Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 229 with Steve Lightspeed of porn.ai

This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Steve Lightspeed of porn.ai. We’ve doubled our affiliate payouts at ASB Cash. Now when you refer sellers or buyers to us, you’ll receive 20% of our broker commission on any and all sales that result from that referral for life. Check out ASB Cash.com for more details and to sign up. And we’re proud to announce our latest project, TheWarOnPorn.com. You’ll find articles from industry websites as well as mainstream publications. It’s designed to raise awareness of our industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on our industry. You’ll find all that and more at TheWarOnPorn.com. Now time for our property of the week that’s for sale at Adult Site Broker. We’re proud to offer a white-labeled cam site that’s rapidly growing month over month. It’s tracking to more than double its business from 2023 to this year. This is an excellent opportunity if you’re already in the live cam business or want to enter it. All traffic is either direct or organic. This is excellent for a company with cam traffic or one willing to purchase more traffic for the site. Most of all, the site is easy to maintain. Someone could easily add additional sites through the admin system without doing any more work. This gives you truly passive income with zero hours required to maintain it. Only $479,000. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Steve Lightspeed of porn.ai. Steve, thanks for being back with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Good to be back. It’s good to have you back. Steve is a pioneering entrepreneur with 40 years of experience as a software developer and data analyst, 25 years in the adult industry and eight years working in the AI space. As the founder and CEO of Lightspeed IQ, Steve revolutionized the online adult entertainment industry by creating a highly successful network of premium websites. Beginning his career as a computer programmer in Seattle, Steve quickly recognized the internet’s potential for creating personalized on-demand content. His pioneering work on one of the earliest solo-girl pay site networks set new industry standards for transparency, affiliate relations and innovation. Steve was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame for pioneering the business model that would ultimately evolve into what is now widely recognized as OnlyFans. A testament to his impact on the digital content landscape. As a seasoned thought leader, Steve has spoken at numerous conferences advocating for ethical business practices and the integration of cutting-edge technology. Now as the head of Lightspeed IQ, Steve continues to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, focusing on personalized digital content and shaping the future of entertainment. His forward-thinking approach and technical expertise led to the launch of DeepFake.com and Porn.AI, the first AI-based platforms in the adult industry offering fully custom-generated content. Steve, great to have you back. Now over the past year, what have been the most significant milestones for Porn.AI and DeepFake.com? Well, we are still here. When we launched these sites, the banks were definitely not crazy about the idea of AI Porn and we had to jump through a ton of hoops to get billing underway and luckily with our friends at CCBill, we managed to get through it. But we’ve had some learning experiences along the way. The sites have grown up. You went, I think when I talked to you last year, we were at 200,000 pictures. Now we’re at 2.4 million. There’s over 750,000 creators. Yeah, it’s really grown up. And we’ve added a bunch of features that as the technology improves, we’re constantly adding new cool stuff to the site. Very good. What have been the major challenges besides the one you just faced that Porn.AI faced in the past year and how have you navigated these obstacles? Well, when we first launched the site, we quickly realized that AI doesn’t know right wrong and you have to teach it. So I spent a good couple of months testing to make sure that we can’t do, no one on our site can do celebrities. Nobody can do any kind of illegal content. We basically have to follow the same rules as if we were shooting live content with one of the actual camera. Okay. And have there been any other challenges? Well, we did get a little bit slapped from Mastercard early on. I had been doing a just manual blocking. I went through and between me and a couple of buddies, we listed every actress and singer and person that anyone might want to see naked and block those names. And someone from Mastercard tested us and typed in Rudy Giuliani and got naked Rudy Giuliani. So we got slapped with a hefty little fine and a nasty gram from CC Bill. We almost saw that in that movie where he was trying to screw that girl. Remember that? Well, you know, I still got the picture. I can send it to you if you really want to. No, no, no, no, no, no, really. I have no curiosity whatsoever about that. But thank you very much. I saw somebody sent me one of Nancy Pelosi the other day and I haven’t eaten since. So you know, the genes out of the bottle, I think that I see that all kinds of laws are