Patreon And Payment Processors Declare War On AI Porn
Patreon is a popular payment subscription platform that many of the NSFW AI image generators were using to monetize their sites. However, in the last few weeks Patreon have been blocking AI porn sites, and thus costing each of them potentially thousands of existing customers. The writing was on the wall as far back as August, when the platform officially updated their terms and conditions to prohibit any accounts linked to AI-generated porn.
We clarified that we don’t allow human pornography, regardless of how the works were created. In other words, AI- or computer-generated pornography that looks human or lifelike is not permitted.
As you can see, Patreon already disallowed any pornography, although many sex tech related companies, such as NSFW VR game sites, have long been using Patreon for paid subscribers, so it was hardly rigorously enforced. And it’s taken a while for Patreon to crack down on AI porn generators, given that the terms were clarified back in August and only enforced in the last several weeks.
Top NSFW AI Generator Soulgen Hit By Payment Processing Problems
Regardless of whether it was expected or not, it’s another huge blow for the nascent AI porn industry, which is already facing setbacks with increasingly strict guidelines from card payment processors. One notable recent casualty of this was the popular NSFW AI image tool Soulgen, which has had to change their payment processor, and has now appeared to become almost or entirely safe for work to avoid falling foul again of the guidelines. Entering any prompts relating to nudity, or even terms such as ‘breasts’ will now get you a ‘inappropriate content’ warning. Existing users have found that their previous NSFW creations are now blurred. It is not known if Soulgen plan to reimburse customers for the loss of their existing creations.
Soulgen famously allows controversial reface tech, which enables users to upload pictures of real people to have AI images generated of them. It seems that Soulgen have been forced to choose between ditching this feature, or keeping it and becoming a SFW AI image generator. They have evidently chosen the latter. While many would see Soulgen’s problems as being inevitable, it seems that the crackdown on AI porn generation has no end in sight. In which case, we can only hope that any NSFW AI image generation is still monetizable or even allowed in another 12 months time.
