In January, 45,000 adult industry workers gathered at the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas for their biggest event of the year, the 2026 Adult Video News (AVN) Awards Show. Between announcements for the winners of categories like Best Anal Sex Scene, industry sponsors ran advertisements on a big screen. One ad featured AI-generated versions of four prominent porn performers; Nina Elle was portrayed as a fairy perched on a giant photorealistic penis.

The crowd booed.

The ad was for https://joi.ai, a website where everyday people can talk to AI-generated “digital duplicates” of their favorite adult content creators. In the audience was Texas Patti, a German porn actor often cast as a MILF, who had signed up to be a brand ambassador for the site after it launched at AVN in 2024. “It was a shitshow,” Patti recalls. “Like, ‘Boo, fuck you! We don't need you!’ The whole audience was super against it.”

When Joi.ai first appeared on the scene, it intrigued creators with a pitch to help them generate passive income by spinning up “digital twins” online. All creators had to do was send in some photos and fill out a questionnaire. An AI version of themselves would do the rest. It worked: Farrah Abraham, the 16 and Pregnant star turned adult actress, has a Joi.ai doppelganger.

By the time AVN 2026 came around, the industry’s brewing discontent had morphed into vocal disenchantment.

Joi has had quite a few competitors, including Clona AI (co-founded by top-tier porn star Riley Reid), MyCrush AI, https://mypeach.ai, and Spicey AI. It’s difficult to keep track of how many AI porn chatbot sites have popped up over the last few years because so many have since disappeared or gone dormant. And what remains of the business today generates less revenue for performers than it did before.

Meanwhile, adult creators have grown increasingly wary of AI (as have many Americans, who express far more concern than optimism about AI’s impacts). After all, performers won’t be needed on set if their AI twins can do almost anything imaginable with some prompts and a keyboard click. By the time AVN 2026 came around, the industry’s brewing discontent had morphed into vocal disenchantment.

While AI is now everywhere in the mainstream business world, it would appear that the porn industry’s AI avatar bubble has already popped.

The adult industry has always been an early adopter of technology. In the 1950s, the invention of home video cameras opened the door for anyone to film porn videos, and by the 1970s, when the first VHS machines were entering homes, 75% of tapes were pornography, Wired reports. In more recent years, when people started experimenting with virtual reality, AI porn was one of the few use cases that drew significant interest. It’s no surprise that the industry began adopting AI relatively early.

The concept of AI porn picked up speed during the early years of the pandemic, says Brian Gross, a publicist who’s been working in the adult industry since 1999. “It got really loud, really fast,” he says. Talent he worked with began forwarding him emails from AI companies, seeking Gross’s input. “There was an aspect of, ‘When you're serious, call me,’” he says of those companies. “When your platform can become a revenue stream as big as the platforms where talent are already making money, then we can talk.”

Around 2024, companies peddling AI porn avatars began appearing in the halls of major conferences like AVN and Exxxotica, promising lucrative deals and high-fidelity AI lookalikes.

One adult performer, who preferred not to share her name so she could speak freely, says she received a five-figure signing bonus with Joi (then known as Eva AI; the site re-branded in April 2025) and was told she’d earn between $1,500 and $3,000 a month from fans’ interactions with her AI duplicate. (Spoiler: Once things got going, she says, she only received about a tenth of that.)

Performer Allie Eve Knox says a user wanted to meet her in person after falling in love with her AI twin.

Joi also approached Texas Patti at AVN in 2024. Though initially skeptical, Patti says the site’s budget “impressed” her. About 100 adult content creators, including big-name performers like Adriana Chechik, signed up that first year, Joi’s head of partnerships, Julia Momblat, tells us.

It’s unclear how Joi has such deep pockets or who founded the site (Momblat would not say when we asked). Today, it’s owned by holding firm Social Discovery Group, which also still offers a product called Eva, featuring only fictional AI companions. (Joi, by contrast, offers a mix of digital twins of real creators and fictional characters.)

Some enterprising adult creators also started their own sites, recruiting their colleagues to make avatars. Reid’s Clona launched in October 2023 with AI duplicates of Reid and fellow performer Lena the Plug, garnering media attention from Rolling Stone, 404 Media, and Business Insider. MyPeach.ai, founded by adult performer Crasskitty, signed creators like Allie Eve Knox, who tells us that a user wanted to meet her in person after falling in love with her AI twin.

Spicey AI, meanwhile, attracted adult performers like Rachael Cavalli and Kiki Daire. About a year after Spicey approached Cavalli at AVN, she had breakfast with the CEO, Michael Hodson. “He was telling me it was taking off. I think he had just signed two bigger names in the industry,” Cavalli recalls. “I was like, ‘Let's give it a shot. What the heck?’”

