OnlyFans‘ newest investor is talking up his future plans for the platform–including promising that it will “never use AI in any capacity to disrupt creators.”
San Francisco-based Architect Capital spent $535 million to take a 16% stake in OnlyFans this past May. The firm’s founder and CEO, James Sagan, recently told The Information Editor-in-Chief Jessica Lessin that he got involved in the platform because he knew OnlyFans’ late owner Leonid Radvinsky personally.
After Radvinsky passed away in March, Sagan “eventually realized that I was kind of the best person to do this, by virtue of my historical endeavors,” he told Lessin. (Lessin’s husband Sam Lessin is a former VP of Product at Facebook, a college buddy of Mark Zuckerberg‘s, and was a co-investor in the deal alongside Sagan. She disclosed his investment at the start of the interview, but in the past has faced criticism for not being open about her family’s ties to Zuck.)
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Now, Sagan says he’s using his stake to help the millions of creators on OnlyFans address challenges with things like payment processors and banks–and, of course, AI. He also wants to take OF public, but that’s another story.
We’ve covered issues with AI-generated and deepfake pornography in the past. Nudify apps have become a serious problem that isn’t yet constrained by established laws against crimes like revenge porn.
But content that isn’t based on real people is a problem for OF creators (and other ethical NSFW creators) too. These days, visits to, shall we say, ‘websites of the night’ flood browsers with ads that promise to generate everyone’s perfect fantasy content, without them ever having to ethically compensate a model.
This leaves OF creators facing the same behemoth we’ve been covering in relation to platforms like YouTube and Instagram. In their cases, parent companies Google and Meta are investing heavily in AI, hoping to make bank before the bubble bursts. As Google and Meta pump out more LLM-driven tools (including some for content production), though, platforms are filling up with slop made by those very same tools.
It’s a vicious cycle–one that Sagan says OnlyFans isn’t interested in continuing.
“AI will be something that […] will benefit the platform only to empower creators,” he told Lessin. “We will never use AI in any capacity to disrupt creators. And they’re not disruptable anyway. But I do think there are ways in which it can meaningfully empower creators by using the technology thoughtfully at the platform.”
When asked for an example of what a meaningful but not harmful application would look like, he demurred. “I’d rather not get into specifics yet, because we don’t exactly know,” he said. “But what I will say is that LLMs are particularly useful tools in terms of capturing somebody’s personality and helping them scale that personality in authentic capacity.”
Lessin responded, “But that would be a bot, not a person.”
Sagan clarified that OnlyFans will “never” use generative AI “to disintermediate the creators, never to automate chats.”
“[W]e’ll only ever build tools to help the creators empower themselves, and to help them make more money, and to help them scale their authentic brand,” he said. “In a world in which you have a lot of AI slop, in a world in which everything is AI-generated, the scarce asset is authenticity, the scarce asset is human connection, and I think that will be more and more important on a forward-looking basis.”
This is a pretty significant promise in our current climate–where, again, safe-for-work platforms are already grappling with a deluge of gen AI content that is crowding real creators for viewer traffic
It also echoes a previous statement from OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair, who told The Wall Street Journal that the platform doesn’t allow creators to plug AI chat managers/chat bots into their accounts (but that she’s aware some creators do use LLMs to generate messages for followers, who often pay to speak privately to models).
“Can people cut and paste AI-generated content from ChatGPT into OnlyFans?” she said. “Of course they can. But in the same way that I could do that with my work now, and we can all do that across the space. We don’t have those tools integrated for creators to use natively in the platform.”
But are these promises already broken? OF began having issues with fully AI accounts as soon as gen LLMs got sophisticated enough to pump out visuals. It made the decision to ban those sorts of accounts, but just a week ago, creators told USA Today they are struggling to combat imposter accounts that use AI to steal their faces and bodies and make fake content.
If OnlyFans can clean up AI imposters, target fully AI accounts and undisclosed AI content, and truly hold to Sagan’s promise that any gen AI tools it introduces won’t make creators compete with slop farms, it could be one of the only platforms where creators don’t have to worry.
That is a very weighty “if”–and Sagan is purposefully leaving the door open for OF to introduce LLM tools in the future, with no upfront mention of what that could look like.
