Why OnlyFans Won’t Let AI Take Over | Fortune Daily

0:00What happens when a platform built on human connection faces an internet flooded with AI-generated people? OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair is drawing a firm line against fully synthetic creators. At the same time, she's leading a business handling more than$7 billion in annual transactions. The former cyber and privacy lawyer joins me now to talk about the economics of authenticity and why creators still face barriers from the banking system. She'll also discuss who gets paid in the next chapter of the booming creator business. From Santa Barbara, I'm Ellie Austin and this is Fortune Daily.

0:48keely thank you so much for joining us here at the mpw summit um so you joined only fans in 2022 you then became ceo in 2023 so the year later there was a perception obviously at that time that uh only fans was primarily adults only content is that true and what is it in 2026 sex. So you're right, there is a perception certainly that OnlyFans is an adult content website. What I would say is actually it's an 18 plus website insofar as that only adults can access our platform. What that means is that the content that's on OnlyFans does sometimes contain adult content but also it can contain any other range of things.

1:29So we have a lot of athletes who share sporting content, we have people who share cooking content, travel blogs, podcasts, comedians, a really, really broad range of people who are creators on our platform. Do you have metrics for which type of content performs the best? So again, because we don't categorize content in that way, and because also we don't have any advertising on the platform. So normally when people have to categorize content in that way, it's to enable advertising targeting and demographic targeting in that way. Because users are in control of their own journey, and we don't have that requirement to categorize for ads, we don't categorize content in that way.

2:04It's also, frankly, because it's quite hard to categorize what content really is. Like, obviously, if something is sporting content, that's very obvious. But when it comes to not safe for work content, the question is, is somebody in a bikini not safe for work content? Or is that safe for work content? And some things are very clear and other things are not. But we don't like to categorize. For anyone who's unfamiliar, tell us how the business model works. If I'm a creator and I decide that I want to be on OnlyFans, what does that look like? So if you're a creator and you decide that you want to be on OnlyFans, you've got to go through our sign-up process.

2:36So think about bank KYC on steroids, essentially, to become a creator on OnlyFans. So you have to provide us with nine pieces of information regarding yourself, ten in some jurisdictions. That includes your government ID, a selfie video of you holding your government ID, your tax information, your bank account details, your other social media handles. so we can check that you're Ellie who you say you are on all of your social media handles and you're not pretending to be somebody else. Once you've completed that onboarding process, it's reviewed by our team and then you're good to go in terms of monetizing your content.

3:08What that means is you have to grow your fan base. So each fan on OnlyFans goes through a registration process as well. We've no anonymity on the platform. And so what you will then need to do is different fans will subscribe to individual creators. It's not like Instagram where you sign up for Instagram and you've access to all the content. You've got to choose your own user journey. and which creators you follow. As a creator, you can earn from day one. So again, by contrast to lots of other platforms where you have to have a minimum follow account in order to be able to start to monetize your content, you can have one fan and start to monetize.

3:39And the monetization model is the same for all of our creators. It's a fair 80-20 split in favor of the creators. So for every dollar that a fan spends on our platform, 80 % of that will go direct to the creator. And on that split, some competitors of OnlyFans have launched lower rates than you have. What's the case you'd make to creators who are looking to keep a higher share as to why they should be on OnlyFans? So the reason for our 20 % split is to enable us to provide the best possible services and tools to creators. So think about safe payment rails. Think about great content moderation.

4:12Think about their safety in terms of the features that we build to protect creators and protect their content. you could take a lower take rate but you have to compromise on some of the quality aspects that you provide so really for creators and the reason why we have 20 % as our take rate is because that's what is necessary for us to be able to provide a safe and secure platform for creators while still enabling them to be the primary financial beneficiaries the numbers around the business are remarkable so you have 5 million creators on your platform that's right you have an estimated 400 million users and you have just 42 employees at the company.

4:48Is that correct? So we're actually closer to 50 now. It's been a big headcount year. Still tiny. Still tiny. So how on earth does that work? And do you use a lot of contractors? We do, yes. So we have a very deliberate hiring model. So we hire very senior strategic leaders and very hungry junior staff in order to provide a lot of the core services for the business. So think about our legal team, our finance team, our payments team. When it comes to our safety team and our development team and our engineering team, a lot of those are independent contractors. The leaders of those teams are employees of the company.