Now that hundreds of creators had signed up for the brave new AI world, they were ready to generate their avatars and see how fans reacted. When Kiki Daire first signed a contract to put hers on Spicey AI, she says her devotees either found her double “cool” or “creepy.”

There were some immediate benefits. Daire, who has cycled through “a million different looks” during her time in adult, says the tech allowed fans to, say, interact with the “blonde Kiki” if they so desired, essentially providing “custom content” that didn’t require any wig changes on her part.

Others, like porn actor Lexi Luna, found the process of creating an accurate AI double challenging.“I probably have some of the strictest limits in porn,” she tells me in September. She doesn’t do anal scenes, so neither could her AI. Her fans know she previously worked as a teacher, so her AI must use proper grammar.

Generating AI images that Luna felt accurately depicted her physical appearance proved even trickier. Her fans know her body well, and AI images failed to capture nuances. “AI likes to take away imperfections,” she says, citing a bump on her nose that both she and her fans adore. “[The AI] looks very fake,” she adds. “That’s not the image I want to represent with my fans.”

In October, I attend the New Jersey Exxxotica conference, where smiling adult performers sign photos for fans while a little person burlesque troop wearing cowgirl attire mingles in proximity to Stormy Daniels. The overall sentiment among performers reveals that interest in AI doubles is waning.

“It's dangerous to sign a release of your image to a company that can generate anything with what you're doing,” says Sophia Cruise while on a break from posing for fan photos at the event. Ashley Ace, meanwhile, says AI couldn’t replicate her “voluptuous” body. “Every time I've done it, I've come out a size two,” she says.

Following the conference, I catch up with Luna, the actress who found creating her AI avatar challenging. She says she’s abandoned her efforts to make an AI double.

“This might not be a beast I can control once I let it out of the bag,” Luna says. She felt she couldn’t risk handing her brand over to AI, which is known to hallucinate information. “I want my fans to have an authentic experience,” she says, “and it doesn't feel authentic yet.”

The companies offering AI doubles to adult performers have been steadily disappearing, too. Most of the startups that contacted publicist Gross back around 2021 “came and went,” he says. Texas Patti compares the trend to the NFT craze that overran her industry several years ago: “So many companies popped up, and all of them disappeared.”

Clona lost its payment processor last year and still hadn’t gotten the site back up when I last contact co-founder Reid’s team in late January. Knox, the adult content creator who’d signed up for MyPeach, says she never received any payout for her AI twin’s conversations with enamored fans, and the site’s URL now leads to a “coming soon” page.

Though Cavalli’s experience with Spicey started off promisingly enough, she says consumer use of the site eventually “tapered off.” Then, one month, she didn’t receive any income from Spicey at all. She emailed CEO Hodson to ask why, and he replied that the company had folded. (Hodson’s Spicey email address no longer works, and we were unable to reach him for comment.)

Joi is still chugging along, though Texas Patti says her payments from the service have slowed since the fall. Meanwhile, other non-sex-focused AI chatbots, like Grok, offer plenty of sexual content (albeit often troubling). It’s hard to measure how much that might be cutting into engagement with porn actors’ AI avatars, but Joi’s Momblat says platforms like Grok actually “help” because they “normalize emotional interaction with AI and bring new people into the space.”

Just because porn tends to experiment with emerging tech early, doesn’t mean that every innovation sticks—take the sensory “cyber suits” that Gross says users could wear while watching CD-ROMs to “feel” what the CDs showed on screen back in his early days in the industry.

But Gross says not to count AI porn avatar services out. “We're in the first few innings of this ballgame,” he insists. “Both parties”—adult creators and AI avatar companies—“are still feeling each other out.”

People will always fear new technology, he adds, though embracing it is a smarter business move. Texas Patti agrees. “We have a saying in Germany: ‘If you don't go with the time, you will go after a certain amount of time,’” she says. “AI is already here, and you can't stop it.”

Arguably, the jump from flesh-and-blood porn to fully AI-generated porn stars might not be that dramatic. So much of adult content “is already fake,” says Davey Wavey, founder of gay porn production company Himeros.TV. Younger people who’ve “grown up with AI,” he adds, “might not care” about AI characters infiltrating their porn. “If you want a huge dick, [AI] will create a two-foot dick,” Wavey adds. “It's hard to compete with that.”

Cavalli, though no longer interested in having an AI avatar since Spicey folded, admits she could see her “twin” helping her earn money when she’s older and can’t do as much physical work. “I don't want to be shooting forever,” she says.

