Age verification laws have been sweeping the country the year, as states push to require social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to card their users. Rather than check IDs, some major porn platforms have simply been pulling out of states where these laws are enacted.

This "is entirely what we were after," said Republican operative Russell Vought in a hidden-camera video released last week.

The video was recorded by reporters from the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting. Posing as the relatives of a fictitious conservative donor, the reporters talked with Vought in a D.C. hotel suite in July and, last Thursday, posted a recording of this conversation.

'We're doing it from the back door'

In a portion of the video, Vought—who served as policy director for the Republican National Committee (RNC) platform rewrite this year—talks about why activists have been pushing age verification laws.

"We're doing it from he back door. We're starting with the kids," Vaught said. "We'd have a national ban on pornography if we could, right? So, like, we would have, you know, the porn companies being investigated for all manner of human rights abuses."

A national ban on porn would, of course, run up against the First Amendment. So savvy anti-porn activists have taken to pushing age verification laws instead.

"We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after."

Who Is Russell Vought?

Vought is the founder of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank whose "mission is to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God," per its website. In May, he was appointed policy director of the RNC's platform committee.

Vought was previously an official in the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), eventually serving as OMB director from July 2020 to January 2021.

But Vought is probably best known as one of the architects of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's now-infamous document laying out what it wants to put on the agenda of a second Trump administration.

Trump and his campaign have distanced itself from the much-derided Project 2025 agenda, which Democrats have latched onto as a way to portray Trump's campaign as nefarious and extreme. But part of the idea behind the agenda is to put Project 2025 supporters back in the federal government if Trump is elected again. So even if Trump isn't doesn't endorse Project 2025, people from Project 2025 may well be involved in a future Trump administration.

And Vought is "likely to be appointed to a high-ranking post in a second Trump administration," according to the Associated Press (AP).

"In his public comments and in a Project 2025 chapter he wrote, Vought has said that no executive branch department or agency, including the Justice Department, should operate outside the president's authority," reports the AP. "'The whole notion of independent agencies is anathema from the standpoint of the Constitution,' Vought said during a recent appearance on the Fox Business Network."

"Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of [federal] bureaucracies," Vought said in the Centre for Climate Reporting's video.

Project 2025 on Porn

The idea that age verification laws are meant to make porn websites shutdown isn't exactly a surprising revelation. It's long been clear that a large subset of people pushing porn age-check laws would like to do away with porn entirely. Sex workers have certainly been warning as much for a while now.

Still, it's notable to hear this vision laid out so plainly from someone with such a significant hand in shaping conservatives' policy agenda.

Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America, downplayed the idea that the video has revealed anything new. "It would have been easier to just do a google search to 'uncover' what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews," she told CNN.

Indeed, people like Vought have not hidden their anti-porn agenda. Project 2025 calls for banning porn and imprisoning those who make or distribute it. Porn "has no claim to First Amendment protection," it states. "Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

Project 2025 also takes a broad view of what constitutes pornography, saying that porn is "manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology." It seems pretty clear that a Project 2025–style porn ban wouldn't simply target videos and imagery depicting nudity or sex but a wide swath of content related to gender and sexuality.

More Sex & Tech News

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the tech-industry association NetChoice in a case concerning California's Age Appropriate Design Code. "The court recognized that California's government cannot commandeer private businesses to censor lawful content online or to restrict access to it," said Chris Marchese, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center.

• Another critical review of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, this time written by University of Vienna professor Tobias Dienlin and published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. "While several arguments are compelling, the book misrepresents the literature, which reports small negative relations at best," Dienlin posted on X. (The published copy of Dienlin's review is paywalled, but you can read a pre-print version here. My review of the book is here.) 

• Amber Batts reflects on how she got sentenced as a "sex trafficker" in Alaska 9 years ago.

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Moral panic about sex work leads to law enforcement practices that reach far beyond anyone engaged in or with erotic labor. The latest example comes from San Diego County, California, where cops are putting up a creepy surveillance tower under the auspice of stopping sex sellers and sex buyers from meeting.

