Sure, Riley Reid is one of the most well-known and respected adult film stars of our time. But did you know that she’s also a big media investor? One of her biggest projects as of late is none other than Clona.AI, a sexting chatbot platform.
Clona.AI takes advantage of generative artificial intelligence and its transformational capabilities to offer an online platform in which users can chat with digital recreations of content creators. However, unlike other competitors, the avatars made with Clona.AI are explicitly trained under the consent of the models they are based on. As such, the models have direct input with respect to what these AI companions will and will not discuss.
For $30 per month, fans can subscribe to have “intimate conversations” with digital replicas of their favorite adult stars, influencers, and content creators. As of the time of this post, the site’s roster includes Lena the Plug and Riley Reid herself. A free tier is available, limiting chat to 5 messages a month.
According to an interview with 404 Media, Reid said “the reality is, AI is coming, and if it’s not Clona, it’s somebody else…When [other people] use deepfakes or whatever – if I’m not partnering up with it, then someone else is going to steal my likeness and do it without me. So being presented with this opportunity, I was so excited because I felt like I had a chance to be a part of society’s technological advances.”
Clona.AI is developed based on the Llama 2 large language model from Meta, which is then refined and retrained to reflect an individual’s distinct personality. Reid has explained that her model was initially trained using a variety of online media containing herself, including YouTube videos, podcast appearances, and interviews. Then, it was further fine-tuned by having the AI speak directly with Reid.
Reid continued by saying, “I’ll be able to see how it responds to users and edit it to be like ‘no, I would have said it more like this…But in the beginning, my focus was on things like making sure it had my dogs’ names right, making sure I was fact-checking it.”
Of course, the AI companion will be able to talk dirty. Yet, the level of naughtiness depends on the preferences of the actor, not the user. For instance, Reid has noted that she flat-out forbids discussing sex acts that are physically dangerous. “I don’t know if the tech team thought about the sounding guys, but I was like, I thought about them.”
Generative AI technology has proven to be incredibly powerful over the years. It has been utilized in film, music, and many other mediums. The process typically requires the celebrity’s permission of their estate and a large database of their work. Yet, we’ve already seen such kind of technology misused and worse, as a bargaining chip in major strikes across entertainment.
Unethical data scraping practices on the public web used to train LLMs have raised a number of challenging questions regarding copyright infringement. Fortunately, there are examples of lawmakers cracking down on such practices, like the recent ban on the copyright of AI-generated art by U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell.
In spite of the challenges that come from the implementation of AI for content with respect to creators, Reid seems pleasantly optimistic. She said, “I feel like we’re gonna be a huge part of AI adapting into our society because porn is always like that…It’s what it did with the internet. And the porn world has seen so many advances in technology.”