AI, authenticity, and escorts
I’ve often heard from clients that booking an escort can be quite difficult, since many escorts have very glossy, highly-edited photos, which means that the person who shows up at your hotel door sometimes looks absolutely nothing like you expect. At the end of the day, an escort ad is still an ad and the idea is to show the person in the best possible light. Flattering angles, a small degree of editing, and so on are certainly permissible, at least in my book, and a mix of studio photos and selfies brings the fantasy a little bit closer to reality. It’s very important to me, however, that my clients don’t feel decieved, and that when they meet me it’s a pleasant surprise rather than a disappointment. So far I’ve had no complaints. I’m a bit of a strange woman in more ways than one, and I’ve realised that it’s much more worthwhile to reach people who want me, specifically, rather than try to appeal to a broader, more generic market in which I anyway wouldn’t quite fit. (If you do look like an instagram model, though - good for you.)
I wonder, with the proliferation of perfect-looking, non-existent women on the internet, with big eyes, big lips, big breasts, and itty bitty waists, if deviation from the ideal, rather than adherance to it, will become an even greater asset in marketing? I’ll make it official - I absolutely hate AI, both for image generation and for writing. In image generation, it severs all connection between the image and reality. I recently came across an account on Vinted where every picture of a pair of trousers was accompanied by an AI image of those trousers fitting somebody’s perky ass perfectly. Okay, sure, the trousers may actually materially exist - but what is the point of showing an image of them that is not taken from real life? It says less than nothing about how they actual will fit an actual ass, and that’s the only thing I’m interested in learning from the photos.
As an escort, I also think using LLMs like ChatGPT to write your ad copy, twitter responses, and so on is a huge mistake from a marketing standpoint (I won’t go into my other reservations in this post). It might seem like a good idea to sound slick and perfect, but at the end that slickness removes all individual voice from your writing and makes you sound completely generic. With the proliferation of AI writing, the average person’s ability to detect it has also gone up - and it reads as very, very cheap. It sounds insincere and lazy and comes off as pure filler from someone who does not respect the written word nor the reader. The moment I realise something was written by an LLM, my eyes simply glaze over; it’s unreadable in the same way that plastic fruit is inedible. The best clients seek connection and specificity - they want you for you, and how can they find that if no part of your advertising reflects you? If you can’t even be bothered to write your own text, why should anybody else bother to read it?
In honour of idiosyncracy and raw edges, I’ll leave this entry, which I knocked out in five minutes, as it is.
PS: Yes, I’m aware not everyone is good with language, though I still think “bad” writing is preferable to LLM writing. However, this is what you hire a copywriter for. Writing needs a human touch. Otherwise, why even write?
With love, and a human touch