Somewhere Between Tech Ethics and Industrial Revolution

If you clicked because of the thumbnail… you got baited.

Kidding. It's just me, your friendly neighborhood blog owner. Today I want to talk about something that's been living rent-free in my head lately: ethics.

Generative images. Generative video. There's this flood of content being cranked out right now, and I keep circling the same question—how are we supposed to think about any of it, ethically?

Here's the thing. When AI started taking off, one industry came to mind almost immediately. You already know which one. Adult content. Watch any sci-fi movie or show and there's always some version of "humanity has fallen into decadence, and now our hero must save the world." There's a reason that trope keeps showing up. Sex—one of the big three human drives—is where the money moves fastest.

I saw this news recently. Someone built an AI virtual influencer named "Maya" and spun up an OnlyFans account. First month: $43,000. 1,247 paying subscribers, and one of them dropped close to $2,000 in a single month. Ha. So that's where we are.

(Is it actually real? Debatable—people pointed out that OnlyFans requires ID verification, so how a fully synthetic person cleared those checks is a fair question. But real or not, the part that matters doesn't change: it's possible now.)

Running an adult business off AI-generated content isn't some genius insight. Anyone can think of it. And right now, anyone can actually do it.

But is it… okay? Ethically? I genuinely don't know.

Maybe the customer can tell it's AI, maybe they can't—and either way, where's the harm, really? You're filling in someone's loneliness, patching a gap they couldn't patch otherwise. But flip it around and it's also gambling-adjacent. It's treating a human being as pure entertainment, a thing to be consumed.

And it's not all upside. Around the same time this went viral, security folks pointed out that the exact stack running Maya—never forgets you, never breaks character, always there at 7am—is functionally identical to a romance-scam or grooming toolkit. Same tech, just pointed at a different target. That one sat with me for a while.

I'll admit I've daydreamed about a business like this myself.

Real-time face and body synthesis, streamed live, buyer pays, both sides walk away satisfied. The seller earns from what they perform and show; the buyer pays to shape that person into exactly the style and requests they want. Textbook "willing to pay." And me? I just take a cut in the middle.

Twitch and YouTube streaming already kind of work this way. The difference here is real-time—plus the fact that you're mapping a custom avatar onto your actual body, on demand, with live interaction.

And I'm not sure that framing holds up either.

The lines just keep getting blurrier. Treat it as a pure business problem—social media, media, all of it—and it comes down to DDD: Dopamine Develop Design. You have to keep shipping services that make the dopamine hit. Which means you have to keep pulling out something more stimulating than the last thing. And AI? AI is almost perfectly built for exactly that.

So standing in the middle of all this, I have no idea what call I'm supposed to make.

If I put a service like that out into the world, what's actually wrong with it? Isn't everyone happy? Nobody's sad, nobody's left out, nobody's hurting—win-win all around. So why does my brain keep drifting back to "yeah, but should I?"

Look at that image I made of myself. Ha. I don't look like that, and my body definitely doesn't look like that—and yet here you are, having followed that thumbnail all the way down to this exact sentence.

I need that to work. And going forward, I'll need something even more addictive, even more stimulating. I know this. So is walking further down this road the right move?

The industrial revolution is already blowing through the door. Meanwhile I'm sitting here every single day, wondering exactly how far our tech ethics are willing to bend.