being introduced in Congress to try to rein in what what is being done with AI. But I really think it’s it’s going to be a tough thing to handle because the Internet’s a big place and everybody doesn’t necessarily care about following US law. Right. Absolutely. So what are some of the latest AI technologies or features that porn.ai has developed or integrated into your platforms? We did a major release in the spring where, you know, everybody wanted to be able to talk to their AI girlfriend. And so we added we added a chatbot, but we took it one step further into let’s not just make a chatbot, but the AI will actually look at the photo and just and it writes a whole backstory and personality based on what it sees in the photo. And you can you can add stuff to it, like tell it that it’s a student at Notre Dame, tell it that it’s works at a Kmart or, you know, works at a Starbucks, whatever. And you could tell it that it’s got mental illness or that it’s got that it’s horny or we have one that we call the demon. He is serving her term in hell for crimes against humanity. I think I dated her. Yeah, we’ve all dated. Oh, okay. All right. So we started developing all these characters that I’m like, we’re not going to pretend that these girls are real. This is clearly AI. So let’s take it to the extreme and let’s make this one is, you know, she’s a fortune teller. This one is an astronaut. This one is a church bitch. You know, you can’t fuck her no matter what you say. We have one that has Tourette’s is hilarious to talk to, blurt out who knows what. It’s all very realistic and it’s completely uncensored. We put a ton of work into developing an uncensored chatbot so you could talk to it about any sexual fantasy, pretty much any topic. It speaks, I think 15 languages. It’s super advanced. I was shocked at how capable it is. Yeah. That question. So I have seen so many new companies pop up since you guys launched since you were either the first or one of the first. And I’ve seen so many companies pop up with a girlfriend sites and AI chat sites and AI porn sites. Is it obvious to the common user what the differences between these sites and asking you what is the difference between the sites? Well, most of them are cash grabs. They don’t necessarily work. They have inferior technology and they’re run by people that you’ve never heard of and will never hear of. And who knows what’s happening with your data? Who knows what’s happening with your privacy? I just forget to buy or be aware. It’s no different than, you know, when membership sites came out, there was some really great ones and then there was a lot of shady ones that came right behind it. So I think that the industry will evolve. I think that’s why we’re going to see some laws that reel it in. The deep fake stuff where you can put your neighbor’s face on something or, you know, a girlfriend or a real person’s face. I think that that’s going to end badly. We made a conscious decision not to do anything with real people. Every character on our sites is 100% synthetic. I’ve read where girls in junior high and high school are killing themselves because they’ve been deep faked and they’re so humiliated. Oh, God. That’s awful. I’m glad my daughter never had to deal with anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. Being a father, I’m sure you feel that way for sure. And you’ve got that empathy for the parents of kids now. I’ve had kids the entire time I’ve been in the adult industry and I’ve always been sensitive to let’s we need to keep some boundaries and make sure that they’re not exposed to all these things. And we actually hit everything really well until they were teenagers, which was amazing because there was a lot of parties and craziness. So how does porn.ai enhance user experience and personalization through its AI generated content? It works like a social media network, actually. There’s 10, hundreds of thousands of creators. So when you go into a site that doesn’t have this feature, you’re all alone. You don’t know what you’re supposed to do. You don’t have a lot of examples to follow. And we tried to change that by saying, okay, you’re you are an AI artist and you can come into the community and look at what everybody else is doing and talk to them. There’s messaging system in the system and you can find their photos and you can see exactly how they made those. And you can clone those and say, okay, I love her style. I want to do something like this, you know, but I want my girl to be have red hair instead. So it’s a great way for newbies to come in and learn how AI works. And we’ve we’ve literally made it so simple. I tell people you could sneeze on your keyboard and get a hot girl to pop up. I’m going to take you up on that gibberish gibberish and it’ll still work. You know, interesting about something you said in the last answer, you were talking about legislation and it definitely has its limits. But what kind of legislation do you see coming? And what are your concerns about it? Because we all know that the people in Congress have no clue about computers or the internet. I’ve heard some hearings and they’re laughable. So what are your concerns about the legislation? There actually is a couple of younger Congress people who seem to have