Why porn websites like Pornhub and YouPorn are toying with AI
It's a great time to be alive! Driverless cars, intelligent voice assistants on your phones, chat bots that can hold human-like conversations when you're bored and now use of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve your porn-watching experience. The list of ways in which machine learning and AI are touching lives just keeps on expanding by the day.
The school of thought which spoke of giving machines the power to think for themselves was first theorised in 1956 by John McCarthy – a computer and cognitive scientist. Now hardly six decades on from his first academic conference on the subject, AI - and its future - has started to take a tangible shape, with the technology now making way into multiple spheres of the society. The latest of them being porn. Yes, you heard it right. Porn.
According to a report published in Mashable, many of the top names of this multi-billion dollar industry are fast turning their focus towards using algorithms to if not revolutionise, but at least significantly improve our porn-watching experience.
Pornhub, for instance, only last month rolled out a support for an indexing functionality that - much like Apple and Google's high-tech image recognition technology - sifts through the portal's vast catalogue of video content and automatically adds relevant tags and assigns sections to it to make them more easily searchable for the end user.
The feature will use facial recognition software that will initially "detect 10,000 individual porn stars and tag them in footage." (Usually this information is provided by uploaders and viewers, who will still play a part by verifying the software’s choices.) It plans to scan all five million of its videos “within the next year”, and then move on to more complicated territory: using the software to identify the specific categories videos belong to, like “public” or “blonde”, among many others.
But that's not all. AI-based algorithm is also being used by the websites to do more than just tagging and sorting. YouPorn, another big name of the porn streaming industry, also rolled out support for AI-based functionality which focuses more on throwing up customised content suggestion for individual viewers rather than just improving the indexing of content on the portal.
Far from being perfect, the feature uses machine learning and attempts to mimic Netflix's "Because You Watched" feature by offering custom suggestions for each new user based on their past choices.
Speaking about the feature, Brad Burns, YouPorn’s vice president, said: "We are aiming to match genres and themes in videos... We are looking at viewing patterns across all the videos hosted on YouPorn so that we can better surface content that a particular user would be interested in."
As the article explains, "the promise of AI is clear: to maximise personalisation", and that's exactly what is happening here. In both the cases, instead of relying on users alone to tag videos — which is haphazard and inconsistent — the algorithm here takes control and helps rearrange the comprehensive database of content on the websites in a way that is different and closely aligned with the preferences of every new individual visiting the portal.
Privacy concerns
However, the use of AI and facial recognition technologies for sifting through videos uploaded on open source repositories of porn like PornHub and YouPorn also raises some security concerns.
As The Verge explains, such moves have worrying implications for privacy. "Revenge porn is often uploaded to popular porn sites, and there may be performers who wish to stay anonymous while publishing videos." With AI-based facial recognition systems in place, anonymity could take a big hit.
Pornhub, for now, has shrugged off such concerns claiming there will be no privacy issues as the system "only identifies faces of known performers stored in its database". However, the application of this tech to pornography will still be worrying as it could be easily misused.