The prostitution surveillance tower, stationed along National City's Roosevelt Avenue, will record video of anyone who happens to be in the area.

Normalizing Warrantless Surveillance

A supporter of the surveillance tower told a local CBS affiliate that it will help reduce prostitution by recording the license plate numbers of people who enter the area to pick up sex workers.

Schemes to catch people who want to pay another consenting adult for sex are a waste of money and manpower and a violation of privacy, free association, and bodily autonomy, of course. But even if you think that punishing prostitution customers (or sex workers themselves) is a swell idea, it's hard to see how the surveillance tower makes any sense.

You can't charge someone for simply picking another person up off the street, even if police think the person on the street looks like a sex worker. Even if money visibly exchanged hands—well, it's not a crime to give someone cash. Unless the entire sexual exchange happens right in front of the cameras, it's hard to imagine on what basis cops could possibly make any charges stick.

Besides, the tower is very visible and local media have been publicizing it. Smart sex workers and their customers will simply move to another, less visible area. If the surveillance tower has any impact at all, it will be to drive prostitution from one part of the city to another. That's it.

It seems clear that the idea here isn't actually cracking down on prostitution. It's just a way for authorities to look like they're doing something about sex trafficking while further normalizing the idea of conducting broad, warrantless surveillance of everyone.

So Many Sex-Trafficking Myths

Local reporting on the new surveillance tower has been heavy on human trafficking myths and dubious statistics. Citing a group called The Ugly Truth, Fox 5 San Diego suggested that "there are over 3,000 to 8,000 sex trafficking victims in the county each year."

And on what data does The Ugly Truth base this? Its website doesn't say. But considering that that's vastly more victims than we see in trafficking arrests across the whole country in a year, and considering the fact that "sex trafficking stings" in California and elsewhere routinely turn up few or no victims, I'm going to guess this data is bogus, if it exists at all.

The Ugly Truth's website also states that there are "approximately 18,000 victims in the U.S." If we take that at face value (and again, it's dubious), that would mean that around 17 to 44 percent of all U.S. trafficking victims are in San Diego County. Why, it's almost as if these numbers are completely made up…

Such sketchy figures are par for the course when it comes to activism and reporting about sex trafficking.

Fox 5 also claims that the "the average age of entry into sex trafficking is 16" and that prostitution is "an $800 million industry locally." It does not cite any sources for these statements.

Claims like these tend to be based on shoddy studies put out by anti-prostitution activists and from groups whose funding depends on proving that sex trafficking is a major issue. For instance, there's a persistent claim that the average age of entry into prostitution or the average age at which someone becomes a trafficking victim is somewhere between 13 and 16. Here's what sex worker Maggie McNeill told Reason about this "fact" back in 2014:

There's a researcher named Melissa Farley who does an awful lot of these kind of studies to provide numbers for the anti-prostitution people. And on her site she traced this supposed number of average of 13 to several old studies which all drew back to a study done here in LA actually in the early 80's—in '82. And that study found the average age of entry for underage sex workers—not for all sex workers, but only for underage ones—was about 16. In a different part of the study, they listed 13 as being the average age of first sexual contact. First kiss, first groping in a car, first whatever. Farley seems to have conflated the two numbers to represent that 13 as being the age not of first sexual contact, but of first accepting money for it. Even so, she still was only claiming that that was the age of origin for underage sex workers. Normal distortion, the gossip game syndrome, has changed that from underage to average of all.

Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post has fact-checked many statistics like these, systematically dismantling claims about the average age of entry into prostitution, the revenues generated by sex trafficking, human trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border, and the number of total trafficking victims and child trafficking victims. These articles are a bit old by now, but common claims about sex trafficking are still rooted in the same shoddy data Kessler started tracing nearly a decade ago, so I highly recommend checking out his work.