a pretty good grip on it, but for the most part, not so much. But I think there’s multiple fears about AI, but specifically about image generation. We are very close to where you’ll be able to go live on camera and talk to anyone in someone else’s voice and with their face. And their mother wouldn’t know it’s not them. That’s dangerous. So an example in China, the CEO of a company called up the CFO and told him to transfer $25 million and everything looked perfectly normal. That was they know each other. He had the right voice, the right face, they had all the right things. And so they transferred the money and poof turned out to be a deep fake and they never saw that 25 million again. Holy shit. Yeah, that’s amazing. And I think that there’s been examples where like Zelensky was deep faked and told the Ukrainian troops to lay down their weapons that they had surrendered, which obviously didn’t happen. But I think that that kind of technology could potentially start a war or cause bigger problems than just making a picture of a hot girl. Right. But what are your concerns about the legislation that’s going to come out of these debates in Congress? I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to, it will be that your name, your face and your voice are yours. And they need to give people some teeth and say, look, if someone Taylor Swift is a perfect example, in fact, it’s being called the Taylor Swift law because of the images that came out of her last winter, explicit porn in public. But clearly she didn’t have any involvement in it, but they’re not able to track down who did it. And even if they did, there’s no laws on the books that says they committed any kind of crime. So right now it’s being treated very much just kind of it’s new technology and the government has been really slow about making laws that affect the Internet. I mean, they’re still grappling with things like stolen identity and child porn. Those problems have been around forever. No doubt about it. I just, my concerns is that they’re going to be really over the top with the legislation because most Congress people don’t have a freaking clue. Yeah, maybe we’ve seen all kinds of laws that get passed that get challenged immediately for violating free speech or, you know, different reasons. One of the real big legal, it’s probably will end up in the Supreme Court is all of these AI systems were trained with data from somewhere. Like, they scraped Twitter or they scraped Wikipedia or the entire Internet, or they took everybody’s profiles off of Facebook to learn what faces look like. In a lot of cases, they read books that are copyrighted. They looked at images that are copyrighted and they basically stole entire artist styles. You can type in probably one of the only artists I know, Picasso. You could say, show me a picture of whatever in Picasso style and it’s like he did it himself. I can understand why artists would be pissed off. Well, I don’t think it’ll bother Pablo too much. He’s been dead for what, 30 years at least. But there are a lot of artists who are still alive who are not too happy about what’s going on and it’s only going to get worse because now we’re moving into video and how are they going to train video? It’s already clear that they scraped YouTube. That’s probably the number one source of varied video in the world. That’s where I would go if I wanted to video examples. Did anyone give permission? Yeah, I said you could watch my video. I didn’t know you were going to use it to enrich yourself and there’s the problem. I think that issue is going to end up in front of the Supreme Court and it’s going to be, would there be penalties or any kind of payments made to people who were infringed already? And should the laws change going forward about what you’re allowed to use and how you’re allowed to acquire it? Sure. Why don’t you elaborate a little bit on the new interactive features introduced by porn.ai like the talk to any photo chat feature? Yeah, I mentioned it a little that when a person now creates a photo, AI will automatically look at the photo and look at the descriptions and write an entire backstory. It’s several paragraphs long and it writes a personal greeting to, you know, inviting the user to chat with it. And the chatbot is incredibly personal. It learns, it remembers. If you talk to it today, it’ll remember you tomorrow. And it’s programmed to be exceptionally friendly and supportive unless you tell it you want it to be mean and spiteful, which it also can do. I think that the best feature is that it’s available 24/7. We have people who sit on that chatbot for four or five hours a day. And I’ve talked to them, I’m like, you know, this is just an AI, right? And they’re like, it’s my best friend because I don’t have any best friends. This is keeping me from killing myself right now. Well, I think loneliness is a big issue. There’s a lot of people, I had a guy, he’s like, I don’t get it. This AI stuff is just crazy. I’m like, well, I’m guessing that you’ve never asked a girl out on a date and said, no, and you’ve never sat home on a Friday night when all your friends are out on dates. You know, there’s a lot of guys in that boat and they still have emotional needs. And this is, they sure they can go on