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.
mingus88 6 minutes ago [-]
It is fraud. However, one thing has become crystal clear lately is that laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and able to enforce them.
And further, scamming people in the context of sex has always been easy because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.
Imagine filing a report that you spent thousands of dollars chatting with some random person, having the chat logs submitted as evidence, etc. it’s similar to why all types of sexual assault are rarely reported
ghurtado 4 minutes ago [-]
> because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.
I would argue that the reason has more to do with our utter inability to create common sense laws regarding anything "sex".
shrubble 4 minutes ago [-]
This was done by “mail order bride” companies like those in Russia and Ukraine; the phrase is that you are not talking to Anastasia but “Hairy Boris”!
bawolff 17 minutes ago [-]
I wonder to what extent the clients care. Either way its still paying for a fantasy.
V__ 23 minutes ago [-]
There is probably some lingo somewhere clarifying that you pay for the "experience" of her and not for her in particular.
iugtmkbdfil834 28 minutes ago [-]
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..
whynotmaybe 26 minutes ago [-]
Do we know if onlyfan is already training their own models with their user's content?
giantrobot 5 minutes ago [-]
How could they not be? At $2 an hour they'd be leaving money on the table by not paying a tiny fraction of that for an LLM.
thedelanyo 26 minutes ago [-]
That's why China ban this service outright? But hey, America is a democratic and freedom land.
PeterStuer 51 minutes ago [-]
2$ an hour chatter and 20$ an hour 'model', both replaced by AI.
anovikov 3 days ago [-]
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.
vimda 1 hours ago [-]
God that's depressing. Even when you _pay_ for human connection you're being fobbed off onto an AI
PeterStuer 47 minutes ago [-]
Bet you had some really deep human connection with that guy chatting to you from the Philippines.
vimda 25 minutes ago [-]
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
nine_k 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
cess11 41 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean by "human connection"?
steve_adams_86 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
hackyhacky 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
cess11 26 minutes ago [-]
What does "para-" mean?
alwa 5 minutes ago [-]
“Para-“ means “around” or “beside,” kind of in the sense of “close to.” In this specific context, American psychiatrists Horton and Wohl (1956) introduced the notion of “parasocial interactions” to describe audience members’ intensifying one-sided sensations of relationships with characters as American-style mass media came into its own.
In the mid-2010s social scientists began to use the idea to think about the newly-more-intimate, confessional celebrities, like the Kardashians, as they started to use the socials ‘round the clock [1]. “Healthy” doesn’t seem to be the word they choose.
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 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.
SoftTalker 16 minutes ago [-]
There will be some interesting game theory studies in the aftermath.
createaccount99 30 minutes ago [-]
That's pretty smart.
tehjoker 38 minutes ago [-]
Does that mean that people do not recognize that some of the content is AI? Or do they simply accept it?
myhf 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
Somewhat unrelated but I won’t be surprised if we eventually find out a lot of OnlyFans revenue is money laundering.
bawolff 27 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
mschuster91 12 minutes ago [-]
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].
I am still amazed that prostitution is legal when done online, and these teenage sex workers are allowed to continue selling themselves.
beejiu 11 minutes ago [-]
(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.
47 minutes ago [-]
Fricken 31 minutes ago [-]
Average wages in the Phillipines are around $360/month USD, so $2/hr isn't too bad for an easy job. BBC is playing rage-bait arbitrage with that headline.
profdevloper 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
steve1977 54 minutes ago [-]
That's a good plan. We did that with drugs and it worked fabulously.
SpicyLemonZest 11 minutes ago [-]
It did! We saw with the opioid crisis just how much devastation can be caused by a single drug wiggling its way into legality.
swiftcoder 41 minutes ago [-]
So your position here is that we should take away their job, leaving them to suffer in abject poverty, while simultaneously banning wealthy Westerners from looking at shocked gasp tits?
bawolff 39 minutes ago [-]
You can never tell for sure on the internet - but i would assume the person you were replying to was being sarcastic.
morkalork 56 minutes ago [-]
Now you have two problems: That poor soul has lost their meager income and you've criminalized countless people who will no doubt still be consuming porn but from illicit sources
zoklet-enjoyer 53 minutes ago [-]
That's what the private prisons are for!
Barrin92 38 minutes ago [-]
you couldn't because someone who sexts people for 2$ 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.
soygem 44 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
cedarscarlett 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
swiftcoder 39 minutes ago [-]
Please do enumerate these other jobs that are available to the Filipino currently performing this job for... checks notes... $2/hour?
mhb 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
swiftcoder 23 minutes ago [-]
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)
mmooss 39 minutes ago [-]
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!'.
mhb 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
dangus 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 19:00:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
And further, scamming people in the context of sex has always been easy because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.
Imagine filing a report that you spent thousands of dollars chatting with some random person, having the chat logs submitted as evidence, etc. it’s similar to why all types of sexual assault are rarely reported
I would argue that the reason has more to do with our utter inability to create common sense laws regarding anything "sex".
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.
At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed, and computers are pretty good at producing convincing video feeds now.
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.
In the mid-2010s social scientists began to use the idea to think about the newly-more-intimate, confessional celebrities, like the Kardashians, as they started to use the socials ‘round the clock [1]. “Healthy” doesn’t seem to be the word they choose.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11...
[1] https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research_all/7/
It's often applied to one-sided relationships with celebrities, where you feel a personal connection to them but they literally don't know you exist.
Parasocial itself means “one-sided” in a relationship [1].
0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/para-#English
1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/parasocial
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke
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.
[1] https://www.comicschau.de/news/fanblast-aloa-me-klengan-krit...
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.
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!'.
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.