Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proven to be well in recognizing people's faces and understanding what's going on inside photos and videos. But for so long, it hasn't been inside the porn industry.
The pornographic video sharing website and one of the largest pornography site Pornhub has came a long way since being founded in 2007.
As tech develops, it announced that it has been training AI machine learning with datasets to automatically catalog its millions of videos. The beta version of the machine learning software have initially scanned some 50,000 videos in a month.
The facial recognition AI can detect 10,000 individual pornstars by their names by simply scanning and interpreting footage, and tag them in footage. These "actors" are initially limited to professionals only and no amateurs will be tagged.
Usually, this information is provided manually by the video's uploaders or viewers. Pornhub said that the AI-powered solution was fed thousands of videos along with official photos of performers to learn how to return names accurately.
But because Pornhub is starting small, humans are still required to verify the software's choices. By either upvoting or downvoting the accompanying descriptions, depending on their accuracy, Pornhub aims to make the algorithms smarter and to limit the margin of error.
The site plans to move to more categories, to include specific characteristics such as "public" and "blonde."
"Now, users can search for a specific pornstar they have an affinity for and we will be able to retrieve more precise results," said Pornhub VP Corey Price. "Our model will undoubtedly play a pivotal role moving forward too, especially considering that over 10,000 videos per day are added to the site."
"In fact, over the course of the past month alone, while we tested the model in beta, it was able to scan through 50,000 videos that have had pornstars added or removed on the video tags."
Previously, there has been attempt to train computer vision algorithms to describe what happen in adult videos. In fact, a developer once used Microsoft's AI to built a bot for this context and made it watch and interpret those types of videos all day long.
But here Pornhub is taking that idea to the next level. And this certainly can boost the porn industry where it is notorious for its highly efficient SEO efforts. Because indeed, adult content services have been a popular niche for about as long as the internet.
Consuming more bandwidth than almost any niche on the internet, online adult entertainment is just getting another sip of technology. That with a goal to improve user experience and more return visits.
With AI, viewers should have more chance to sit back and let automation do the 'heavy' work for them.