GenAI will kill OnlyFans, and maybe the Internet
Everyone is showing off and grifting with AI right now. Fake influencers, fake models, fake voices, fake everything. The numbers look great. People are making real money.
Good. Let them.
Because this is going to break something much bigger than it builds.
OnlyFans is the obvious first casualty. Its entire product is “a real person, paying attention to you, for money”. The moment a synthetic version delivers the same dopamine for a fraction of the price, the marketplace floods. Real creators get drowned out, subscribers churn, and the platform either turns into a verification company or dies.
Now apply that to everything else. Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube - they all run on the same quiet assumption. The person on the other side is real. Take that away and there’s nothing left. AI slop is taking that away.
Here’s the part the grifters don’t think about: when you can’t trust anything you see, the feed stops meaning anything. Likes don’t matter if half are bots. Comments don’t matter if half are generated. A creator you love might not exist. At some point your brain just gives up and the scrolling stops feeling like connection - it feels like watching a slot machine.
I think people will tolerate that for a while. And then they won’t.
The thing nobody seems to be thinking about is that humans actually want other humans. Not a perfect simulation of one. The real thing. We can be fooled short-term, sure. We cannot be fooled forever. The fact that there is another mind on the other end is the whole point - take that away and you have nothing. We want a genuine human connection.
So my bet is the reaction to infinite AI slop is a swing back to the physical world. Smaller communities with real people in them. Dinners. Gyms. Local stuff. Friends you’ve actually met. The boring analog things software was supposed to replace and never quite did.
Which, if you’re building right now, is where the actual opportunity is. Not “make better AI people” - everyone is doing that and it’s a race to zero. The interesting thing to build is the stuff that proves you’re a person, and the stuff that gets humans into the same room. Identity that doesn’t sell you out. Ways to gate communities to actual humans. Local discovery that actually works. Tools that make it less of a pain to organize anything offline. Boring stuff nobody wanted to build because software was eating the world.
What’s left when this all settles down is the part of life that was always going to be analog - bodies in rooms, voices in air, hands you can shake.
GenAI’s biggest cultural contribution might end up being that it produced so much garbage it drove people back to each other.
Hell of a legacy for a technology built to simulate everything we already had.