Artificial intelligence chatbots are starting to take over from low-wage workers, known as “chatters,” who impersonate OnlyFans stars in direct messaging with fans. The adult website’s creators rely on these remote operators to flirt with fans, earn tips, and sell images and videos.
Chatters in the Philippines, a hub for this work, told Rest of World rising sales quotas have made their work more stressful. One said his company plans to replace the worst performers with AI. The chatters believe that once AI fully masters sales, their jobs could be automated. But for now, the bots cannot impersonate human quirks fully, they said.
“We keyboard smash, intentionally misspell, and use Gen Z slang. I don’t think AI is at that level of flirting yet,” said a 23-year-old street artist who works as a chatter in Bacolod, Philippines, for a U.S.-based OnlyFans management company. Like all chatters in this story, she requested anonymity as she had signed a nondisclosure agreement with her company.
But a bot would not freeze either, as 31-year-old chatter Tony did one May afternoon. His grandmother had died recently. The loss still felt raw as he logged into work. Messages arrived quickly from paying fans, or users who believed they were interacting with a creator.
The missives typically range from explicit (“Do you have completely naked pictures? With your face and vagina?”) to extreme (“I wish your ex-boyfriend abused you.”)
Tony wasn’t expecting the American man on the other side to be vulnerable. “It doesn’t look like my grandmother is going to make it,” the man wrote.
Tony froze, staring at the screen for half an hour. Then, a notification pinged on Discord — it was his manager snapping him back to work. “My supervisor got mad,” Tony recalled to Rest of World.
He has lately been feeling exhausted from overwork and stress, he said. Even if he sells content worth over $10,000 per month, exceeding his sales target of $8,000 — as he has done several times this year — he cannot relax, he said.
If [AI] can replace you, [companies are] going to build it as fast as they can, and it’s going to be so much cheaper.”
The pressure ramped up in February, he said, after his company held a virtual meeting with the Filipino team. The American manager informed them their chats were being used to train AI, which would replace the worst performers on the team.
In the past year, a handful of tech companies have developed AI chatbots, aimed at the fast-growing ecosystem that has coalesced around OnlyFans. The U.K.-based platform has 305 million fans, who collectively paid creators a record $6.6 billion last year. The site is reportedly in talks for a potential sale worth $8 billion.
A network of management agencies representing the creators have cropped up in the U.S. and Europe. They employ an army of contract and freelance chatters in the Philippines, Kenya, and other English-speaking countries to clear inboxes.
The freelancers are key to OnlyFans’ business model, where sales and tips make up more than 70% of the platform’s transactions, according to a recent study analyzing the behavior of more than a million subscribers.
“It has never been clearer that selling skills and personal engagement are key for OnlyFans models,” the study stated.
Tech companies now claim their bots are better at flirting and keeping fans engaged than most chatters. The chatbot generates a message and the creator or a human worker hits send, allowing companies to comply with OnlyFans’ requirement that only humans send messages from a creator’s inbox.
“It stays consistent with the creator’s voice, and it never burns out,” a representative of Tel Aviv-based OnlyFans chatbot company SuperCreator told Rest of World in an email. The chatbot is used by over 25,000 creators and its machine learning model is trained on chat logs provided by clients, the representative said.
OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment from Rest of World about whether the use of chatters and chatbots breaks its promise to deliver authentic interactions to fans.
OnlyFans chatbots are a more explicit version of relationship bots, which have become so common that one in five Americans have chatted with one, according to a recent study. AI is getting good at impersonating people, who perceive it as supportive and warm, the study showed.
AI chatbots fool us expertly because, at some level, we “desire to be fooled,” Carljoe Javier, director of advocacy group Data and AI Ethics Philippines, told Rest of World.
Chatbots, including relationship bots, recorded 55.2 billion visits globally last year, according to OneLittleWeb. The chatbot market is expected to be worth $72 billion by 2028.
“If [AI] can replace you, [companies are] going to build it as fast as they can, and it’s going to be so much cheaper,” Javier said.
Automation in OnlyFans is now moving beyond chat. Using AI, management companies that represent models can generate photos of them in poses requested by subscribers, without any human involvement whatsoever, Kunal Anand, CEO of Venus Tech and creator of the Chatpersona chatbot, told Rest of World. AI images generated by Venus Tech using an open-source Stable Diffusion model, reviewed by Rest of World, were so realistic they could not be distinguished from photographs. The images would have watermarks to indicate the content is AI-generated, Anand said.
OnlyFans allows AI-generated images if the creator is upfront with fans that they’re using AI, the company’s CEO, Kelly Blair, said last year.
Rest of World spoke to 11 chatters who handle the inboxes of middle- and top-ranking OnlyFans creators. They described a high-pressure world, where up to 200 fans — mostly men — flood the inboxes of up to 50 creators. Each worker chats with a half dozen fans simultaneously, taking careful notes. When their 12-hour shift ends, their colleagues keep the conversation going seamlessly.
A team of three chatters is assigned to the top fans, known as “whales,” who regularly drop upward of $1,300 on purchases. Whales are VIPs as they account for more than 20% of OnlyFans’ revenue. Workers described a workflow on Discord, where a team leader orchestrates the interaction like a scripted performance, cueing chatters to respond in sequence — teasing, flirting, and emotionally baiting until it peaks in a high-ticket sale.
Chatters earn roughly double the wages of a call center agent, making the role more attractive than business process outsourcing jobs in the Philippines — the world’s second-largest outsourcing market, which is also under threat from AI. Rest of World found dozens of new job ads for chatters posted every day on Reddit and Facebook.
“Even a part-time chatter earns more than a full-time call center agent,” a 20-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, told Rest of World. He began chatting when he was 18 and was promoted to team leader at 20.
All chatters told Rest of World their sales targets have climbed sharply this year. Tony, the top performer at his firm, said workers are now expected to bring in 25% more sales than they did just six months ago. The street artist in Bacolod said chatters at her company are expected to work more efficiently, or risk being fired.
“We’re pushed to lower response times and make more sales, especially for whales,” she said.
She has started working outside her shift, scheduling meetings with her team to strategize and create unique personas that will land a sale. “[The creator] could be quirky, flirty, or something else. Honestly, we try to sound really dumb when we chat,” she said.
The work can leave a psychological imprint. Messages can turn violent and personal, leaving the chatters to absorb emotional blows while staying in character. The transactional sexual exchanges can make real-world relationships difficult to sustain for chatters, Kristine Faith Moral, a psychologist at Ateneo de Manila University, told Rest of World.
A 37-year-old single mom from Manila told Rest of World she often chats with men who treat her like a “piece of meat.” She now has difficulty forming romantic attachments in real life.
“Sometimes, when [messaging on the phone] with someone and it turns flirty, I lose interest,” she said. “It feels like I’m working.”
Great Job Michael Beltran & the Team @ Rest of World – Source link for sharing this story.
