My girlfriend was really an AI catfish — I feel cheated
She looked too good to be true — because she was.
A Redditor was heartbroken to discover that the “perfect” woman he’d met online was actually an AI creation known as “Claudia.”
“Feel a bit cheated,” lamented Reddit user u/LegalBeagle1966 after learning that he’d been cybernetically catfished, per the Washington Post.
U/legalbeagle1966 was one of many users salivating over Claudia, an alleged Reddit girl who became a fixture on the platform by sharing glamorous selfies.
“F/19 feeling pretty today,” she wrote in her most viral post, which shows the alabaster-skinned bombshell rocking a plain gray sweater and slightly bohemian black bangs.
Another more risque pic, which has since been deleted, showed the webgirl in the nude with the caption, “what do you think about my body?”
Her movie star looks combined with her girl-next-door accessibility quickly made her a hit on Reddit, with online oglers calling her “hot” and “very gorgeous.”
U/LegalBeagle1966 would frequently comment on how Claudia was “pretty sexy” and “perfect.”
Unfortunately, the girl of his dreams was, in fact, a deepfake.
She’d been created by two cheeky computer science students, who concocted the avatar as a goof to “see if you can fool people with AI pictures,” the anonymous creators told Rolling Stone.
They’d reportedly been inspired after encountering a post from a Redditor who claimed to earn $500 from catfishing victims online.
To automate the process, the digital wizards used Stable Diffusion, an AI program that generates strikingly realistic pictures using only a text prompt — like a pictorial version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The digitizing duo created Claudia by requesting a selfie of a woman in her house “without makeup with black hair, shoulder length hair, simple background, straight hair, hair bangs.”
The recreational catfishers then disseminated her nudes online, earning $100 before Redditors caught wise to their randy Rick Roll.
“For those who aren’t aware I’m going to kill your fantasy,” said one astute Reddit user on one of the doppelganger’s saucy snaps. “This is literally an AI creation, if you’ve worked with AI image models and making your own long enough, you can 10000% tell.”
Some of the telltale signs of an AI avatar include bizarre background details and a mysteriously vanishing neck mole, according to AI experts, the Washington Post reported.
The implications of making adult entertainers from digital concentrate go beyond making lecherous Redditors feel a bit porn-swoggled.
There are concerns that synthetic skin flick stars could render their human counterparts on OnlyFans and elsewhere obsolete.
Indeed, experts and sex workers alike fear that porn audiences might prefer the raunchy robots to the real thing as they can be programmed to be “perfect,” with “small waists” and “big breasts.” And while platforms like Reddit have certain rules in place to prevent deepfakes from proliferating, this content is readily available online.
According to Rolling Stone, certain Discord communities are hawking AI-made “personal girls” — aka non-celebrities — for as cheap as $5 a pic.
Interestingly, the strides in image quality seem to have made authenticity a non-issue among consumers.
“The average person who’s looking at this stuff, I don’t think they care,” one anonymous deepfake porn creator told the WaPo. “I don’t expect the person I’m looking at online to be the person they say they are. I’m not going to meet this person in real life.”
However, many X-rated content creators claim that the hysteria over AI porn is overblown — and that they aren’t worried about being put out of a job (so to speak).
“Anyone who thinks AI-generated images of hot naked women is going to ruin the OnlyFans economy for real-life women has a fundamental misunderstanding of what OnlyFans is,” OnlyFans star Laura Lux declared on Twitter late last month.
Lux says her subscribers prefer a personal connection that AI-generated “stars” will be unable to provide.
Many consumers also prefer imperfect content — as evidenced by the rise of amateur videos and a move away from hyper-produced flicks.
“People do not subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see a random naked woman,” she continued. “They subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see ME naked specifically based on a parasocial connection formed by following me on other social media platforms.”
Sexologist Ness Cooper concurs, saying artificial intelligence simply can’t replicate the complexities and nuances of human sexuality.
“I strongly doubt there ever will be the one porn that rules them all, as that’s not how our brains work when it comes to sexual fantasies and erotic images,” she told the Independent. “Simply put, we are all different and enjoy different things.”
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