For 3 days in February, porn star Alix Lynx flew to Miami for her first unique creator gathering the place she was in full grind mode: capturing Reels and speaking technique with different creators. “It was sort of like SoHo Home for OnlyFans ladies,” she says of the expertise, which is named The Circle and drew greater than a dozen intercourse staff, together with Remy LaCroix and Forrest Smith.
Lynx, who’s a former webcam mannequin turned OnlyFans starlet, has a mixed 2 million followers throughout Instagram, TikTok, and X. She joined OnlyFans in 2017 with “the luxurious of getting my very own following,” she says, however these numbers haven’t all the time translated to subscriptions. It’s why she was in Miami.
“I don’t suppose individuals perceive. I do a shitload of selling,” Lynx says.“That’s the large false impression with OnlyFans—when creators be part of they suppose it’s going to be simple. However except you’re a genius at advertising and marketing on social media, which is few and much between, it’s genuinely onerous to get discovered and acquire a following.”
Lots of OnlyFans’ 4 million creators have mentioned the identical factor: native discovery on the platform sucks. “There’s only a frustration,” Lynx says. “In an ideal world, there can be that searchability characteristic as a result of it makes it an excellent taking part in discipline for creators.” (In keeping with OnlyFans, the platform limits its search characteristic as a security precaution so customers don’t by accident stumble throughout content material they didn’t intend to see.)
It’s an issue that Presearch—a free, personal, decentralized search engine—needs to repair with the launch of its image-based discovery device Doppelgänger.
Doppelgänger is the most recent addition to Presearch’s Spicy Mode, a NSFW characteristic for looking out grownup content material. Customers can add a picture of a star—or any individual they suppose is scorching—to seek out OnlyFans creators that resemble them. The expertise matches the consumer with related creators who need an viewers moderately than to deepfake platforms which can be nonconsensual and unlawful. Ever puzzled who Sabrina Carpenter’s or Pedro Pascal’s porn doppelgängers have been? Surprise no extra.
In keeping with the corporate, Doppelgänger is constructed with particular guardrails—no monitoring what customers search, express age-gating—and runs on Presearch’s decentralized index, “which surfaces content material conventional engines like google and business AI suppress,” says Brenden Tacon, head of product and enterprise growth at Presearch.
“We’re making an attempt to supply a spot the place you may serendipitously develop into found,” Tacon tells WIRED. “You gained’t on OnlyFans. In the event you’re hustling your self on Instagram, Reddit, and all these locations, it’s so onerous to interrupt by means of the noise.”
With 300,000 each day lively searches on Presearch—in accordance with the corporate—Doppelgänger is among the first instruments in the marketplace pushing for moral discovery of grownup creators at scale. In contrast to conventional reverse picture instruments that scan throughout the open internet to find the place a photograph seems or try to hint somebody’s id, Doppelgänger doesn’t search the broader web, doesn’t floor private data, and doesn’t try to determine an individual. “It merely returns visually related public profiles primarily based on picture options, making it structurally extra restricted and, in some ways, extra privacy-protective than a typical reverse picture search,” Tacon says.
Nonetheless, the accuracy of Doppelgänger may use some enchancment. In a number of assessments run by WIRED, the AI appears higher tailor-made to seek out matches for girls than males. I had no downside discovering look-alikes for Cardi B and Sydney Sweeney. However when trying to find Michael B. Jordan look-alikes, it instructed feminine creators Chanell Coronary heart (the quantity 3 match) and Chamile Symone, along with Uncut Jock NYC, a white-presenting Brazilian intercourse employee. In truth, 5 girls have been instructed amongst Jordan’s high 40. Curious if this was a glitch, I dragged a photograph of actor Jeff Goldblum—a perennial “hottie,” in accordance with the subreddit r/VintageLadyBoners—into the picture finder, and the highest search outcome was for Jean B, a self-described “twink content material creator,” adopted by 38 ideas of large-breasted girls. (A second seek for Goldblum—who, for what it’s price, is extra zaddy than twink—with a special picture, didn’t fare any higher; the lone male “look-alike” was for YCC, who’s Chinese language.)
