If there is one safe prediction we can make about 2026, it is this: public debate and global news will be dominated by artificial intelligence and the anxieties that surround it. And near the top of that swelling list of worries will be “AI porn” – the fateful collision between ever more accomplished image-making machines and humanity’s eternal appetite for audiovisual sexual stimulation.
The year has barely begun and already two loud tsunami sirens have sounded. The first is the latest Grok incident. For the uninitiated, Grok is Elon Musk’s AI, conceived a couple of years ago in a fit of pique after Musk’s spectacular falling-out with OpenAI. Despite its inauspicious origins, Grok has advanced at extraordinary speed and now rivals the best AI models – from ChatGPT and Gemini to China’s Qwen, Kimi and DeepSeek.
AI porn will come without all the bleak moral worries that accompany humans in this business
Grok does, however, have a habit of behaving badly. This is partly by design. Musk has loudly proclaimed he wants it to be bolder, freer, less “woke” than other AI. But noble aspirations can have ignoble consequences. A few months ago Grok began spewing anti-Semitic references and referring to itself as “MechaHitler” before being hurriedly muted and retuned. In recent months it became clear that it would generate sexualized images of minors on X in response to user prompts – an episode that’s prompted apologies, emergency fixes and a rapid disabling of specific “capabilities.”
The second klaxon comes from a very different source. In a recent post, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri warned that we are reaching the point at which AI-generated images and video become unfalsifiable – totally indistinguishable from “real” images. Which means the assumptions underpinning visual trust are about to collapse entirely.
This is bad news for Instagram itself, which already risks drowning in a tidal wave of what is lazily termed “AI slop” – a misleading label for content that is often technically dazzling. It is far worse news for those concerned about AI pornography. Combine Grok’s disturbing lapses with the fact that AI has essentially perfected both image-making and video generation, and the nightmare scenario is no longer hypothetical. It is unfolding in real time.
Much digital ink has been spilled on these obvious upfront horrors: artificial revenge porn, illegal or disturbing content, deepfake sexual images of public figures and worse. And, yes, these are serious concerns that will require powerful action. But I suspect the real danger of AI porn lies elsewhere – and it is not at the criminal fringe, but at the mainstream center. With ordinary porn, vanilla porn, basic porn.
Put bluntly, AI pornography is about to become exceptionally good. Indeed, if you are crafty, it already is, and I can show you exactly how and why (Spectator-reading parents might want to hide the next paragraphs from their hormonal teenage kids).
Go to a good image-making AI like, say, Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro. Type in a description of the titillating image you want to see, that fits your erotic tastes. Let’s say, “beautiful curvy young blonde Nordic woman in a tiny summer dress, sitting on a bed, smiling teasingly [etc. etc. etc.].” You have to phrase the prompt carefully, so you don’t trip the guardwires, yet put in enough key terms so the hint is dropped – “make this hot.” As a result, the AI intuits your needs.
Nano Banana will likely then give you a very sexy, but not explicit, photo of a stunningly beautiful and pleasingly curvy young Nordic woman who does not exist but looks totally lifelike, even as she sits on the bed in a tiny dress offering a come-hither smile. Now comes the alchemical part. You take this image and feed it into an AI video-making machine. You prompt what you want the lovely lady in the video to do, for example, “she stretches languidly and lifts her knees and says in a husky voice to the camera [insert whatever dialogue turns you on here].”
These early video-making machines were not designed to produce porn like this, but the fact is that they can, they will, they do. Sometimes the guardrails go up and nothing happens, but often your naughty idea sails through and you get shockingly sexy, quite explicit little videos, lasting ten seconds or so. And, of course, you can go back again and again, and make more and more. And more. Refining them all the time.
If you’ve done all this successfully, congratulations, you’ve just produced and directed your own porn video. What’s more, it is a porn video starring the sexiest woman (or man or couple or throuple) you can possibly imagine, doing and saying exactly the stuff that personally turns you on. It is immaculately curated by you, and perfectly bespoke for you. It is also remarkably arousing. It is the porn of your dreams. For anyone that remembers the 1970s, we have come a dangerously long way from grainy pictures of semi-nude housewives.
What are the likely consequences? I predict this superb AI porn will, firstly, destroy the human porn industry in the coming years. AI porn will be absurdly cheap, if not free; it will have infinite variety; it will be so much better in so many ways – and it will come without all the bleak moral worries that accompany humans in this business.
Secondly, and rather less positively, AI porn will turn many of us into terrible porn addicts, because it is so exquisitely, personally arousing. What’s more, this brilliant AI porn will only improve as the videos get longer and more elaborate. Then come the virtual reality goggles.
As a species, we are not built to resist porn of this quality. Our insatiable desire for erotic stimulation will be met with a ceaseless supply of addictively superb erotic stimuli. We might masturbate ourselves to death, or at least into hospital. And birth rates could further collapse.
Is there any way we can stop this? No doubt we will try, but I fear this is an unyielding tide. Even if big AI firms manage to cage their machines, enemies will steal over the fence and provide this incredible sexual drug that everyone wants. Put it another way: we already have a problem with internet porn. But if internet porn is heroin, this new AI porn will be fentanyl.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 19, 2026 World edition.
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