Deepfake porn is a labor issue

Last month, First Lady Melania Trump used her first public remarks of President Trump’s second term to voice her support for the Take It Down Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at curbing deepfake “revenge porn.” She was joined by Elliston Berry, a Texas teenager who was a victim of deepfake porn. “The widespread presence of abusive behavior in the digital domain affects the daily lives of our children, families, and communities,” Mrs. Trump said. “Every young person deserves a safe online space to express themself freely, without the looming threat of exploitation or harm.”

The Take It Down Act unanimously passed the Senate and is now headed for the House. Across the political spectrum, lawmakers generally agree that deepfake porn, in which generative AI renders a sexually explicit likeness of a real person, must be regulated. The public is on board as well. When pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift were circulated online, her fans were outraged and social media platforms raced to restrict these images. But the conversation has been framed too narrowly as a problem of exploitation and consent. It is also an existential labor problem: AI-generated porn could put thousands of Americans out of work.

Like it or not, porn is big business. The industry currently operates as a hybrid market. Porn studios hire performers as private contractors, paying them a flat rate per shoot to own the recorded scene and freely disseminate it online. Performers can also create their own porn for OnlyFans, a social media platform primarily for explicit content where users pay for subscriptions to content creators’ accounts. Pornhub, the largest porn site—receiving 5.25 billion visits each month—hosts around 20,000 verified performers. On OnlyFans, the numbers are even more staggering. In 2023, OnlyFans received $6.6 billion in payments, generating $1.3 billion in revenue. The company has over four million content creators, an estimated two million of whom are American—about twice the number of Uber drivers in the US.

AI throws the porn industry, along with the rest of us, into new legal territory. For promotional purposes, porn studios have long included clauses in performers’ contracts giving them rights over not only the film itself but also “derivatives” of all images created during the shoot. These clauses could now grant studios sweeping ownership of performers’ likeness that they could use to make deepfakes porn scenes without providing additional pay to performers.

But performers face an even broader threat, one that jeopardizes the studio and OnlyFans markets alike: In the not-too-distant future, companies will likely be able to make porn scenes generated by AI that are difficult to distinguish from scenes involving real performers and are cheaper to produce than hiring them. Even if consumers know that the person they are watching is not real, they may not care. Porn performers will not merely have to worry about having their particular likeness stolen for deepfake porn, because their profession as a whole could be largely replaced by AI.

Los Angeles’ economy, already ravaged by wildfires, would be particularly hard-hit. The San Fernando Valley remains the epicenter of the global porn industry, supporting not only tens of thousands of porn performers and adult content creators, but also other porn industry members, from makeup artists to grips. Los Angeles is a company town, and porn workers are its employees.

One might argue that the porn industry should simply be allowed to collapse. Indeed, this is the tact that has often been taken with “sin” industries through restrictions on banking, for example. The porn industry has a way to go when it comes to empowering performers, but further cutting into their pay is not the solution. Porn performers are workers, and AI-generated porn poses a threat to their work.

Instead, the porn industry should be recognized as part of the entertainment ecosystem—the rebellious stepsister, shall we say, of the mainstream film industry—and shares with it a common foe in AI. SAG-AFTRA, the labor union representing about 160,000 media professionals globally, has made the fight against AI a top priority. The union won important protections for its members in the historic 2023 strike, including consent procedures regarding deepfakes in contracts, minimum pay scales for using deepfakes, and limitations on employing generative AI for screenwriting. In the ongoing video game strike, deepfakes remain the sticking point.

Unfortunately, none of these negotiations will directly help porn performers. Although SAG-AFTRA represents a wide range of media professionals—including mainstream actors, screenwriters, broadcast journalists, news writers, DJs, recording artists, stunt performers, puppeteers, and other media professionals—porn performers have never been eligible for membership. The porn industry also struggles to organize from within due to fragmentation and notoriously high turnover. While the Free Speech Coalition serves as the industry’s trade association, the industry has no labor union. SAG-AFTRA should add porn performers to its ranks, devoting a branch to their specific needs.

The entertainment ecosystem would be strengthened if media professionals recognize that, when it comes to AI, their fate is intertwined with that of porn performers. Indeed, when it comes to fair compensation and the protection of human labor, all of our jobs may depend on it.

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