Photo:
‘Empowering content creators to shape the dialogue of their $30/month ‘AI companions’.’
Adult film icon and media investor Riley Reid is spearheading the integration of generative AI into the adult entertainment industry with the launch of an online platform. This platform allows users to engage in conversations with digital versions of their favorite adult stars, content creators, and influencers. Unlike other adult chatbots, Clona.AI’s avatars are trained with the explicit consent and direct input of the models’ creators, ensuring that conversations remain within agreed boundaries.
For a monthly fee of $30, fans and subscribers will have the opportunity to engage in “intimate conversations” with the digital avatars. The current roster of creators on the platform includes Riley Reid herself and Lena the Plug. A free tier is also available, granting users five chat messages per month.
Riley Reid expressed her excitement about the potential of AI in the industry, stating, “The reality is, AI is coming, and if it’s not Clona, it’s somebody else. When [other people] use deepfakes or whatever — if I’m not partnering up with it, then someone else is going to steal my likeness and do it without me. So being presented with this opportunity, I was so excited because I felt like I had a chance to be a part of society’s technological advances.”
Clona uses Meta’s Llama 2 large language model as a foundation and refines and retrains it extensively to reflect the personality of the individual it is based on. Riley Reid’s model, for example, was initially trained using a variety of her online media, including interviews, podcast appearances, YouTube videos, and her adult content. The refinement process involved AI conversations with Reid herself.
While the AI companions have the capability to engage in explicit conversations, the extent of the explicitness is determined by the preferences of the actors and creators, not the users. Riley Reid emphasized that her model, for instance, will not discuss physically dangerous sexual acts with users, stating, “I don’t know if the tech team thought about the sounding guys, but I was like, I thought about them.”
Generative AI technology has demonstrated significant potential in creating digital clones of deceased celebrities and recording artists. However, it has also been misused in activities such as deepfake pornography and shady dental advertising. Unethical data scraping practices and copyright concerns have also arisen due to the use of public web data to train large language models.
Riley Reid remains optimistic about the future of the sex industry and its incorporation of AI, highlighting its historical adaptability and advancement with technology. She stated, “I feel like we’re gonna be a huge part of AI adapting into our society because porn is always like that. It’s what it did with the internet. And the porn world has seen so many advances in technology.”