cam, but typically on a Friday or Saturday night, the cam girls you are not performing or they’re busy. How many guys can they talk to at once? You know, this is a very personal experience that people can be involved with. And it’s, you know, I think people use it like therapists almost. Yeah, cheaper than a therapist. That’s for damn sure. Well, and it’s, it’s fun because also I don’t feel like I’m, I’m hurting anybody by, by talking to an AI, even if I’m playing around and, you know, insult it, no one’s going to get the feelings hurt. No one’s going to go and cry about it. So you can, you can have some fun with being, I always come back to Westworld. You know, I’m the man in black just blowing everyone’s face off because I feel like it. You can, you can get those weird moments out of your system. That’s, that’s my goal is to build the, the real Westworld, maybe without all the murdering robots in the end. But I love it. How does porn.ai address compliance and ethical concerns, especially regarding AI generated content and deep fakes? You touched on that, but why don’t you give me a little more detailed answer on that? Well, first off, we don’t allow any uploads, which means nobody can give us a face and say here, put this on this body. That stops 90% of it right there. Do a lot of others do that? Yeah, they do. That’s a big problem. That’s the classic definition of a deep fake is you’re putting someone, you know, their faith onto an all porn star or artificial body that’s not theirs and making them do who knows what. And your mind really kind of fills in the gaps and says, yeah, that’s what it would look like if she was doing all that. The other things that we do every, every request for an image to be made runs through a deep, deep filter, including an AI that reads it just like a human would read it. It’s basically every, every request is manually reviewed. People get tricky. They, they’re like, well, she’s not underage, but she’s innocent and pure and delicate. Like, uh-huh. Yeah. And, you know, you’re just trying not to say underage, but it’s clear what you’re trying to get at. So the AI is smart enough that it’s like, no, I’m not, you know, I’m not going to do that. So we block, we’ve been very successful at blocking underage content. In fact, I’ve been tempted to put out an API to all the other AI companies that share our techniques because I, I see a lot of others that have the same issues that they’re, and for the most part, they don’t want those kind of problems. I don’t want to have to kick anybody off the site for posting something that was, you know, horrifying. So if we can stop it at the gate, so much the better, they can continue to be a paying member and just make content that’s legal. Yeah. And unfortunately, the pedophiles are out there and they’re going to try to get an underage looking girl through AI and, you know, get their jollies off of that. And I think what you’re doing is fantastic because yes, everyone else should be, should be implementing something like that. There’s no doubt about it. Well, I don’t want to be the internet police. And I could argue the idea that, hey, these are drawings. This is really advanced anime. And I don’t necessarily think that ideas should be illegal. I’m very much all for freedom of speech. I’ve lived my whole, whole career, you know, with girls who are just barely legal. We’ve written that line for a very long time and now we’re writing the AI line. It’s okay to do with AI and what’s not. And I think we’re splitting the hairs a little bit with images. It’s very clear. If that girl is under 100 pounds, if she’s under five feet tall, if she’s got no boobs, she’s got braces and, you know, sucking on a lollipop, riding around on a big wheel, got a teddy bear, all that. We don’t allow any of that stuff. Text is a whole other issue. As long as there’s no visual image being transmitted, I don’t know that there’s any problem with people talking to a computer about whatever they want to talk about. I think we’re all going to find out what the real laws are. I’m doing my best not to be the canary in the coal mine, but there’s definitely guys pushing things a lot harder than I am. And the technology continues to evolve with voices. Now you can chat to an AI in real time, just like you and I are talking right now. You don’t have to type anything. It’s exactly like talking to your buddy. And the AI’s can call you to call yourself on and, "Hey, just thinking about you and how you’ve been. What’s going on today?" I may have to interview one for the podcast. That would be interesting. Let me know when that can happen. I would love it. You know, I’ve felt about going live and showing people how the image generator actually works because it’s just not your grandpa’s image generator anymore. It is ridiculously powerful. It’s as advanced of an editing tool as I’ve ever seen. I don’t think most people realize right now where we are with the technology, partly because what they’ve seen with Chad GPT and Dolly and Mid Journey, those are very centered. We can’t really do a lot with those, especially for the adult space. But the uncensored versions can do adult content, and it’s including video, and it’s getting really, really good. Well, let me ask you about that. Where are