• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, March 7, 2025

There are three main drivers of online innovation: cats, porn, and crime.

Ethan Zuckerman coined the “cute cat theory of digital activism” back in 2008. “Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers,” he said. “Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.”

There are two implications of Zuckerman’s observation. First, people were willing to put more time, money and effort into building cat-pic-sharing platforms than into digital activism platforms -- but if a tool could be used for cat-pic-sharing, it could also be used for digital activism.

The investment in the pic-sharing platforms, therefore, had an unintended side effect of creating much more sophisticated tools for digital activists.

The second implication is that it’s harder to monitor and control activism when it’s dispersed among a much higher volume of cute cat activity.

Zuckerman also noted the power of pornography as a driver of tech innovation. “Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work. If there are no activists, it doesn't work well."

This week, I hosted my friend Melissa Clark-Reynolds for her twice-yearly “Signals from the Future “webinar. A renowned futurist, Melissa uses these sessions to share the 10 signals that have captured her attention in the previous SIX months.

One of her signals was the use of AI to replace OnlyFans “chatters”. Historically, OnlyFans stars would have people who wanted to DM with them -- and who were happy to pay for the privilege. As an OF star, obviously you’d want to oblige, but who has the time?

So a new low-wage job was born: chatter. An OF star would hire chatters, detail exactly what they were and weren’t willing to talk about, what they were and weren’t willing to do, what their tone was, etc, and the chatters would pretend to be the star and talk to strangers.

Replacing the chatters is an obvious use case for AI. Enter FlirtFlow, which “doesn't just send messages; it creates authentic connections,” capturing “the essence of years of relationship-building expertise, ensuring every interaction is genuine and meaningful.”

Or Botly, a company focused on “making this as conversationally relevant as possible so people can seek companionship through these creators, even though it is an AI talking for them.”

OnlyFans’ terms of service allow consensual images only, and creators make a deliberate choice to be there. But our third driver of innovation is not so respectful.

10 years ago, Marc Goodman wrote a book called “Future Crime,” detailing the ways criminals are inevitably among the first adopters of emerging technologies. “They have evolved well beyond the days when they were the first on the street carrying pagers… Today, they are building their own nationwide encrypted cellular radio telecommunications systems.”

Eight years ago, deepfakes started appearing, and of course one of their first use cases was nonconsensual porn. At the time, I was giving talks on exponential technology and regularly referenced a deepfake that had been made by putting Gal Gadot’s face on a porn star’s body.

This week, Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media wrote that “only a single image of someone is now required to create a short nonconsensual adult video of them.”

“[C]ertain AI video generators are better at producing specific types of nonconsensual videos,” Maiberg continued. “For example, while Pixverse is often used to make videos in which women take their tops off, Hailuo, an AI video generator from a Chinese company called Minimax, is often used to make videos of women who turn around and shake their bare ass at the camera. Hailuo is also used to make videos where two people can be made to kiss.” Apps like these are available in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

And of course nonconsensual porn is not the only criminal activity being enabled by emerging technologies. Last year, a finance worker was tricked into paying out $25 million after a video call in which everyone except him was fake. “The worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized.”

If you’ve only been dabbling with ChatGPT, and aren’t yet convinced what the use cases might be, look to cats, porn and crime. As they go, so goes the Internet.