Back in the late 1970s, when the VHS and Betamax videotape formats were battling it out for market share, pornographers backed VHS despite its inferior quality, preferring its longer recording time. VHS subsequently thrived, while Betamax became a byword for failure. As for porn, by the early 1980s it had snapped up over 50 per cent of American videotape sales.
In the 1990s, pornographic websites were taking credit card payments online whilst most businesses still thought the internet was a passing fad, or simply didn’t trust it. A Dutch porn outfit developed streaming video in 1994—years before YouTube existed. Subscription models meanwhile (pun intended), were mastered by the porn industry long before Netflix made them respectable.
Now, however, AI has arrived, and the porn industry has predictably rushed to embrace it. And that is becoming a problem.
Porn remains big business. The industry is worth 76 billion US dollars globally, and is heading for 118 billion US dollars by 2030. But dig deeper and things get weird fast.
Emily Pellegrini is a good example of the problem. Amongst the internet’s more successful adult content creators, she has reportedly earnt up to 100,000 US dollars per month. Like the AI-generated young lady in the photo above, however, Emily does not exist. She too is AI-generated.
Emily is not alone. Whole companies now flog toolkits for creating and promoting AI models. The full package: realistic image and video generation, automated chatbots, business management software. Don’t fancy appearing on camera? Don’t want to hire photographers? No bother. One firm reckons you can “create an OnlyFans model in just one click”. The high barriers to entry have, you might say, been stripped away.
When supply becomes infinite
Every previous tech leap—VHS, internet streaming—expanded the market for porn whilst keeping one fundamental constraint in place: you needed human performers. AI bins that completely.
Anyone with halfway decent technical skills can now churn out unlimited content featuring AI-generated performers. The economics have shifted entirely. Supply has, effectively, become infinite.
Consumers, for the time being at least, do not appear to care. Platforms report solid engagement with AI-generated models, which rather suggests people prefer the fantasy to the reality—or are too lazy (or dumb) to spot the real from the fake.
But then there’s the properly dark side of the industry to consider. Deepfake technology has gone industrial. The US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 67,000 reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material in 2024. In the first half of 2025 this had increased to 485,000 reports. South Korea is churning out much of the world’s deepfake porn, with the country’s female celebrities facing the consequences.
Legislators have at least woken up to the threat of AI porn. America’s Take It Down Act sailed through Congress in May 2025—passed nearly unanimously, which tells you how bad things had got. It criminalises non-consensual intimate imagery. Platforms have got 48 hours to remove flagged content or face the music. The EU’s AI Act demands transparency for AI-generated content. Some 45 US states have banned AI-generated child sexual abuse material outright.
This crackdown on the darker side of AI porn is landing just as the adult industry’s innovation advantage looks shakiest. Porn companies used to operate outside mainstream commerce entirely. Respectable firms wouldn’t touch them, which meant they had to innovate on their own. That isolation created serious technical chops. They built proper payment systems when nobody else would help them. Invented affiliate marketing. Figured out customer retention before it had a fancy name.
Netflix’s subscription model? Porn did it first, years earlier. The OnlyFans creator economy? Amateur adult content paved that road ages ago. Mainstream companies just copied them later and pretended they’d invented it themselves.
Commodification bites back
The lessons other industries might nick from porn’s AI adoption aren’t exactly straightforward. Certainly, the adult sector is brilliant at adopting new tech. Its willingness to experiment offers proper value there for any digital business. Its ability to convert casual browsers into paying customers through strategic free samples is genuinely unmatched.
But porn is also showing what happens when commodification runs completely wild. Product differentiation vanishes. Barriers to entry evaporate. Even the most profitable business models start looking wobbly.
Think about what AI-generated content actually means. It scales infinitely at basically zero marginal cost. One person can run dozens of synthetic personas at once, each with different looks, personalities, content libraries. That doesn’t just threaten human performers (though it absolutely does that). It threatens the whole economic structure of adult platforms.
If anyone with basic tech skills can deploy AI models at scale, what’s the platform actually worth? OnlyFans built its entire business on providing infrastructure for creator-fan relationships. When both creators and relationships become synthetic, that infrastructure’s value drops through the floor.
The irony is almost painful. An industry that prospered by jumping on disruptive technology first is now facing tech that might disrupt it out of existence, staring at a future where its product is infinitely replicable, its performers are potentially obsolete, and its business model looks horribly vulnerable.
Adapting to exposure
Will the adult industry adapt? Of course it will. It always has.
Some creators are already selling human authenticity—the rather basic fact that they’re actually real people—as a premium product. Others are trying hybrid models that mix AI efficiency with human oversight. Niche markets might hold up; specific tastes and customisation don’t automate easily. Legislation might constrain AI’s worst applications, especially non-consensual deepfakes and synthetic child abuse material.
But don’t kid yourself about what’s happening here. The industry that invented digital commerce is facing its biggest challenge yet. AI isn’t just another tool to bolt on. It’s attacking the scarcity economics that made adult content profitable from the start.
Other industries should be paying very close attention. If porn—which has in many ways led every previous tech disruption—is struggling with AI, what chance have less battle-hardened sectors got? The industry that taught everyone else how to monetise digital desire might be about to learn that some innovations are too disruptive even for dedicated disruptors.
Turns out even the most uninhibited industry can discover that there is such a thing as too much exposure.
Photo: Dreamstime.