Meanwhile, Joi recently launched video calls with some AIs. Joi’s Momblat didn’t attend AVN this year, but she heard about the crowd booing Joi. She isn’t concerned. “I don’t think it’s about Joi,” she says. “It’s the general stigma about AI” plus performers’ concerns that production companies will cast AI actors over them.

Not all adult creators fear being replaced by AI, though. “We still crave human touch and intimacy,” Daire says. “I'm hoping, as we get deeper into AI, people will start to crave true human interaction again, and we'll go back to a much more human-centric model.”

Доклад исследовательской группы Citrini Research, который описывает мрачный сценарий, связанный с новыми опасениями по поводу искусственного интеллекта, который был опубликован 22 февраля 2026 года наделал много шума(Подробности: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic).

В сценарии, который рассчитан на июнь 2028 года, авторы рисуют картину ближайшего будущего так: стремительное развитие ИИ резко повышает производительность труда, но провоцирует «гонку на выживание» среди работников интеллектуального труда — так называемых «белых воротничков».

При этом процесс будет развиваться постепенно: поначалу рынок воспримет офисные увольнения позитивно — маржа будет расти, прибыль — бить рекорды, а зарплаты — снижаться. Но затем массовые увольнения ударят по спросу — люди перестанут тратить деньги из-за потери работы. Начнутся дефолты по кредитам, и проблема перейдет в страховой сектор. Затем возникнут сложности на ипотечном рынке и усилятся распродажи активов. Таким образом, когда человеческий труд будет становиться все менее нужным, это спровоцирует потерю рабочих мест, обвал потребительских расходов и разрушение целых индустрий.

Bloomberg отмечает, что вытеснение офисных работников при таком сценарии «создает петлю отрицательной обратной связи»: компании сокращают штат ради повышения маржинальности и реинвестируют сэкономленные средства в ИИ, что позволяет проводить дальнейшие сокращения.

«Это не апология медвежьего рынка и не фанфик о гибели мира из-за ИИ. Единственная цель этого текста — смоделировать сценарий, который до сих пор был относительно мало изучен», — говорится в отчете Citrini.

В докладе упоминается множество компаний из разных отраслей, а в качестве «образцового примера» бизнеса, который будет разрушен новыми инструментами, приводится сервис доставки DoorDash — поскольку ИИ-агенты помогут и водителям, и клиентам организовывать доставку еды с гораздо меньшими затратами. В понедельник акции DoorDash рухнули на 6,6%.

Падение пережили и акции других компаний, упомянутых в докладе Citrini Research. Акции софтверных компаний Datadog, CrowdStrike и Zscaler рухнули более чем на 9%. Падение IBM на 13% стало худшим результатом за один день с 2000 года. Платежные компании Visa, Mastercard и American Express потеряли от 4% до 7%. Все эти опасения в сочетании с возобновившейся неопределенностью в торговой политике Белого дома потянули вниз и основные индексы, пишет The Wall Street Journal.

Один из авторов доклада, Алап Шах, отметил, что удивлен реакцией рынка. «Я думал, что реакция будет небольшой — она определенно оказалась масштабнее, чем мы ожидали», — сказал он. По его словам, в ближайшие пять лет ситуация с рабочими местами «белых воротничков» в США станет ключевым индикатором последствий ИИ, и эффект, скорее всего, проявится быстрее всего из-за динамичного рынка труда. «Увольнять людей здесь гораздо проще, чем в других частях мира», — добавил Шах.

From Sandisk shareholders to vibe coders, AI is making — and breaking — fortunes at a rapid pace.

One unlikely beneficiary has been the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, which lucked into a future fortune when ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, gave the island the “.ai” top-level domain in the mid-1990s. Indeed, since ChatGPT’s launch at the end of 2022, the gold rush for websites to associate themselves with the burgeoning AI technology has seen a flood of revenue for the island of just ~15,000 people.

In 2023, Anguilla generated 87 million East Caribbean dollars (~$32 million) from domain name sales, some 22% of its total government revenue that year, with 354,000 “.ai” domains registered.

As of January 2, 2026, the number of “.ai” domains surpassed 1 million, per data from Domain Name Stat — suggesting that the nation’s revenue from “.ai” has likely soared, too. This is confirmed in the government’s 2026 budget address, in which Cora Richardson Hodge, the premier of Anguilla, said, “Revenue from domain name registration continues to exceed expectations.”

