re chatting with me personally on my OnlyFans so to have an AI chatbot is not the same vibe.” 

Titouan Urli, the cofounder of Unleash, an agency that manages over 200 creators is very pleased by the cash ChatPersona has added to the business. Though he believes the technology may be flawless in as little as a few months, it’s still imperfect. He stresses the need for human oversight. Because Unleash works with high-level talent, Urli employs workers based in the U.S. and Germany, who can oversee AI-generated chats to ensure the technology runs undetected. “AI only goes so far,” he says. “You will always need a human.”

Still, the popularity of these nascent OnlyFans AI companies could result in a loss of income for “chat” workers in developing nations. Because of their poor command of the English language, these chatters are already held in low esteem by OnlyFans creators and managers, who worry that fans might cut off lucrative relationships if they sense they’re being duped. The chatters in the developing world also have little incentive to go above and beyond in their jobs as they are poorly compensated and work long hours managing multiple creators. This causes them to burn out and abandon chats and their jobs, ruining fan relationships and destroying creator income sources.

So it maybe isn’t the worst thing that this grueling sex work is being outsourced to AI. “I worked as an OnlyFans chatter as well and I can categorically say that it was the shittiest job I ever worked. The pay was shit and the agency’s CEOs were assholes,” writes one person in a Reddit forum.

More tech news below.

Alexandra Sternlicht

The rest of this edition of Data Sheet was written by David Meyer.

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NEWSWORTHY

Alphabet and HubSpot. Reuters reports that Alphabet is considering a bid for the marketing software outfit HubSpot, the market value of which is currently $35 billion. This would be an unusually large acquisition for the Google parent, and it would come at a time when antitrust regulators are heavily scrutinizing mega-deals—though Alphabet might be able to argue that buying HubSpot would boost competition against its big rivals, Microsoft and Salesforce.

Disney+ password crackdown. It’s Disney+’s turn to crack down on password sharing after rival streaming service Netflix had great success doing the same. Disney signaled its intentions last year, and its rules against password sharing went into effect earlier this year, but now CEO Bob Iger says the real crackdown will begin in June, reaching all markets in September. As The Verge reports, this will mean identifying subscribers who seem to be breaking the rules, and prompting them to get their own account. Adding others to an account will still be possible but at a cost. Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max service will also crack down similarly, though its rollout will only end next year.

China’s AI tactics. Microsoft (which the U.S. government just lambasted for letting senior U.S. officials’ email accounts fall victim to Chinese hackers) has warned about China using AI-generated content to disrupt big elections this year, including those in the U.S., India, and South Korea, the Guardian reports. Meanwhile, the Center for European Policy Analysis has an interesting piece out on China’s military AI goals, which include using the technology to identify and target enemies.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

931%

—The increase in Samsung’s Q1 operating profit, as forecast by the company today. As the Financial Times reports, analysts see this as indicating a strong recovery in the memory-chip market. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung is heavily expanding its plans for semiconductor manufacturing in Texas.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

OpenAI could be in a ‘clear violation’ of YouTube’s terms of service, CEO says—depending on how it trains its Sora video tool, by Paolo Confino

The U.S. reportedly wants the Netherlands to stop fixing advanced chipmaking tools sold to China, by Lionel Lim

Tesla bear says it’s poised to ‘go bust’ because it’s too vertically integrated, which is a ‘brilliant model when you grow’ but not when you have your worst quarter in years, by Paolo Confino

Elon Musk’s X restores free blue checks, a year after asking users to pay $8 per month apiece for the status, by the Associated Press

‘Craziest talent war I’ve ever seen’: Elon Musk says AI is hitting a new frenzy—and he helped set it off 9 years ago with Larry Page and Sam Altman, by Dylan Sloan

Musicians are up in arms about generative AI. And Stability AI’s new music generator shows why they are right to be, by Sage Lazzaro

BEFORE YOU GO

Sundays off. Germany doesn’t allow most stores, including grocery stores, to open on Sundays, due to the constitutionally enshrined principle of Sunday rest. So what happened when Tegut, a Hessian grocery chain, opened fully automated, unstaffed mini-shops? The courts said those can’t open on Sundays either. Tegut, whose legal foes in this battle include Germany’s unions as well as both the Protestant and Catholic churches, has now paused its rollout of the automated stores.