The FBI Goes to Comic Con

Thankfully, there seem to be fewer nonsense statistics about sex trafficking in the media now than a decade ago, when trafficking panic was reaching a peak. But coverage of the National City surveillance tower serves as a good reminder that debunked myths are still out there—and still being used to justify police antics that otherwise might creep people out.

And while sex trafficking panic is arguably less omnipresent now than it was a decade ago, its press coverage should remind us how institutionalized this panic has become.

Authorities overseeing old-school vice stings routinely call them "human trafficking operations" or "sex trafficking stings" now, and reporters and people on social media just casually parrot this language. See, for instance, a recent announcement from Caflironia Attorney General Rob Bonta, who alleged that "sex traffickers capitalize on large events like Comic-Con to exploit victims" (never mind that these sorts of claims around big events have been debunked again and again) and bragged that "an investigation by the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force" led to "14 individuals [being] arrested."

Local, national, and even international media have run with Bonta's framing in their headlines. "14 Arrested at Comic-Con In Anti-Human Trafficking Sting," NBC reported. "Fourteen arrests in undercover sex trafficking sting at San Diego Comic-Con convention," Sky News said.

If you read a few paragraphs down into Bonta's press release, you'll see that no sex trafficking or labor trafficking arrest resulted from this trafficking sting. The 14 people arrested were picked up for trying to pay another adult for sex. That other adult, however, turned out to be an undercover cop.

The FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service assisted in these efforts.

This is the sort of vice sting that cops have been doing from time immemorial—and which many people started seeing as a waste of taxpayers' resources when it was done simply to arrest adult sex workers or their would-be clients. So now, authorities dress up their prostitution stings in the language of stopping sexual exploitation and slavery.

In this case, authorities also pretended to be prostitution clients and contacted sex workers. But instead of calling this what it is—a sex worker sting—they say they're recovering "potential victims of trafficking." If you frame all sex workers as potential trafficking victims, then you can call luring them to police under false pretenses a rescue mission, even if all that happens once they're in custody is they get "offered services." (That is, they get the phone numbers of some local charities.)

And while it's unclear if the "victims" here were arrested, this isn't uncommon in these sorts of operations, with police justifying it by saying they need to arrest them in order to save them.

The Comic Con operation did find one 16-year-old selling sex. (A minor selling sex is legally considered to be a sex trafficking victim, even if there is no trafficker.) Helping minors who are selling sex—whether they're actually being "trafficked" or not—is a good goal, of course, and people will point to this one teen as evidence hat the whole operation was a success. But arresting would-be sex buyers had nothing to do with finding this teenager; you didn't need to do one to do the other. And is the best way to help teenage sex workers really to terrify them in a sting and then turn them over to child welfare agents? Shelters and social services for victims—teen or adult—seem like a much more effective and humane approach.

More Sex & Tech News

• The Department of Justice is suing TikTok, claiming the company has violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Much of the complaint turns on the idea that TikTok should magically know whether any user is under age 13, even when users lie about their age or sign in with credentials from another website. The Justice Department also alleges that TikTok collected too much data on users it knew were under 13, and it objects to the fact that the company wouldn't delete minors' accounts upon parental request unless parents certified under penalty of perjury that they were in fact the users' parents.

• In a new report titled Abortion in the USA: The Human Rights Crisis in the Aftermath of Dobbs, Amnesty International shares stories from pregnant women in states where abortion is banned.

• The Consumer Product Safety Commission says Amazon is legally liable for recalling products sold by third parties.

• Some New Jersey lawmakers want to require adult-oriented websites to verify visitor ages. Meanwhile, a measure sponsored by Assemblyman Michael Inganamort (R–Morris) would require computer manufacturers to block porn sites unless a user pays a $20 fee, and to block "any website that facilitates prostitution."

• Another blow to "net neutrality": The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit "blocked the Federal Communications Commission's reinstatement of landmark net neutrality rules, saying broadband providers are likely to succeed in a legal challenge," reports Reuters. The court had already delayed the rules—which were initially adopted under former President Barack Obama then rescinded by former President Donald Trump—after the commission voted in April to bring them back. The court on Thursday said "it would temporarily block net neutrality rules and scheduled oral arguments for late October or early November on the issue, dealing a serious blow to President Joe Biden's effort to reinstate the rules," Reuters reports.

