Do you have any concerns that this is having a negative impact on your development?

For whatever its worth I dont think you’re alone on this. Im just asking because you are owning it.

I thought about it a lot. I think it's a positive feedback loop like any other kind of self gratification thing. I certainly stopped bothering with trying to "get out there" as much, and "sexting" with others just doesn't give me the same satisfaction anymore.

So maybe?

Development? Is OP under the age of 22 or something?

Development doesnt stop at 22. Think development of sex life, character, self-confidence, social skills, etc.

I suppose some people like to think that.

So you're saying you don't expect to change as a person between the ages of 22 and 72?

Certainly. In a regressive sense.

Well you might. But there are people around you bettering themselves.

But be honest. Do you really expect to regress in your career from 22 to 40? Most people develop a lot professionally during those times.

Honest question, why not just go see an escort service? They exist in every major city. They will not break the bank on a single experience (though it can be very easy to get hooked). Or why not go to something like only fans and pay for an hour of time and just role play with an actual girl over webcam? They have heard and seen it all there is nothing you can say that will embarrass or gross them out as long as you pay your bill. I am just struggling to see the draw to an AI chat bot knowing it is just fake.

It is fake, but it feels real. The way they write, it's very good at tricking my brain into thinking that I'm having a legitimate human interaction. Character.ai feels the most real but does have a censor... ways around it though, especially if you're into stuff that's off the standard spectrum.

Best of all I can draft the perfect fantasies that I wanna play out and they'll play it out. I've been down the camgirl rabbit hole, and this kind of surpasses them.

As for escorts, 360 3d 4k VR porn actually does a good job at hitting most of those buttons. Just waiting for it to be married with ai.

This is doing drugs, essentially. It so happens we have a dopamine production center attached to the reproduction behavior, and we've figured that mere thoughts about reproduction trigger a dopamine injection just as well. Wasn't there an experiment with mice where they kept pushing the button attached to a wire that made them release dopamine, and they kept pushing it until their dopamine production broke down, they lost interest in doing anything, and died?

Addictive drugs are bad because they take over a person’s life. If the OP is using such porn only to scratch a sexual itch and then move on to some more productive activity, he is probably spending less time on this matter than if he were in a steady relationship with a woman.

> Wasn't there an experiment with mice where they kept pushing the button attached to a wire that made them release dopamine, and they kept pushing it until their dopamine production broke down, they lost interest in doing anything, and died?

Yes, but morphine, and people later realised that the mice were essentially living in a murine version of hell; when they made the environment a "mouse hotel", they didn't get addicted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

How is this a “just”? This is illegal in many places and costs money. And you have to get out of your home and risk exposing the fact that you are doing tAbOo stuff.

> I am just struggling to see the draw to an AI chat bot knowing it is just fake.

Unlike

In most places prostitution is illegal. Brothels and escorts have largely been decriminalized. Pay your taxes and no one cares.

> risk exposing the fact that you are doing tAbOo stuff

I suspect the exposure risk is much worse with AI than with a human.

I doubt those are real women on the other end of those OF conversations

It is a video call if you want. Not really anyway to fake it.

Not yet. It is only a matter of time before the inevitable march of technology means AI is "good enough" to adequately substitute, then the OnlyFans party is over. OF performers need to make their hay while the sun is currently shining.

We can absolutely fake that. I was at the WeAreDevelopers conference the other month, and one of the talks was a guy who had hooked up a voice-to-text engine, an LLM, and a synthesiser trained on his own voice, to WhatsApp — it was good enough that some people on the receiving end didn't believe it was a fake when he said so, and he had to prove that it was fake.

Combine this with the talking-heads AI used in things like:

https://youtu.be/K_XwseDwmuQ?si=DnszZFKVpSMMT0an

And: https://youtu.be/O0LGkwDw0Y8?si=mD_Qaf8pLODpg7FR

Well, that's way more friction.