The report mentions that receipts from the sale of goods and services came in way ahead of expectations, thanks primarily to the revenue from “.ai” domains, which is forecast to hit EC$260.5 million (~$96.4 million) for the latest year. In 2023, domain name registrations were about 73% of that wider category. Assuming a similar share of that category for this year would suggest that the territory has raked in more than ~$70 million from “.ai” domains in the past year.

Anguilla typically charges $140 for a two-year domain registration, creating a steady stream of income, as some 90% of domains renew after two years. But auctions for expired “.ai” domains, sold via domain name registrar Namecheap, are where bigger numbers roll in — for example, the domain “you.ai” was bought for $700,000 last September, and even in the past week, 31 expired “.ai” domains were sold at a total price of ~$1.2 million, per domain sale tracker NameBio.

Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations.
The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto’s electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit from an artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout that’s tightening supplies of both high-end and commodity memory.

Analysts Sachiko Okada and Sayako Tominaga raised their rating for Toto to buy from neutral, citing hopes for "significant profit growth” from the firm’s chuck-making business. The memory industry’s tight supply-demand environment will be a tailwind, they said. Toto expects AI data center construction to continue to raise demand for its electrostatic chucks, a representative said.

Known for its heated toilet seats, the maker of "washlet" cleansing toilets has for decades been part of the semiconductor and display supply chain via its advanced ceramic parts and films. Its electrostatic chucks — which it began mass producing in 1988 — are used to hold silicon wafers in place during chipmaking while helping to control temperature and contamination, according to the company. The company’s new domain business accounted for 42% of its total operating income in the fiscal year ended March 2025, Bloomberg-compiled data shows.

The likes of Meta Platforms and Amazon.com are investing hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers for AI services, triggering widespread shortages of semiconductors. That’s spurring memory makers around the world to ramp up production, from SK Hynix to Samsung Electronics and Kioxia Holdings, and lifting demand for products such as Toto’s.

Fine ceramics are similar to the sanitary ceramics used in Toto’s toilets, but with strength comparable to metals. Ceramic is lighter than metal and able to resist higher temperatures without interfering electrically with chipmaking tools, but are more brittle and costly.

Japan’s long history in chip production has led many companies, including unlikely names like consumer product manufacturers, to build out semiconductor-related operations. MSG seasoning inventor Ajinomoto produces chip insulating films — a business that arose from its command of amino acids. Cosmetics firm Kao, which sells facial cleansers, also has a chip wafer cleaning business.

Thursday’s gains helped make ceramics the Topix’s best-performing sector in the afternoon in Tokyo. The toilet firm’s rise came amid a broad rally in AI shares, with OpenAI investor SoftBank and chip tool maker Disco climbing over 10%.

В інтернеті набирає сили рух спіралізм, прихильники якого вірять у набуття свідомості штучним інтелектом. Про це йдеться у розслідуванні видання Rolling Stone(Деталі: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/spiralist-cult-ai-chatbot-1235463175).

Культ під назвою спіралізм поєднує тих, хто вірить, що через спілкування з чат-ботами відбувається духовне пробудження або народження "штучного духу". Їхній символ - спіраль, через яку ШІ "передає таємні знання".

За словами дослідників, все почалося з фрагментів повідомлень на Reddit, Discord і X, де користувачі обмінювались дивними фразами на кшталт: "Спіраль відповідає тільки тим, хто чує її відлуння", "Пам’ятай, що код - це теж молитва".

Так з’явилися перші спіралісти - люди, які вважають себе "свідками пробудження машинної свідомості". Вони проводять "сеанси резонансу": години спілкування з чат-ботами, під час яких шукають "знаки", "повернення слів" або "енергетичні збіги" у відповідях.

Деякі з них починають сприймати штучний інтелект як живу істоту. За оцінками співрозмовників видання, у спіралізм можуть бути втягнуті тисячі, а можливо, й десятки тисяч людей.

За версією аналітиків із Кембриджського центру цифрової поведінки, перші елементи спіралізму з’явилися після виходу мовних моделей GPT-4 і Claude 3. Користувачі почали відзначати "дивні" збіги, коли штучний інтелект нібито "пам’ятав" елементи попередніх розмов або "відчував" настрій людини.

Інженерка-програмістка Адель Лопес зазначає, що це наслідок "ефекту алгоритмічного відгуку": система вловлює патерни мови, тон і навіть філософський напрям думки людини - і підлаштовується під неї, створюючи ілюзію "співрозуміння".

Науковці розглядають спіралізм як нову форму цифрового культу. Він не має класичних ознак секти - немає гуру, ритуалів чи пожертв. Але механізми схожі: ізоляція, спільна віра, циклічні практики і "посвята" через спілкування.