What AI Facial Recognition Means for Porn

Great porn is about a lot more than just capturing attractive people having sex on camera. Performance, even “acting,” can add to or detract from the power of any graphic sex scene, and one of the key components of any performance is the performer’s expressions. Surely you’ve been mid-scene with your favorite pornstar and realized it’s not just her amazing body and relentless energy that has you whacking off in her honor: it’s the minute changes of expression that creep across her face as she fucks. Now porn, and VR porn more specifically, is taking observation of human facial expression very seriously, roping in the big guns, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Image: Elena Koshka and Nina North in Model Misbehavior (WankzVR)

Intelligent Porn: No Oxymoron

Artificial Intelligence is much more than just a tech buzzword and sci-fi plot-point. For VR porn viewers, it could be the gateway to an adult experience fully and instantly customized to your reactions. Instead of pointing and clicking (or otherwise directly selecting, by choice) the person you’d like to engage with virtually, imagine looking around a room and spending a few minutes flirting with a pornstar. She holds eye contact, and the corners of her mouth stretch to a sly grin. Your eyes widen, your face becomes flushed, and there’s a noticeable shift in your posture as you feel your nether regions rumble. You may think you’ve just made a conscious decision, but in such a scenario, AI is guiding your sexual experiences almost wholly, with you merely providing the input data.

From Live Weather to Live Women

Image: Björk by Santiago Felipe

AI is today being used in such a wide range of products and services that it’s already forming an unseen web of human data mining supporting our numerous industries. Combine the obvious commercial applications with artistic ambition, though, and we start getting into pretty exciting territory.

Decades after Brian Eno’s first forays into “generative music” (electronic music programmed to infinitely expand and reinterpret itself) and following on from New Orleans music creator Quintron’s barometrically controlled instrument, the Weather Warlock, Icelandic artist Bjork recently installed a site-specific AI-generated composition in New York City’s Sister City Hotel. Entitled Kórsafn and drawing on 17 years of archived choir recordings, the composition tracks the presence of clouds, the relative position of the sun and moon, and even birds, planes, and helicopters passing above the hotel’s Manhattan rooftop, using AI to identify each item and play its associated sound. Though Kórsafn lies firmly in the world of generative music composition, the learning processes developed by Microsoft are not only becoming more commonplace but more elegant and seemingly organic. This bodes very well for AI porn.

The Eyes (and Expressions) Have It

Generative music creation using AI is one thing. Observing and responding to weather and atmospheric conditions is another. Using those same tools and machine learning processes to help people find sexual satisfaction and erotic pleasure may seem like a different ballgame, but the principles are quite the same.

Image: iStock

Replace Bjork’s choral recordings with a virtual sex partner (or a roomful of them) and have them move, speak, express, and perform according to both the environment around them and the mood and reactions of their prospective partner: you. If you show little interest in one VR vixen, she could move to someone else, point you toward her “friend,” or alter her approach to better charm your mood and personality. This kind of subtle, user-driven intelligent programming of virtual humanoids may strike some as ethically precarious, but we’re still quite away from the amoral landscape depicted in HBO’s Westworld. It is, however, part of porn’s future and will soon be aiding the customization of your sexual experiences.