Inside The Underground Community Of Men Generating AI ‘OnlyFans’ Models

At first glance, Grace looks just like any other influencer promoting their OnlyFans on Instagram. She has blonde bombshell waves, a dental-receptionist’s smile and perfect skin that looks like it could front a Rhode Beauty campaign. She’s just posted a video. It’s her, shimmying in front of the camera wearing a leopard-print bikini.

“If you are an older man double or triple my age… please say hi ☺️” the caption teases.

In the comments, many do.

“Hi sweetie, looking great ❤️” they write.

“Hi sweetheart 😘”

"Hi beautiful lady 🌹"

"Grace" is not a real person. She’s an AI-generated woman created by Karl* and Tony*, two British men in their early twenties who claim they make thousands of dollars per month selling pornographic content produced in her likeness on platforms similar to OnlyFans. They run multiple accounts just like Grace's. For a fee, they promise they can show you the ropes — and help you get rich doing the same thing.

Between them, they call this system of monetising artificial women “pimping AI.” More formally, they call it the 'AI Model Method'.

The system is surprisingly simple. First, generate an AI woman optimised for the algorithm — young, conventionally attractive. Then run her Instagram account, posting suggestive content and flirting with followers to build a fanbase. Finally, funnel those followers towards paid content on paywalled platforms similar to OnlyFans, where subscribers pay for explicit images and private messages. (OnlyFans officially prohibits AI content, although some AI creators attempt to bypass the platform’s verification system).

AI porn is still relatively new, but it is overwhelmingly gendered. Studies of deepfake pornography, the non-consensual end of the spectrum, reveal that 99-100% of targets are women. And the people generating it are overwhelmingly male, too. Already, the Telegram group for the AI Model Method has more than 10,000 members — almost exclusively men.

I wanted to know who they were. Not just out of curiosity, but because if these men had the power to generate, puppeteer and monetise digital women, what did that mean for representation? For identity?

What happens in a system where there is no allegiance to the body in question, only to the money and the demands of the subscriber?

The only way to understand the AI Model Method was to see it from the inside, to understand the men beneath the AI mask. That's why I joined the Telegram group under a male alias.

It didn’t take long for the chat logs to reveal how deeply misogyny was embedded in the group. Women were regularly invoked with gleeful vitriol. The admins (Karl and Tony) often uploaded videos to the channel on topics such as “why fat chicks should be banned from dating apps".

Members even celebrated that the AI models they were creating could replace real sex workers online. "This sh*t will put OnlyFans models out of business" one message gloated.

According to Kit Barrus, an OnlyFans creator in the top 0.01% on the site, the rise of AI performers could be tied to a broader power shift within the porn industry.

“Men seem very frustrated that the power in pornography has shifted out of their hands,” says Barrus. “I think that in some ways, men trying to make these AI models is their attempt at regaining control over this industry.”

For decades, porn was dominated by male-run studios, with women working as performers who had little say over the scenes they were shooting. Platforms like OnlyFans have changed this dynamic, giving creators more autonomy and control around their content.

“Now, we really have a lot of power,” Barrus says. “We get to choose who we work with, when we work, what we do on camera, what kinds of content we want to make. I think it’s resulted in better content, and certainly more ethical content ... [AI explicit content] is just not incredibly ethical.”

While the impulse for control was clear in the Telegram group, there was also something much darker. In an offshoot of the main channel, the groupchat devolved into slurs, racist memes and even Nazi imagery, all interspersed between tips for generating 'hotter' AI models.

The overlap between the AI Model Method and extremist spaces was extremely confronting, but it wasn't altogether surprising. After all, the group revolved around control — over the image of the female body, and over the women who profited from their own. It made sense that ideological rot would take root in the same dark corners.

The great irony of the AI Model Method is that it revolves entirely around women, yet there are none present. The salacious Instagram captions enticing men? Written by another man. The provocative chatting with thirsty subscribers on the spicy platforms themselves? Also men.

The subscribers who desire these AI models are not lusting after the simulation of a woman so much as the fantasy of another man. It is desire not for another person, but desire turned inwards, feeding on itself. To lust for an AI model is to lust for a simulacrum, a copy with no original.

But maybe the lack of personhood was the appeal of the AI woman. She had no interiority, no desires, no judgement. One Telegram group member even bragged that his model's 'body count' (number of people she's slept with) was zero. It was as if the AI woman was some kind of digital answer to the Madonna–whore complex: infinitely available to please, yet paradoxically pure.

According to Kit Barrus, these representations of women could bleed into how women are expected to behave offline. "A man trying to masquerade as a woman in a way that fits a man's fantasy is going to be very different from how a woman would actually present herself." says Kit. "It also gives the men who are purchasing this content this idea of what a woman could be that isn't even real."

When it comes to AI, irresponsible representation feels inevitable. When the men behind these AI women are disembodied from the sexual labour — the risk, the stakes, the exposure — who gets to decide what's okay and what isn't?

This question felt even more urgent when I found Riley, an AI-generated transgender model created by a member of the AI Model Method Telegram group. I realised she wasn’t real, not from the images, which were convincing enough, but from the captions. They read exactly like the other AI profiles I had come across: one-dimensional, shallow, and, at times, dehumanising. Riley had thousands of followers, and her comment sections were flooded with men eager for more.

In the Telegram group, trans women are singled out by the admins as especially ‘profitable’, a category they encourage members to exploit, even as they espouse transphobic rhetoric in the same breath. 

“It’s very concerning,” says Mish Pony, a trans and queer sex worker and the CEO of Scarlet Alliance, Australia’s peak body representing sex workers. “The sex industry has been one of the few places trans women can make a good income; it’s a site of celebration in a culture that otherwise stigmatises us. For non-trans people to use the bodies of trans people to make money is essentially stealing an income source.”

Although AI is a new technology, the ethical questions it raises in regards to the sex industry are not. For decades, feminists have debated whether sexual labour can ever be fully autonomous under patriarchy and capitalism. AI-generated performers introduce a strange new twist: a porn economy where the female body can be simulated, controlled and sold without women being present at all.

The power dynamics of patriarchy and capitalism have always existed in sex work. But AI pushes these dynamics into a digital age where they can be scaled and amplified. But despite AI technology making rapid advancements, Kit Barrus is confident that the demand for real, human performers will never fade.

"The strength of OnlyFans has been that there's no discoverability on the platform within itself. You're forced get to know girls via Instagram, then you pay for access. I think [most] men do want [a real person], I genuinely believe that. I think men are willing to pay 15 bucks for a porno, but they're willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a companion," Barrus says.

Maybe the greatest weakness of the AI Model Method isn’t the technology itself, but the fact that the men behind it can only reproduce women through the lens of the male gaze. They can create pornography, but they cannot create intimacy. And that's something that AI cannot replicate. At least, not just yet.