Yes, a company called Fanvue has taken a step into the cyborg dystopian future with its introduction of an AI-based version of OnlyFans. New tech has made it possible and, for the moment, profitable to spin up non-human avatars — complete with voices, “personalities,” and, of course, finely tailored physical forms — to pull in the expanding audience of lonely and socially awkward or just tired, and mostly male, denizens of the fast-deteriorating cyber realm.

Fanvue, as with the bevy of similar startups hitting the internet, is essentially OnlyFans, but the twist is that the “creators” have open access to AI. Artificial voices, personages, events, acts, and so forth are all on offer in the new digital landscape. The voice, the hair, the body — none of it is real at all. Add a $100 million market capitalization, and you might see where this is going.

Maybe sites such as Fanvue force most women back into the real world, where they need to interact with other real humans.

With both Only Fans and its AI mimickers like Fanvue, creators upload content, followers subscribe, and whatever happens behind the paywall stays behind the paywall. (Just don’t violate the generous but firm guidelines in the Terms of Service.)

In the scramble to replace humanity online, Fanvue is, if not leading the pack, making bold strides into designing how that erasure goes down. The company boasts 200,000 “creators” on the platform, to whom it has paid out more than $500 million. Similar companies jockeying for position will likely fight over brand-name recognition and then be absorbed under some yet-to-be-determined single umbrella. Maybe it’s Fanvue. Or will OnlyFans simply buy them all?

OnlyFans creators do have at least some cachet with their existing followers. And until the next crop of perhaps less human-oriented followers steps up with debit cards in hand, the small contingent of OnlyFans creators who make a living (very attractive women) will probably continue to do well.

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Photo by PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

Maybe you have seen the clips of decidedly non-European men positioned in front of a camera, pantomiming, smiling, pretending. On the split screen, we can see how the Kling (or similar) motion control software instantly transmogrifies the middle-age Indian man (from the cases we’ve seen) into a rather convincing young, highly attractive, English-speaking female (to take just one of many iterations). She’s ready to talk to you! The opportunities for delusion, fraud, and manipulation by way of the human proclivity toward self-deceit just got multiplied a thousandfold. Customer service runarounds just got 10 times more convoluted.

The assumption is that, for millions if not billions of customers, video-to-video and image-to-video technology like Kling, which allows users to transfer specific motions, facial expressions, and gestures in live time from a reference video is more than enough to satisfy consumers as well as producers. Everybody wins!

Or not? Digital puppeteering can’t help but subvert the quality and value of human-to-human interaction — you know, that thing that started and perpetuates all of our experience on earth. Yet so dilapidated are our circumstances that it’s actually very hard to say whether or not this is an improvement in moral terms. You see, on the one hand, maybe sites such as Fanvue force most women back into the real world, where they need to interact with other real humans. On the other, maybe the price for artificial intimate interaction with digital entities stabilizes and even more young, shiftless, and financially abused men have nowhere else to turn but to simulated companions.

Justine Moore, a partner at A16z, gets credit for putting the puzzle together in a semi-viral X thread last week: “I predicted this in ’23 when I saw a few creators start using AI to sell voice clips and extra images. But now the future is here — anyone can be a hot girl online. It’s all thanks to NB Pro [and] Kling Motion Control.”

Consider that with these minor steps forward into really convincing motion transfer and voice technologies, the level of human discernment required to combat fraud, at every level, just shot through the roof. You get a FaceTime or X call from someone. Is it really that person? We are presented with an audio-visual clip of some sort, it’s labeled “BREAKING.” Maybe it looks important, or maybe the context really has immediate impact, but we won’t be entirely sure if it’s real.

Fanvue’s big step into a very particular timeline nightmare shouldn’t have been inevitable, yet it also seems foretold. It surely spells deep trouble — and signifies a turning point where we must make an active, daily choice to be, and not just seem to be, human.

​Tech