AI is Making Celebrity Gay Fantasies Come True. What's Behind DeepFake Mania?

If you're a gay man with a pulse, at some point you've probably speculated (fantasized) about the possibility of being with Shawn Mendes, Tom Holland, Michael B. Jordan or any other straight Hollywood hunk. Now, with AI on the rise, you can make your celebrity fantasies come true in the privacy of your own bedroom, simply with the touch of a few keystrokes.

That's right, AI porn is skyrocketing, which means you can pretty much create whatever dream scenario you want. Sure, sometimes AI fakes (or deepfakes) look a little bit, well...fake, especially the porn videos, which often consist of a superimposed celebrity face on a real body. It's giving a little bit of an "apparition getting it on," but hey...if it does the job, right?

Freaky? Maybe. But, love it or hate it, AI porn can be found all over the internet, with entire categories on various adult tube channels devoted to it. And it's not always about turning your favorite heteros into homos. It can also be designing the perfect guy for you out of thin air, based on all your preferences (think the 80's cult classic "Weird Science," only gay and virtual).

But using AI to manipulate hard-core images or videos of celebrities without their consent? That's where things get a little dicey when it comes to ethics.

Last month, the internet was flooded with images of Taylor Swift. No, it wasn't because her hunk-of-a-man boyfriend Travis Kelce propelled the Kansas City Chiefs into and win this years' Super Bowl, paving the way for countless shots of Taylor's blood-red lipstick from her viewer box. Instead, it was Taylor acting out her "Wildest Dreams" like never before...until we realized that the images were actually not her, but sexually explicit AI generated images of the star.

One of the most popular of these images attracted 45 million views, 24,000 reposts, and hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks on X (formerly Twitter). In some regions, the images became so popular that "Taylor Swift AI" became featured as a trending topic, propelling the images even further into the stratosphere. Eventually, X had to pause (and later restore) the ability to search her name on the platform.

Luckily for Taylor, the Swifties sprung into action and criticized the social media platform for allowing the explicit posts to remain live as long as they did. They also flooded out the images by using the trending hashtags to promote real clips of Swift performing, effectively hiding out the explicit fakes.

But now that the cat's out of the bag, it doesn't seem like AI porn is slowing down one bit, even as venues like X explicitly ban "synthetic and manipulated media." The company even put out a disclaimer, citing an abbreviation, NCN (which stands for "Non-Consensual Nudity"), which we have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of.

We would say Tay was a victim of our culture's deeply entrenched misogyny, except male celebrities are not off the hook either. Whether it be romantic cuddling images, like AI Timothée Chalemet in bed with AI Tom Holland, or much more hardcore representations, gay men are obsessed with the phenom.

Why? Well, if you think about it, it's the ultimate fantasy fulfillment. Remember that feeling as a teenager when we wanted nothing more than the jock on the water polo team to be gay, and make our biggest sexual fantasy come true? Imagine if you could, just by using AI. The same goes for celebrities, who we've lusted after and fantasized about for years.

Creating our dream images, or seeing our favorite celebs as we've always wished we could, is like finally being told "yes," when we were always told "no." It's a license for imagination to become reality, where suddenly any secret desire can come true. It's granting permission to scratch an itch that's been driving you crazy for years.

As appealing and exciting as this new frontier is, however, we still need to tread lightly.

Exploiting celebrities, or for that matter, other people in our real lives, can be violating and cruel. Many students in schools have fallen victim to sexual image manipulation, as a form of bullying. There are lines that shouldn't be crossed, and there are lawsuits unfolding as we speak to figure out exactly where those lines fall.

But, even besides this, if we take away all of the mystery in our fantasies because we can manifest whatever we want, whenever we want, is there a danger that we'll become accustomed to it? Part of desire comes from wanting something we don't have, or can't have, and that's what makes it exciting. If we can fulfill our every wish, will we eventually become jaded?

AI isn't going anywhere, and either are our gay fantasies, so let's just hope we can merge the two in the best way possible for everyone. Unless, of course, Shawn Mendes just wants to give us the real deal?

Jake Meyers is a licensed therapist.