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: taking pictures 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 employees, 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 at all times translated to subscriptions. It’s why she was in Miami.
“I don’t suppose folks perceive. I do a shitload of selling,” Lynx says.“That’s the large false impression with OnlyFans—when creators be a part of they suppose it’s going to be simple. However until you’re a genius at advertising 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 stated 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 a good taking part in subject for creators.” (In keeping with OnlyFans, the platform limits its search characteristic as a security precaution so customers don’t by chance stumble throughout content material they didn’t intend to see.)
It’s an issue that Presearch—a free, personal, decentralized search engine—desires to repair with the launch of its image-based discovery software Doppelgänger.
Doppelgänger is the latest addition to Presearch’s Spicy Mode, a NSFW characteristic for looking out grownup content material. Customers can add a picture of a celeb—or any particular person they suppose is scorching—to seek out OnlyFans creators that resemble them. The know-how matches the person with related creators who need an viewers reasonably than to deepfake platforms which are nonconsensual and unlawful. Ever puzzled who Sabrina Carpenter’s or Pedro Pascal’s porn doppelgängers have been? Marvel no extra.
In keeping with the corporate, Doppelgänger is constructed with particular guardrails—no monitoring what customers search, specific age-gating—and runs on Presearch’s decentralized index, “which surfaces content material conventional search engines like google and yahoo and industrial AI suppress,” says Brenden Tacon, head of product and enterprise improvement at Presearch.
“We’re making an attempt to supply a spot the place you would possibly serendipitously change into found,” Tacon tells WIRED. “You gained’t on OnlyFans. Should you’re hustling your self on Instagram, Reddit, and all these locations, it’s so onerous to interrupt via the noise.”
With 300,000 each day energetic searches on Presearch—in accordance with the corporate—Doppelgänger is without doubt one of the first instruments in the marketplace pushing for moral discovery of grownup creators at scale. Not like conventional reverse picture instruments that scan throughout the open internet to find the place a photograph seems or try to hint somebody’s identification, Doppelgänger doesn’t search the broader web, doesn’t floor private data, and doesn’t try to establish 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 exams run by WIRED, the AI appears higher tailor-made to seek out matches for ladies than males. I had no drawback discovering look-alikes for Cardi B and Sydney Sweeney. However when trying to find Michael B. Jordan look-alikes, it urged feminine creators Chanell Heart (the quantity 3 match) and Chamile Symone, along with Uncut Jock NYC, a white-presenting Brazilian intercourse employee. Actually, 5 ladies have been urged 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 end result was for Jean B, a self-described “twink content material creator,” adopted by 38 recommendations of large-breasted ladies. (A second seek for Goldblum—who, for what it’s price, is extra zaddy than twink—with a unique picture, didn’t fare any higher; the lone male “look-alike” was for YCC, who’s Chinese language.)
