Technology and porn are becoming disturbingly intertwined. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

The Relay app allows users to track their porn-free streaks and get group support. Its creators say they're taking a stand against porn and AI erotica. Jamie would meticulously schedule his days around finding time alone to watch porn and masturbate--often up to five times a day. The 32-year-old Michigan engineer, who did not want to use his real name due to privacy concerns, first watched porn at the impressionable age of 12, but never realized he had a problem until just after his father's funeral three years ago. "I didn't shed a single tear," he says.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When it comes to sex in 2025--who's having it, who isn't, and how--perceptions are all over the place. Is Gen Z sliding back in time? Are middle-aged women finally having good sex, or none at all? And what exactly is going on with seniors in retirement homes? In the series Pillow Talk, we interview one person in a specific time and place in their lives about what sex looks like for them and their peers, in every enlightening (and excruciating) detail. Get in touch if you have an idea for a subject--or if you have a story to tell.

The 39-year-old was charged with using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence - a low-level catch-all offence for many internet crimes - and Hannah was warned to keep her expectations low. "We were prepared to go to court and for him to get a slap on the wrist," she says. But she and the 25 other women who decided to be part of the case were determined Andy be held accountable. One after the other, several gave crushing statements at his sentencing hearing last year. "You didn't just betray my friendship, but you shattered the sense of safety I used to take for granted," Jess told the court.

A few months ago, everyone was worried about how AI would impact the 2024 election. It seems like some of the angst has dissipated, but political deepfakes--including pornographic images and video--are still everywhere. Today on the show, WIRED reporters Vittoria Elliott and Will Knight talk about what has changed with AI and what we should worry about. Or you can write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

I can only imagine how you must be feeling after sexually explicit deepfake videos of you went viral on X. Disgusted. I'm really sorry this is happening to you. Nobody deserves to have their image exploited like that. But if you aren't already, I'm asking you to be furious. Furious that this is happening to you and so many other women and marginalized people around the world. Furious that our current laws are woefully inept at protecting us from violations like this.

April 10 was a very bad day in the life of celebrity gamer and YouTuber Atrioc (Brandon Ewing). Ewing was broadcasting one of his usual Twitch livestreams when his browser window was accidentally exposed to his audience. During those few moments, viewers were suddenly face-to-face with what appeared to be deepfake porn videos featuring female YouTubers and gamers QTCinderella and Pokimane--colleagues and, to my understanding, Ewing's friends. Moments later, a quick-witted viewer uploaded a screenshot of the scene to Reddit, and thus the scandal was a fact. Deepfakes refer broadly to media doctored by AI, commonly to superimpose a person's face onto that of, say, an actor in a movie or video clip.

Artificial intelligence imaging can be used to create art, try on clothes in virtual fitting rooms or help design advertising campaigns. But experts fear the darker side of the easily accessible tools could worsen something that primarily harms women: nonconsensual deepfake pornography. Deepfakes are videos and images that have been digitally created or altered with artificial intelligence or machine learning. Porn created using the technology first began spreading across the internet several years ago when a Reddit user shared clips that placed the faces of female celebrities on the shoulders of porn actors. Since then, deepfake creators have disseminated similar videos and images targeting online influencers, journalists and others with a public profile.

In the spring of 2001, when I was just 18 years old, I launched a multiyear career as an online porn model and cam girl, giving paying customers access to my naked body in the form of photo sets and weekly cam shows broadcast in the members' sections of my paysites. By today's standards, the work I did was laughably low-fi. The bulk of what I put out into the world was just softcore stills. Even my cam shows only offered viewers the chance to watch an image refresh every 15 seconds or so, basically providing access to a slow-moving digital flipbook. Over the course of three and a half years, I only shot two videos--and one of them was completely silent, thanks to a malfunctioning microphone.

Changes to Stable Diffusion are notable, as the software is hugely influential and helps set norms in the fast-moving generative AI scene. Unlike rival models like OpenAI's DALL-E, Stable Diffusion is open source. This allows the community to quickly improve on the tool and for developers to integrate it into their products free of charge. But it also means Stable Diffusion has fewer constraints in how it's used and, as a consequence, has attracted significant criticism. In particular, many artists, like Rutkowski, are annoyed that Stable Diffusion and other image generating models were trained on their artwork without their consent and can now reproduce their styles.