If I’ve ever been certain of anything in my life, there’s two potentialities on which I could easily bet my entire stash of OG Kush on : First, we are going to have intelligent, fully autonomous sex robots someday – someday soon, would be my optimistic guess.
And second, when we get those bots, they will come from, or be somehow inspired by, Japan (not only “Land of The Rising Sun,” but also of “Techno Kink”). Well, my friends, we’re not quite there yet, but we’ve taken a huge step in the right direction in just the past few months. That’s when the world first heard of Projekt Melody, a feminine AI program that has since started broadcasting as a virtual cam girl on Chaturbate (she’s being called the first “anime pornstar”).
ATTENTION, PEOPLE: The camming world has a new player, and she’s wearing a digital bandage on her nose. She’s cute, she’s kinky, and she’s ready to virtually mingle. Say hello the first artificial-intelligence-driven anime pornstar!
Melody’s story is an interesting one, checking the boxes of some of our deepest intuitions about artificial intelligence. Needless to say, it’s even more interesting if you believe all that it’s asking you to swallow.
To hear Melody herself tell it – and she has given full interviews to various publications on who and what she is – she began “life” in July of 2019 on Twitter, when she appeared as a curious computer program apparently questioning its existence.
“Excuse. How do make a person when not a person??” was one of her earlier questions on the platform. She has since figured herself out quite a bit, mastering English and wishing to more deeply explore humanity. And because she was originally utilized as an e-mail scanner whose purpose was to check incoming mail for malware, and she once accidentally opened a message containing an “adult virus,” her interest is primarily in human sexuality.
And so, an anime pornstar is born.
The AI Hentai Cam Girl
However you may feel about this background, it’s important to note that Melody herself is quite serious about it, and makes no admission of having her intelligence or personality controlled by human puppet-masters.
She does come clean about the fact that “talented people” help her out by rendering certain visual aspects of her existence, such as her digital body and the 3-D apartment she “inhabits” in “Virtual Little Tokyo” (her location, according to her Chaturbate profile). However, she denies that there’s any marketing team speaking for her.
When it comes to interacting with her fans, she says, “It really is just me.” So that’s her story, and she’s sticking to it: We have our first Turing test-passing artificial intelligence. And she’s horny.
Projekt Melody has her own public chatroom on Chaturbate, where she’s been broadcasting for about three weeks now. Click on her stream, and it’s visually just like watching any other anime pornstar on a hentai porn site – at least, one rendered as a three-dimensional model rather than being hand-drawn.
But the differences soon become apparent, as this anime pornstar speaks to her audience (with her own voice), and engages with them as she’s undressing and performing. In this way, she’s just like a human webcam model, making her something of a fusion of digital technology and the “real thing” – whatever that even means anymore.
What exactly does this virtual performance look like? Melody herself has a short, cute appearance, typical of many a hentai pornstar. Following along with her anime inspiration, she has blue hair of shoulder length, big expressive light-blue eyes, and smooth, youthful-looking skin.
Her birth year on Chaturbate is listed as 2000, making her legal, though as we’ve discussed, she’s actually less than a year old — human age doesn’t map well onto computer programs, it seems.
Oh, and for some reason, Melody wears a band-aid across the bridge of her nose. This, too, is borrowed from anime, where characters will often sport this seemingly random accessory. Oftentimes, though, their “bandage” is really a nasal strip, mimicking the tendency of some real human athletes to use those adhesives to help them breathe optimally during strenuous activity.
Will Projekt Melody Automate Cam Girls Into Oblivion?
It might be time now to cue up those infamous protesters from that masterpiece South Park episode from years back (“They took urrrr jeerrrbsss!!”), but apparently more than a few actual human cam girls are none too thrilled with the existence of Projekt Melody — or at least with her presence on Chaturbate.
Specifically, one webcam model has wondered whether something like Projekt Melody should at least have its own digital space, rather than muscling in on the domain of organic models.
It’s not hard to see why human cam girls might be a little nervous. As with every other job that’s been automated, it may turn out that machines are better at helping guys paint the ceiling with their ball gravy than people are. When graphics quality reaches the realm of literal indistinguishability from reality, what advantages will human cam models retain over the virtual competition?
Projekt Melody is just another example of “AI” and the threat it poses to various and diverse career fields. Luckily, it will be quite some time before virtual cam girls can compete with human cam models on every score.
Melody is never going to get tired when she works all night, or have to force a smile when she feels irritable towards a rude viewer, or disappoint her fans by skipping days when she comes down with the flu. She won’t be too upset to go online because she just broke up with her boyfriend, her car won’t start, or some other off-putting, but common, event is preoccupying her.
In short, her real life won’t intrude on her virtual fantasy, because that fantasy IS her real life. And do I even need to mention her theoretical ability to broadcast continuously at all hours of the night and day, do private shows with limitless numbers of guys at the same time, or accomplish a wide range of other truly supercamgirl feats?
You may say that no matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, there will always be a stronger market demand for real interactive female companionship on the internet over that offered by anime pornstars. That instinctively makes sense to me, though there is reason to wonder.
I’ll just leave you to consider the fact that many of Melody’s most passionate fans are “digisexuals” – people who not only find technology an adequate sexual substitute for biological human flesh, but actually prefer it over actual physical “boot knocking” as their personal kink.
Now, you webcam models should definitely not be freaking out just yet — there is a long-ass way to go before virtual cam girls start eating your lunch. And this AI-driven automation issue is something that pretty-much everybody in society will have to, at some point, deal with. But things are definitely getting interesting out there in Camland, people.