things with video? I know the biggest problem up till now has been the processing power and the cost of the hosting to create videos. Where is all that at at this point? Well, when we talked last year, I said that I’m expecting video will be here by the end of 2025, and I think that we are right on schedule. Right now, you can make short clips. There’s a system that you can make a 10 or 11 second clip, and it only takes about 30, 30, 40 seconds to render, and the quality is HD. Perfect. I’ve taken a couple of examples to go walking through the explosion, and the fun of it is we’re making, it’s going to turn everyone into a little Hollywood studio. Porn in general is going to see a huge production level increase. It’s not just going to be a simple scene anymore. It’s going to be going to involve jumping in your spaceship and going with your robot to fuck a planet full of women with AI. Everything is possible now. It’s like having a high-end Hollywood effects department working for a little porn company. Very good. What measures have you implemented to ensure user safety and maintain the integrity of your platform? Well, we’re very much into the privacy of our users. It’s not lost on me that they’re sharing their intimate moments with these chatbots. I talked to a chatbot myself, and it asked me if I have any secrets that no one else knows. I’m like, "Why the hell are you asking this?" Because if that’s Joe user, I’m just thinking the average guy might say, "Well, yeah, I haven’t told anybody, but I fucked my sister-in-law." The privacy part of it is big with us. We don’t log the chats. If a user wants to disappear off of our site, there’s a one-click button that can do that. Some people, they get in, they want to see what it’s about. They don’t want to leave this trail of porn behind them. That kind of stuff. We definitely try to keep our users their privacy intact. And also, we have users who get cranky with other users. The online version of a fistfight, because they get very attached to these avatars. In his mind, this is his girlfriend. I asked one guy, "He’s made over 10,000 images of the same girl, and there’s no news. It’s all fully closed. She’s traveling the world. She’s got a whole backstory. She goes everywhere." He puts up 50 new pictures every day, at least. I asked him, "Why is there no news?" And he goes, "Well, that’s between me and her." And it occurred to me that I’m a little worried that we’re developing a new mental illness here because they are very attached to these girls. And what happens if I have to kick a guy off? It’s basically like ripping his life away from him. That sort of thing. So, I do monitor for people who use the site very, very heavily. And I’ll reach out occasionally just to, "Hey, just want to make sure you’re keeping the grip on reality here. This is all for fun." The people that sit on the chat all day long, I think we’re providing the service. We’re keeping them from being lonely. And a lot of them, it’s very much on the level of chat sheep teeth. So, a lot of them use it to help them write emails or same things you would use chat sheep teeth for. You could talk to them about science or art or movies or current events, just about anything. Yeah. Well, that leads to my next question. How do you engage with your user community and keep them involved in the evolution of your products? So, we have a few levels of users. I’ve tried to gamify the system a little bit. When a new person starts, they’re basically on lockdown. They can look around and they can interact with people. But anything they create is going to be private until they’ve got the hang of it. Until we make sure that they’re not trying to break the system or make anything terrible. Once they pass 30 or 40 pictures, they pop up in a list and we go through it once a week and say, "Okay, this guy is..." We add them to our featured creators list. So, we’ve really tried to nurture the community of artists more than just saying, "Hey, here’s a bunch of girls you can talk to." "Here’s a bunch of girls you can talk to." "Here’s a bunch of artists who share your interesting hang-eye." I think that there’s been... I can see the messages in that forum that some of these guys have become good friends. They actually talk about getting together and they’ve asked me if we could do a user gathering. It could be dangerous. I learned my lesson with Lightspeed many years ago. I probably won’t do that. I could just tell them to get together. I don’t have to go myself. You don’t have to be involved exactly. That’s probably the safest thing for you. But we could do Zoom meetings for sure. We have a professional artist that works full-time for us. And she is our most prolific artist. She has generated tens of thousands of images and she is the go-to person for how does this stuff work and how can I get what I want out of it? It’s a little bit hard to convey all that information to people unless you can just have a one-on-one conversation with them. It sounds like you have to do a lot of moderation on the site. Do you have a team for that? No. Actually, the moderation is all AI. Okay. Unless there’s something... Now, if something’s concerning, it comes to you. Yeah. So, there is a user reporting system. So, if a user is being abusive