Anti-porn crusades have been at the heart of the US culture wars for generations, but by the start of the 2000s, the issue had lost its hold. Smartphones made porn too easy to spread and hard to muzzle. Porn became a politically sticky issue, too entangled with free speech and evolving tech. An uneasy truce was made: As long as the imagery was created by consenting adults and stayed on the other side of paywalls and age verification systems, it was to be left alone.
But today, as AI porn infiltrates dinner tables, PTA meetings, and courtrooms, that truce may not endure much longer. The issue is already making its way back into the national discourse; Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation–backed policy plan for a future Republican administration, proposes the criminalization of porn and the arrest of its creators.
But what if porn is wholly created by an algorithm? In that case, whether it’s obscene, ethical, or safe becomes secondary to What does it mean for porn to be “real”—and what will the answer demand from all of us?
During my time as a filmmaker in adult entertainment, I witnessed seismic shifts: the evolution from tape to digital, the introduction of new HIV preventions, and the disruption of the industry by free streaming and social media. An early tech adopter, porn was an industry built on desires, greed, and fantasy, propped up by performances and pharmaceuticals. Its methods and media varied widely, but the one constant was its messy humanity. Until now.
What does it mean for porn to be “real”—and what will the answer demand from all of us?
When AI-generated pornography first emerged, it was easy to keep a forensic distance from the early images and dismiss them as a parlor trick. They were laughable and creepy: cheerleaders with seven fingers and dead, wonky eyes. Then, seemingly overnight, they reached uncanny photorealism. Synthetic erotica, like hentai and CGI, has existed for decades, but I had never seen porn like this. These were the hallucinations of a machine trained on a million pornographic images, both the creation of porn and a distillation of it. Femmes fatales with psychedelic genitalia, straight male celebrities in same-sex scenes, naked girls in crowded grocery stores—posted not in the dark corners of the internet but on social media. The images were glistening and warm, raising fresh questions about consent and privacy. What would these new images turn us into?
In September of 2023, the small Spanish town of Almendralejo was forced to confront this question. Twenty girls returned from summer break to find naked selfies they’d never taken being passed around at school. Boys had rendered the images using an AI “nudify” app with just a few euros and a yearbook photo. The girls were bullied and blackmailed, suffered panic attacks and depression. The youngest was 11. The school and parents were at a loss. The tools had arrived faster than the speed of conversation, and they did not discriminate. By the end of the school year, similar cases had spread to Australia, Quebec, London, and Mexico. Then explicit AI images of Taylor Swift flooded social media. If she couldn’t stop this, a 15-year-old from Michigan stood no chance.
The technology behind pornography never slows down, regardless of controversies. When students return to school this fall, it will be in the shadow of AI video engines like Sora and Runway 3, which produce realistic video from text prompts and photographs. If still images have caused so much global havoc, imagine what video could do and where the footage could end up.