About two weeks ago I left a comment with a link to Pika AI, a new tool that makes it possible to generate video from text prompts. The promotion video was pretty good, but sadly it has been taken down in the meantime. However, there is plenty of material available on the YouTube page of Pika Labs. The aforementioned video is also currently embedded on their landing page. Pika Labs is a real company, which recently got $55m in funding. There are also other startups working on automated video generation. Thus, we can probably readily accept the premise that this technology exists, is actively being worked on, and will improve in the future. Generating images based on text prompt, in contrast, is almost pedestrian in comparison. It has been fully adopted by the industry. Sometimes, people bluntly tell you that all their images have been AI generated, and at other times, you guess that they probably did not spend money on getting one studio-grade picture after another.

The state-of-the-art in video generation seems to be the creation of short clips of a length of about one minute, which even includes dynamic camera work and impressive special effects. There is probably not much extra work needed to completely obliterate not just the porn industry but even parts of Hollywood. Porn is downright primitive so I would not be surprised if there were already AIs in development that can produce simple looped animated videos. I am under the impression that video, in particular porn, is not that much of a step up from the status quo.

A few months ago I already wrote about PornPen.ai. That site has improved quite considerably in the meantime. Nowadays, you can generate short GIFs, use 3D models as a basis for your artwork, and even keep a character consistent as you change settings and poses. All of this will come very handy for short videos. Within a year or two, we will probably be able to generate ten-minute long porn clips with ease. With a modern character editor, which can be found in plenty of Japanese-made games, it should be trivial to create bespoke porn. Here is an example of the character editor of the game Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, which was released in March this year:

I am using this character editor as an example because I am familiar with it and can confirm that it is very easy to create an attractive female character. It takes a couple of minutes and, no, you are not limited to Asian faces. In contrast, somehow Western developers may spend years on a task like this and not figure it out.

I think that the porn industry will be completely done in a few years. Perhaps there will be a few guys who prefer real women in their porn, similar to how some people by “artisan chocolate”. However, this comparison is off because if you get the power to create exactly the kind of porn you want, you are the artisan whereas guys insisting on looking at videos of real women will, strictly speaking, get a much worse product.

Taking into account that AI video generators will be able to import 3D models, we will probably quickly get to the point where people can produce their own superhero movies at home. Of course, the big Hollywood studios will also jump on this bandwagon, but given the trajectory of the Marvel cinematic universe (MCU) is on, it will probably just be a few years before small independent teams will be able to produce better movies than big studios. I am not exaggerating. Hollywood has kneecapped itself. Studio executives ran one franchise after another into the ground, so much so that the most recent MCU movies have lost hundred of millions of dollars each.

There is the interesting phenomenon that people do not seem to want perfection. It is enough if something is “good enough” as long as certain minimum standards are met. By this I obviously do not mean to say that the bar is necessarily very low. However, we have seen a lot of examples of supposedly inferior or cheaply made products becoming enormously successful. In terms of video games, we have seen franchises like Minecraft, Angry Birds and even Pokemon doing phenomenally well even though their graphics are merely functional. Minecraft looks really bad, with its extremely pixelated graphics, Angry Birds has the lamest, most insipid art you can find, and Pokemon games somehow always lag far behind in looks, but the fans just do not care. Likewise, with a good story in an independent movie, or visually appealing bespoke porn, Joe in his basement will be highly competitive. High fidelity sound or high-definition video seem to be quite irrelevant, in fact. People are happy with watching 720p video streams even though they could watch the same movie in 4K on a blu-ray disc. This format never really took off, and neither did the successors of the CD. This year, people have been buying more music on vinyl than CD, which is quite ridiculous.  Thus, I am quite certain that even 480p AI-generated video will find a large audience, and if people want a better product, we can use AI to create higher-resolution material as well. It will just take longer.

I predict that we will see the complete disappearance of the “Hollywood star”, just as there are no longer any music stars. No pop musician who appeared in the 2010s got even a fraction of the fame Michael Jackson or David Bowie had in the 1980s. I do not mind the disappearance of “stars” at all as these are simply sock puppets of the elites. There is probably a reason the elites carted out a guy like Schwarzenegger to tell people to get triple-vaxxed. This guy probably has just a few years left on this planet. Yet, he still has more name-recognition than any male actor who got big in the 2010. (I can’t even think of any names off the top of my head.)

AI porn will also deeply change society. It will lead to a complete demystification of women and sex. All it takes is one picture of a real-world woman and an AI video engine to generate a never-ending stream of custom-made porn. Governments will probably attempt to ban this technology because it takes away their ability to plant pictures or videos of 17-year-old girls on your computer who look like fully grown women and lock you up for being in the possession of child pornography. Alternatively, I could imagine governments coming up with new bizarre laws that redefine child pornography to include “any kind of AI-generated material that could be interpreted as showing non-adult women”. Thus, you better get some wrinkles on your AI models.

I have little sympathy for Hollywood and the porn industry, so I look forward to both going down in flames. The porn industry is in the worst shape it has ever been. It has not had a “star” since Jesse Jane in the late 2000s or perhaps Mia Khalifa about a decade ago, but this was largely due to sex videos in which she is wearing a hijab, which led to her getting death threats. Hollywood has likewise seen much better days. The biggest franchises ever created have completely crashed and burned, i.e. Star Wars and the MCU. In a decade or so small groups of independent movie makers will probably give Hollywood a run for its money, just as it has been happening in gaming for years already.