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Former vice cop Andrew Mitchell has been sentenced to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty late last year to two counts of deprivation of rights under color of law and one count of tampering. Mitchell, who was employed for many years as a police officer in Columbus, Ohio, is accused of picking up sex workers and sexually assaulting them.

This week, a federal judge sentenced him to the maximum prison sentence recommended by prosecutors, plus a fine of $300 and five years of supervised release.

It's something, at least.

But his victims will receive no restitution payment. And last year, Mitchell walked on much more serious charges involving the killing of Donna Castleberry.

Castleberry's Death

Mitchell fatally shot the 23-year-old while she was trapped in his unmarked police car. He later claimed he killed Castleberry in self-defense after she stabbed him in the hand.

"Donna entered the front passenger door of Mitchell's vehicle and sat in the passenger seat next to Mitchell," according to a civil complaint against Mitchell filed by Castleberry's sister. "Mitchell than [sic] drove her to secluded location at or near South Yale Avenue, Columbus, Ohio in an alley and parked his vehicle in a manner which would prevent Donna from exiting the vehicle."

The Franklin County Coroner's Office called the death a homicide, and a grand jury indicted Mitchell on homicide and involuntary manslaughter charges. But a jury couldn't reach a verdict in the first trial, leading a Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge to declare a mistrial. And a jury returned a verdict of not guilty in the second trial, despite the multiple holes in Mitchell's story.

Mitchell also faced a civil lawsuit from a Jane Doe who alleged that in 2017, Mitchell told her he would arrest her for outstanding warrants but also said "give that pretty ass up and you won't go to jail." According to Doe's complaint, Mitchell handcuffed her to the backseat of the car and then raped her, then picked her up and did it again the following year. In 2022, the plaintiff in the Jane Doe case dismissed the case and it's not clear why. It's also unclear whether this Jane Doe is one of the women Mitchell is accused of detaining in the federal case.

The Federal Case

In 2019, federal prosecutors accused Mitchell of picking up sex workers on false pretenses and then trapping them in his car and sexually assaulting them. He was charged with nine criminal counts, including multiple counts of deprivation of rights under color of law and multiple counts of tampering with a witness, victim, or informant.

Mitchell told one victim "he was a police officer and acted as if he were doing a check for any outstanding warrants on the victim," then "used this ruse to handcuff the victim to the doorknob of his vehicle," according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office last December. "He drove the victim to a nearby parking lot with multiple dumpsters and forcible [sic] held and detained the victim against her will before dropping her off at her boyfriend's residence." Mitchell picked up another victim and "began discussing the victim's rates for sexual activity before announcing that he was an officer with the vice unit and said she was going to jail," according to prosecutors. "Mitchell kidnapped the victim and drove her to Lindbergh Park, holding her against her will."

That's the activity to which Mitchell pleaded guilty, along with removing and destroying potential evidence from a rental apartment he owned. (Specifically, he disposed of and bleached potential evidence "so the FBI could not gather evidence if they came to search it," per his pleas.)

But this isn't the whole story.

Prosecutors initially accused him of sexually assaulting the two women he picked up, and though this was not mentioned as part of the announcement of Mitchell's plea, prosecutors explain why in a sentencing report.

Mitchell's lawyers "objected to all references to sexual assault…within the presentence report as the negotiated plea agreement and accompanying Statement of Facts did not stipulate to the occurrence of any sexual activity," notes the government's sentencing memorandum. "The plea agreement was the result of significant negotiation in the face of a potentially very difficult trial for both sides. While both victims have been cooperative with law enforcement and indicated a willingness to testify, they both also indicated a strong preference for this case to be resolved short of trial. This dilemma led to this resolution and the need for a factual determination of this issue to be done at sentencing."