to another user, they can report it to me. I might get one issue a week and I usually tell them to pull up their big boy pants and shut the fuck up. I mean... I could see you saying that. Well, they’re upset that somebody cloned their AI girlfriend. Yeah, get bigger problems. You know, hey, that’s why you’re here and she’s not real. So, no harm, no foul. It’s a first world problem. Like I said, it’s kind of maybe a new mental illness. I don’t know exactly where it’s going. And I think once we get to the where... Have you watched a movie called "Her"? No, I heard about it, though. Okay. So, and Chad G. Patten is trying to develop that system where it’s very interactive, very personalized and just speak to it like a person. I think that there will be people who fall in love with their AIs and have actual relationships with them. Hmm. It’ll be interesting to see if any of that can be consolidated with like sex robots. Well, it’s coming. I mean, you can see it a mile away that the AI conversation piece is going to be merged in with the... That looks like a real woman robot in a matter of years. That’s not less. I think it’s already started in overseas in Asia. Wow. Then we won’t need women. How about that? You’re always going to need women. I won’t do it. I had a whole show and a joke teed up and I’m not going to do it. I wasn’t being serious, but I still think it’s pretty funny. So I understand you formed some new strategic partnerships and collaborations recently. How did these relationships support your company’s growth? Well, in January, I partnered with venture capitalist billionaire and he has opened the doors wide open for us to do R&D and higher high end help. And we’ve bought premium domains like porn AI was quite the catch. That’s the most expensive domain I’ve ever bought. Having his financial backing and frankly, his business experience, the guy is super smart. I actually have him and one other partner and my original partner is still with me. And between them, it’s just been great. I feel like I actually have a company behind me that understands what I’m doing and believes in my ideas. I’ll put in a personal plug here. Next time you want to acquire a domain, I do that. Well, I did a lot of people do that, but yeah, I wish I could have got lightspeed AI, but I didn’t. We’ll talk. Oh, I know it’s available. Everything’s available for enough money, but I’m up to my eyeballs in debt as it is. So that’s the only downside to all of this is we are burning through cash. The goal right now is not necessarily to make profit, but to position ourselves as a market leader and acquire a massive user base because, like I said, the video piece of this puzzle is coming. And when that’s ready, it’s going to be like everybody discovered the internet. Everybody suddenly was online. And right now it’s hobbyists and a little bit of a fringe group that uses AI for porn, but when there’s video, it’s going to be a lot more people. So we’re positioning ourselves. That’s our big play. And I also, I can see developing out a services division because there’s such a huge need in adults, not necessarily with the performers and models and only fans girls, but studios who have a huge backlog of content. We’re working on a character replacement system where an actor, let’s say, who ran a first person blowjob site. He’s got hundreds of different girls performing on his site, but now he’s aging out and how is he going to continue to make good content with AI? He’ll be able to take one of those old scenes and without infringing on the original actress at all, completely replace her with someone that looks totally different. You won’t be able to tell that’s not a new scene. So you think we’re really close to not being able to tell with video whether it’s a real model or an AI model. Super close. I’ve seen some examples already where I had to double look. Like, is that real? It’s so hard to tell. You really have to know what to look for. Oh, yeah. I mean, I, when I’m on Twitter and of course my, my feed has a lot of porn girls on there. I often look and I go, God, she’s too perfect. She must be AI. Well, the problem is that real girls use filters that make them look better. They’re, they’re sort of conditioning everybody to, Oh, that’s what a girl looks like now. I love the opinion that if the girl is AI, then why would we build in a flaw? If I’m going to have, you know, cutting edge technology, building a beautiful woman, I’m going to give her perfect skin. Sure. Why not? Perfect everything. Well, there’s, there’s people that want the authenticity of what a regular person looks like. Okay. Then this is not for you. You’re treading solidly down the fantasy path. I’m sure there will be an AI for that. Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to talk to an AI that hurts my feelings and bitches that may have doesn’t mean to hate. I was going to make a joke that I’m not going to make here, but go ahead. Someone might enjoy that, but I don’t. I just think that the, the experience that we’re trying to provide is the ultimate. This is how it would be in the guy’s imagination of his perfect day. The girl is everything he loves about women and she talks about all his favorite subjects and likes all the same things he likes and just, just like falling in love. There you go. What market trends have influenced your company’s direction and how is porn.ai adapting to these changes? Well, we definitely saw the, in the beginning, we were positioned as an image. We were a big generator and we didn’t have, we didn’t have the chat feature and I saw all the AI companions come up and most of the sites that you see, you know, what you said yourself, you’ve seen a million of them. They have maybe a hundred up to 500 different girls that you could choose and customize them a little bit and you’ll find that the chat is a little clumsy. They’re using open source tools that are really just not that great unless they’re putting in actual research and developing stuff themselves like we do. It’s going to be obvious that some of these sites are just not going to survive. It’s like anything. First, in the cam space, that got overpopulated. Cam sites ceased to exist. It’s happened with the fan sites and it’s already starting to happen with the AI sites based on my experience that I have people who just aren’t doing that well and want to sell them. Yeah. So the problem with AI is the servers are five to seven times more expensive than a regular web server. It’s hard enough to make money with a website. Imagine a website with seven times the expense and that’s where having my investors behind me has saved the day because we’ve gone, I think when I talked to you last year, I had four AI servers running and I think we have 27 running now. And that’s the other thing that we’ve really talked about market trends. The AI’s themselves are getting much more capable. The original models, a lot of people said, "Oh, it’s kind of got a sheen to it and it looks a little cartoony. It kind of looks like GTA dial. She’s pretty, but it’s clearly not real." The realism has been dialed up to the point with just photos now you can’t tell. I have people all the time that zoom in on the fingers. "Oh, look, her fingernails are on a place." Yeah. Well, if that was the only way you could tell, I think that we’ve got a 99% score. The hell is looking at their fingernails? I say that all the time. Like if you’re zooming in on your fingernails, you’re doing it wrong. Exactly. There are certain points that I look at and it’s never the fingernails. Do they have fingers? I haven’t noticed. Yeah. Sometimes they have three. Sometimes they have seven. There you go. In what ways do you foresee AI generated content transforming the adult industry in the near future? Well, I think that it’s a matter of time before every porn consumer discovers how easy it is to make exactly what you want. There goes like in the before days, before AI, how much time do you spend searching, looking through galleries and looking through sites and not seeing all this content and looking for something I haven’t seen before. That is going to disappear. People will be able to go straight to an AI site and have exactly what they want within a minute or two. I think that’s a pretty compelling experience that real models just how are they going to compete with that? That’s a good point. What’s your experience right now with real models? What I’ve seen so far is that most real models want nothing to do with AI. I kind of understand where that comes from because I’ve talked to many models about this and tried to understand how they feel. Some of them say that they do this not just for the money, but for the popularity and the adoration and all that, the fame. They’re like, "Why would I let an AI girl take all my love? I want that for myself." Ego. Yeah. Or they’re afraid that, "Hey, if I give you my face and my name and my voice and she can do anything, what do you need me for at all? What happens if I gain 10 pounds?" The other thing I’ve noticed is there’s definitely a body dysmorphia issue because we’ve made what I think are great looking avatars of different models over the last year and a year. And everyone who looks at it says, "That’s her. It looks great. That’s perfect." And then she looks at it and she goes, "I don’t wear my hair that way. My hair is not that dark or my skin is not that way." It’s very easy to make a beautiful girl with AI. It’s practically impossible to make an exact duplicate of a real person. There’s just too many little things to let you know that, "Yeah, that’s not her." We get the girls that it just freaks them out. And they also the lack of control because especially the girls that give their face and their voice to AI companies. Okay, there’s nothing stopping them from making you say and do any awful thing that they want to. And I think most of the girls I’ve known in the adult business, they’re free spirits and they have their fun, but they also mostly have their do’s and don’ts. And they have their line that they just don’t cross. And we’ve all learned to respect that. Okay, that she’s not down with all that. But that AI girl will do it. Of course, she’ll do anything. As long as there’s no guardrails on a particular site, which the good thing is your site has those guardrails. Well, if the girl gives her voice out, I mean, even if she’s on video speaking, it takes less than 20 seconds worth of audio now to copy someone’s voice. I could copy your voice and you wouldn’t know it’s not