Adult film icon and media investor Riley Reid aims to bring the transformational capabilities of generative AI to adult entertainment with an online platform where users can chat with digital versions of content creators. But unlike other, scuzzier adult chatbots, Clona.AI’s avatars are trained with explicit consent of the models’ creators who have direct input in what the “AI companions” will, and won’t, talk about.

For $30 a month, fans and subscribers will be able to hold “intimate conversations” with digital versions of their favorite adult stars, content creators and influencers. The site’s roster currently includes Reid herself and Lena the Plug. A free tier is also available but offers just five chat messages per month.

“The reality is, AI is coming, and if it's not Clona, it’s somebody else,” Reid told 404 Media. “When [other people] use deepfakes or whatever — if I'm not partnering up with it, then someone else is going to steal my likeness and do it without me. So being presented with this opportunity, I was so excited because I felt like I had a chance to be a part of society's technological advances.”

Clona uses Meta’s Llama 2 large language model as a base, then heavily refines and retrains it to reflect the personality of the person it’s based on. Reid explains that her model was first trained on a variety of her online media including interviews, podcast appearances and YouTube videos (in addition to some of her x-rated work) before further fine tuning its response by having the AI chat with Reid herself.

“I’ll be able to see how it responds to users, and edit it to be like ‘no, I would have said it more like this,’’’ Reid said. “But in the beginning my focus was on things like making sure it had my dogs’ names right, making sure I was fact-checking it.”

While the AI companion will be capable talking dirty, how dirty that gets depends on the actor’s preferences, not the user’s. Reid notes that her model, for example, will not discuss physically dangerous sex acts with users. "I don't know if the tech team thought about the sounding guys, but I was like, I thought about them,” she said.

Generative AI technology has shown tremendous potential in creating digital clones of deceased celebrities and recording artists. The process requires little more than the celeb’s permission (or that of their estate) and a sufficiently large corpus of their vocal or video recordings. However, we’ve already also seen that technology be misused in deepfake pornography and shady dental advertising. Unscrupulous data scraping practices on the public web (data which is then used to train LLMs) has also raised difficult questions regarding modern copyright laws, copyright infringement and Grammy award eligibility.

Still, Reid remains optimistic about the historically proven resilience of the sex industry. “I feel like we're gonna be a huge part of AI adapting into our society, because porn is always like that,” Reid said. “It’s what it did with the internet. And the porn world has seen so many advances in technology.”