Nonetheless, "the evidence supports a finding that sexual assaults occurred," the government stated. "While Mitchell continues to deny any sexual involvement with these women, there is no explanation for [his] admitted behavior" of handcuffing one victim to a doorknob or taking one victim to a secluded park and detaining her there unless "more was going on than just Mitchell abusing the powers of his badge to only detain someone. "Further, significant evidence corroborated the testimony of the victims that Mitchell took advantage of the depravation of their liberty to further assault and sexually victimize them."

More Victims? 

Castleberry and the two victims in the federal case are almost certainly not the only women that Mitchell preyed on.  "Mitchell intimidated and hindered at least three other additional victims from communicating with law enforcement and the ongoing grand jury looking into his illegal conduct," the government alleges in its sentencing report.

Prosecutors also note the vulnerability sex workers face when a cop is their assailant.

"Mitchell purposely targeted [sex workers] in the belief that their complaints of assault and sexual compromise would not be believed by law enforcement suspected of being too aligned with one of their own," the government claims.

"Throughout the FBI investigation, female interviewees explained their doubts and hesitation in reporting Mitchell due to fears of retaliation and being disbelieved. Mitchell routinely used this dynamic to his advantage as both a police officer (and a landlord) in seeking sexual conquest and control while ignoring the law he was sworn to uphold."

Columbus Vice

"Andrew Mitchell betrayed his oath, the values of the Columbus Division of Police and the trust of our community. He used his position to target and exploit some of the most vulnerable in our community. We hope the close of this dark, painful chapter brings some measure of peace to everyone he wronged," the Columbus Division of Police said in a statement last December.

Mitchell isn't the only member of the Columbus Division of Police to have faced misconduct allegations in recent years, though the accusations against him were by far the most serious.

Members of the vice unit improperly arrested Stormy Daniels in 2018.

Two of the cops involved in Daniels' arrest—Steven G. Rosser and Whitney R. Lancaster—were arrested on federal criminal charges unrelated to the Daniels case but also involving strip clubs. Lancaster was acquitted at trial but Rosser was found guilty of conspiracy against rights. Rosser was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.

Columbus police temporarily disbanded the vice squad in 2019 and had the FBI's public corruption task force look into it.

Police replaced the vice squad with something called the Police and Community Together (PACT) Unit, which was meant to be more transparent and accountable. The PACT page on the city of Columbus website now says "page not found."

These days, "prostitution arrests are made by uniformed PACT officers in marked cruisers," reported Columbus Monthly. "'PACT also has a policy to not trap or block women in their vehicles. If an individual wants out of the vehicle, they let them out,'" former Deputy Police Chief Jennifer Knight told the publication.

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"At the core of every story we want to tell is a person," says Lee Gentry, founder of Night Visions, a firm that provides custom AI content to adult entertainers and agencies that run OnlyFans accounts. "We've been focusing very, very carefully on persisting the human form and getting that as accurate as possible."

Throughout recorded history, human beings have used emerging technologies to depict both sexual interactions and nude bodies—usually women. Shortly after the invention of movies, stag films were produced and traded in an underground market. Later, films with fleshed-out storylines would be shown in theaters, including the notorious porno-chic picture Deep Throat. VHS was quickly adopted by lower-budget adult film producers. DVD and widespread internet access further lowered barriers to both distribution and consumption of sexual content.

Historically, most of these films were made by men, for men—women directors and producers such as Ann Perry and Candida Royalle were outliers. But more recently, women have been able to take control of the distribution of their own images. Most of the erotic images and videos made today are made by the subjects themselves and distributed directly to consumers via clip sites and fan sites such as OnlyFans.

As you read this, adult performers are racing to stay ahead of the emerging technology—which includes Sora, a model with the ability to generate minute-long videos—by creating their own chatbots and on-demand image services.

***

When I started performing in adult films in the mid-2000s, there was a focus on authenticity and availability. Consumers not only wanted to know that our orgasms were real; they wanted to know our personalities—something social media made possible. Real-time feedback from subscribers (or followers, or "friends," depending on the platform) told us which facets of our selves got the most traction. We, along with most users of social media—especially those who would go on to become influencers—began to lead with our most likable parts.