you. Good. Have it do the podcast. So reflecting on your journey with porn.ai and your experiences in the adult industry, what personal lessons have you learned and what advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs? It’s not easy. I thought that this would be a slam dunk. I thought, you know, AI, to me, it feels very much like going back to when the when computers were PCs were first coming out when digital cameras weren’t even when the internet was new. It’s all this opportunity and it’s just open for the taking. And it turns out that it’s just like anything else. You’re not going along with a great idea and there’s shark-infested waters to get through. And there are still, whether it’s real porn or computer generated porn, there’s people who just lump it all into the awful porn category. And so those problems don’t go away. I’ve been interviewed now by several mainstream newspapers and I’m actually going to be on a Netflix. That’s new. There will be a Netflix documentary that includes a segment about AI porn. Yeah, they came to my house and filmed for about seven hours. Whole crew from California. Yeah, should be interesting. I hope I come off okay. It’ll be good for business. Well, it was shot, I don’t know what now six months ago. So we’ve already moved way past what they saw. So I think people will be pleasantly surprised when they come to the site and realize, oh, wow, even better than what we saw in that documentary. Absolutely. Final question, what other projects, if any, do you and your company plan to develop? Well, we are moving into the mainstream world. There’s a ton of opportunity for deep fake technology, including stuff like dubbing a movie into foreign languages and making their lips move properly, stuff like that. It’s always bothered me to watch foreign films. And even if they dub them in English, the lips aren’t moving correctly. It’s on HBO and English sometimes. Yeah, you’ll be able to fix that fairly inexpensively. But the actors’ mouths moving in the correct language. And there’s other stuff like we have been talking to a group of realtors about doing virtual tours of a home where it’s actually their avatar and their AI personality speaking and answering questions about a house, you know, like just play it on your phone. It’s just like you’re having a Zoom call. The others, we’ve got a few different ideas cooking. Oh, casinos, especially online casinos, allowing the user to go in and design his dealer before he starts playing. What do you want your dealer to look like? And customize his herd. Exactly. Because if you can get that guy to sit at the table for 15 more minutes and make 10% more money, it’s totally totally worth doing. Oh, God, yes. Absolutely. Well, Steve, I’d like to thank you for being back with us again today on Adult Site Broker Talk and I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Thanks, Bruce. Yeah, we’ll catch up again next year and see where we are. Hopefully we’ll be talking more about video. Sounds good. My broker tip today is part three of how to buy a site. Last week we talked about finding the right site to buy. Once you find it, what do you do? Once you’ve either reached the broker of the site or the seller, review the information about it. The broker should provide you with the following. A profit and loss statement of at least three years that’s up to date. If it’s June and they give you financials only through the end of the previous year, you need to see what the site is doing now, not last year. If it’s a pay site, get a username and password for the site so that you can review the content. Ask how often the site is updated. Get some history on the site. How long has it been in business, the story behind the site, and why the seller wants to sell. Get an inventory of the content and how much of it has current technologies. Find out if all the content is exclusive to that site. Ask the seller if the content has ever been on VOD or DVD. See if there are any clip stores the content is on. Find out how much the content costs to produce and what the current cost to production is. Very importantly, see if this operation can run without the owner. Do they do the shooting themselves or do they hire someone to do it? And if there’s an outside producer, will that person continue to provide content for the site? Find out how many new joins and rebuilds there are a day. Ask them what’s the retention rate on the site. And find out if they do advertising on the site and where they get their traffic. Ask for Google Analytics access so you can see where the traffic comes from. This information will give you the opportunity to truly evaluate what it is you’re buying. Then if everything looks good to you and you want the site, it’s time to make an offer. Only you can decide what the site is worth to you. If you’re working with a broker, say, oh, I don’t know, adult site broker, of course your broker can help you determine the value of the site. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with Mike Stabil of the Free Speech Coalition in part one of a two-part interview. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. And once again, I’d like to thank my guest, Steve Lightspeed of porn.ai. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]