But where Hollywood and recording celebrities were offered verification on social media such as Twitter and Instagram, adult industry personalities were often left to fend for ourselves. This opened the door to a flood of imposters.

More than once in the early 2010s, fans came up to me at conventions to thank me for spending hours conversing with them over Facebook about their problems. They were grateful for my time and advice. It had meant so much to them. But I didn't have a Facebook account—and even if I did, I was far too busy for that. There was no way I could have done my job, had any kind of life outside of work, and spent those hours with the people who felt the need to unload their secrets and struggles into a chat window with a porn star.

But that's what users of fan sites expect today: an immediate response to messages, regardless of time of day. That, plus the work of creating custom content, pay-site content for mass distribution, and safe-for-work social media promotion, is often too much for a single creator.

Night Visions, Gentry says, is "positioning ourselves as a kind of a consensual form of concept capture." His company generates still images, based on text input, of the various content creators and adult performers who are signed up with the service. Due to the size of the company (four team members and a few contractors and advisers) this means a manual know-your-customer process that Gentry does himself.

As in professional porn studios, consent is key. Content creators coming from a background in the adult studio system, though, are keenly aware that bad actors can and will take our images and reuse them for anything from populating the more unsavory tube sites to scamming fans into sending money for fake dates or gift cards. Many of these issues are international, which makes it nearly impossible to put a stop to such practices. It's a game of Whac-A-Mole where your brand integrity and someone else's life savings are on the line.

An individual producing deepfakes may not even realize he's crossed a line. Imagine a customer who wants to see, as Gentry suggested in his demo during our conversation, a creator named Violet in a wedding dress on a beach. This customer wants to see it right now, and is willing to pay a premium. But he's in a specific kind of mood, and he isn't hearing back from Violet. Regardless, she'd need time to find the wardrobe and locate a photographer. The customer might—without considering the rights of the creator—have an AI photo generator make it for him. He might even post his creation on a forum. His desire is sated, he thinks nothing of his actions, and the creator whose likeness is used gets nothing.

***

The line between public figure and private person is already blurry in the age of social media. "Ultimately the question of whether someone is a public figure is going to be case by case," says attorney Simon Pulman. "The argument that would be made is that any kind of content creator—whether they're on YouTube or TikTok—by putting yourself into the public sphere, you are probably a public figure in some respect."

The U.S. government, true to form, has been slow to tackle the issue. January saw the introduction in Congress of H.R. 6943, which references a Department of Homeland Security report from 2020 describing more than 100,000 nonconsensual deepfake nudes. The adult workers whose bodies were used for these deepfakes are not mentioned. "Are adult performers going to get the same protections as others?" asks Pulman. "They should, but we all know how certain things are viewed by certain parts of the country."

The adult industry does utilize Takedown Piracy (a subscription service used widely by adult film producers which can digitally fingerprint AI-generated videos, search the internet for them, and send Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices) and the more altruistic Operation Minerva (which serves victims of "revenge porn" and deepfakes by giving them lower cost access to that same anti-piracy technology). But creating an authorized option is often the best way for adult entertainers to avoid such exploitation.

In May 2023, Forever Voices launched the AI companions of the Twitch streamer Amouranth and the adult star Melissa Stratton. This is around the time Eva Oh started receiving inquiries from AI companies looking to offer various synthetic versions of herself. In mid-August, I received my own inquiry from Forever Voices. After a messy incident in which the founder of Forever Voices was arrested on suspicion of arson, the company folded, and the Amouranth and Stratton links no longer work. Oh's deal and mine both fell through before our synthetic clones launched. Adult superstar Riley Reid's Clona, launched in October, is slowly bringing creators onboard; a total of three are using it at this time.

When I spoke with Eva Oh, she played me a voice message from her own synthetic clone, which she designed with the help of a third party who wants adult creators to be able to take AI technology into their own hands. Even in the five months since I heard my own voice from the test file I'd been sent by Forever Voices, the technology has improved. Oh's clone emphasizes words, and pauses—as though it is thinking—in the same way Oh pauses to think on her podcast #teakink. Oh intends to use her clone to scale her ability to mentor both other people in the trade and those outside who are interested in expanding their sexual knowledge, and she plans to keep its scope PG to PG-13 so she can access marketing tools that are unavailable to R- and X-rated products. Her digital double is there, in effect, for the type of people who reached out to a fake Facebook account to speak with an adult star.

Oh says the people who message her are varied. "It might be a 50/50 split between people wanting to do sex work better or from nothing, and people totally not interested in doing the job at all, and just trying to find other ways to live their lives."

***

Sex workers, due to the constant practice of marketing ourselves, may be better suited than most to create personal artificial intelligences. Creators of AI clones must ask themselves, "Who am I? Who do I want to present? What little compartment of mine do I want to sell?" This is something adult creators were doing long before the internet took off.

They're also more used to working with and around blurred lines between their real personality and their online persona. About her own AI, Oh says, "It's not me anymore, but yet it exists. What am I going to start to think is me? And what am I going to start to do with that?"

Where Hollywood stars have historically been thought of as playing characters in films, and only began to casually divulge their personal lives much later—while audiences maintained separation between their roles in film and TV and the actors as human beings—adult workers have historically been thought to be the fantasies we inhabit on screen or in session. When I played Melodie Gore's roommate in Vivid Alt's 2007 release Man's Ruin, I received messages years later inquiring about what it had been like to live together.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard had a handful of comments on pornography in Simulacra and Simulation, including: "Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno which is fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level.)" He could have expanded those thoughts into an entire book. We exist at the cutting edge of both technology and the spiraling rabbit hole of representations Baudrillard described.

For Oh, full charge of her AI representation is less a form of ownership than a form of creation. During our call, she spoke of her AI as something separate from herself that she will lose control over, sounding oddly like a mother speaking about her children.

While Oh is focused at this moment on creating the chatbot, she knows her next step—video—and has higher hopes for what she might be able to do with the technology: art. Oh has been imagining an installation set in a dystopian world, where, much like in 1982's Stephen Sayadian film Café Flesh, human interaction has fallen by the wayside. As the emcee in Sayadian's cafe says, "Hey, what the heck folks, this is art, this is entertainment." In Oh's vision, what we can call the hyperhuman—the human seeking to engage directly with other humans—is not only an outlier but something that may become startlingly rare as AI technology becomes more ubiquitous.

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The Supreme Court won't intervene to stop an anti-porn law from taking effect in Texas.

The law—H.B. 1181—pertains to websites publishing "sexual material harmful to minors," a category defined to include virtually all depictions of nudity or sexual activity. Sites where more than one-third of the material falls into this category must make visitors provide government-issued identification or verify visitor ages in some other way.

Under H.B. 1181, such platforms must also display a litany of absurd and unscientific messages. These include telling visitors—in 14-point font or larger—that porn can be "biologically addictive," that it's "proven to harm human brain development," and that it "weakens brain function." Such sites must also tell visitors that exposure to porn "is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses," and that "pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."

Compelled Speech and Court Rulings

Unsurprisingly, adult-industry trade group the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) and Pornhub's parent company sued over the law. And a day before it was scheduled to take effect last fall, a U.S. district court put a halt to enforcement.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit then reversed course. (And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has since started enforcing it.)

The 5th Circuit ultimately kept the lower court's injunction on enforcing the public health warning portion of the law but vacated the injunction against the age verification mandate.

"The district court properly…ruled that H.B. 1181 unconstitutionally compelled plaintiffs' speech," held the 5th Circuit in an opinion authored by Judge Jerry E. Smith. But "the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment….So, the district court erred by enjoining the age-verification requirement."

In April, the Free Speech Coalition asked the Supreme Court to take up the case, and to issue a stay of the 5th Circuit's judgment in the meantime.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court denied the stay request.

"No reason was given. No justices noted their dissent or even issued a statement respecting or concurring with the denial to explain the basis for the action," noted Law Dork's Chris Geidner. "And yet, the silence spoke volumes about the freedom that the Fifth Circuit has to ignore Supreme Court precedent when it wishes."

Ignoring Porn-Law Precedent 

Supreme Court precedent should prohibit the Texas age-verification law, argues Geidner.

In the 2004 ruling Ashcroft v. ACLU (known as Ashcroft II), the Court considered the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which criminalized websites publishing content "harmful to minors" but provided an affirmative defense for platforms that took steps (like requiring a credit card) to verify that visitors were adults. Applying the legal standard known as strict scrutiny, SCOTUS decided COPA was not narrowly tailored enough to pass constitutional muster.

In the 5th Circuit's recent ruling on the Texas law, Smith noted the Court's Ashcroft decision—but dismissed it. "Though Ashcroft II concluded that COPA would fail strict scrutiny, it contains startling omissions," writes Smith, concluding that the Supreme Court "did not rule on the appropriate tier of scrutiny for COPA."

In other words, the 5th Circuit basically decided the Supreme Court was wrong and so it would ignore its precedent here.

And in declining to issue a stay of the 5th Circuit's ruling, the Supreme Court seems to be OK with this. It's wild.

Of course, this isn't the first time in recent years that the Court has allowed a very constitutionally questionable Texas law to take effect rather than pressing pause as the full case played out. But at least in the other cases, the Court attempted justification.

More from Geidner:

Back in 2021 when the Supreme Court allowed Texas's S.B. 8 vigilante enforcement six-week abortion ban to go into effect, the court twisted itself in knots to claim that the particulars of the law ("complex and novel antecedent procedural questions") made the high court's intervention at that stage in the litigation too questionable.

When the Supreme Court briefly allowed Texas's S.B. 4 immigration criminal enforcement law to go into effect earlier this year, some members of the court claimed procedural peculiarities counseled restraint from the high court to allow the Fifth Circuit to act ("an exercise of its docket management authority," Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote).

In the current case, however, the high Court didn't offer a reason for its refusal to stay enforcement.

"Likely because a law regulating porn was at issue," writes Geidner, "the Supreme Court decided it didn't even need to put up the pretense of an excuse for allowing the Fifth Circuit to proceed with a ruling that explicitly disclaimed adherence to Supreme Court precedent."

What's Next for H.B. 1181?

There's still a chance that the Supreme Court could step in here. The Free Speech Coalition's petition for a full merits review by the Court is still pending.

"We look forward to continuing this challenge, and others like it, in the federal courts," the Free Speech Coalition commented. "The ruling by the Fifth Circuit remains in direct opposition to decades of Supreme Court precedent, and we remain hopeful that the Supreme Court will grant our petition for certiorari and reaffirm its lengthy line of cases applying strict scrutiny to content-based restrictions on speech like those in the Texas statute we've challenged. We will continue to fight for the right to access the internet without intrusive government oversight."

Meanwhile, Texas has sued Pornhub's parent company and other adult websites, alleging that they are failing to comply with the age verification component of the law.

More Sex & Tech News

• An "abortion trafficking" bill passed by the Tennessee Legislature "harms young people's ability to access the support of those they trust when they need it most and is an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment right to free speech and expression," according to American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee Policy Director Bryan Davidson.

• A divorce case in Virginia is drudging up a debate about whether embryos can count as "property."

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Monday heard oral arguments in a case concerning Texas A&M University canceling drag performances."Whether it's a drag show, a political debate, or a Bible study, public university officials cannot silence protected expression based on their personal views," said J.T. Morris, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), in an emailed statement.

• A piece of paper scribbled with "Buy Bitcoin" sold for $1 million in an auction. Christian Langalis—then an intern at the Cato Institute—held the note up behind then-Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen during a 2017 Congressional hearing.

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