5:22But what we do is we use independent contractors to enable us to scale when we need to. So if we've got a big development project, we know we can add headcount quickly. But equally, when that project's over, we then don't have people hanging around, not being well utilized. When you came into the company in 2022, you were actually running Trust and Safety. before you then went on to become CEO. What does it actually cost? How can you quantify to ask the financial cost of moderating a platform of the size of OnlyFans? It's probably one of our single biggest expenses, frankly, in terms of dollars.

5:54And that's because our moderation is multifaceted. So obviously we use state-of-the-art technology to help us to moderate content. So that includes image scanning, audio scanning tools, things along those lines. But we also make sure that each piece of content is moderated by a human. And that means that we make good decisions around content moderation, right? We're not making knee-jerk decisions based on fuzzy results from an AI tool. We're using those AI tools to help inform human content moderators who make that decision. In addition to when we think about sort of safety tools and content moderation, there's also age verification as well and create a match.

6:31And so create a match is also making sure that the individual featured in the content is the same person who opened that account. Very important, especially in the adult content space, because it ensures consent at all times. Do you believe there will always be a human in the loop when it comes to moderation? I think legally there has to be a human in the loop, certainly in Europe, when it comes to content moderation. And for us, we want to make sure that we're doing it the best possible way. I think AI tools have improved enormously since I first started in the business. And they really are a huge aid in terms of making that content moderation decisions.

7:02But having a human in the decision-making process is very important, even if it's just at the appeal stage. I think also having a platform where we don't have end-to-end encryption enables our team to actually fully moderate all of the content on the platform. It means that things like hate speech don't occur on the platform, like negative behavior, trolling, doxing, things along those lines. And also because there's no anonymity on the platform, in the event that anything does occur, we're able to see who's the person behind that content. We're able to work with law enforcement to help to address any issues.

7:35There's a lot of conversation happening right now about the regulation of tech platforms. Meta settled an enormous lawsuit a month or so ago over allegations that its tools were addictive to young people. What would your message be to other tech CEOs when it comes to your learnings around moderation and keeping people safe on OnlyFans? I think safety by design is absolutely key. And that's including the trust and safety teams as early on impossible in product design and development. It's much harder to retrofit safety control into a basically ready to launch product just before you go to market than it is if you think about those things in the design phase.

8:12Before you joined in 2021, the company announced it would ban explicit content and then it reversed that decision quite soon after. And as I understand it, that was driven largely by banking partners. Do payment processes still wield a powerful influence at OnlyFans and how is that shaping your endeavors now at the company? Absolutely. So I think one of the things that people often forget is that obviously that the entire point of OnlyFans is to be able to monetize content, right? So payment processes, of course, play an exceptionally important role in terms of our compliance and also making sure that creators get paid in a way that is quick, safe, prevents fraud, all of those other things.

8:50Do you understand from a business perspective why that decision was made in 2021? I obviously know you weren't at the company, but to ban adult content? I think it was a proposed ban. And I think it was, I think there was 48 hours. It was a very short ban. adversity but I was never actually never actually put into place um what I think the company learned from that was uh the importance of listening to our creator community um the outrage from creators obviously was was pretty loud frankly and they were very concerned about what this had been for their livelihood but it also highlighted for us the necessity to build trusted relationships with banking partners with payment processing partners and to make sure that we operate in a way that is very transparent.

9:35We have in place a safety and transparency center, which publishes all of our policies. We do monthly transparency reports. We believe in information sharing. And all of that was somewhat of a learning for us, actually, as a business, about the importance of building that trust proactively rather than retroactively. So it has really informed how we run the company going forward. You mentioned a bit about your approach to AI. A lot of tech is racing towards AI generated content and synthetic content but OnlyFans has taken a really hard stance against fully AI generated creators. Do you ever fear that you're going to be left behind because of that stance?

10:11It's an interesting question and when it comes to AI adoption we want to make sure that we are adopting AI that helps our creators to earn. So what does that look like? So what does that look like? It takes a number of different forms so I think when we think about AI there's two different ways in which you can think about it. You can think about it in the content generation space, but also in the platform optimization space. So using AI tools to help our content creators, for example, understand how to price content. So we have pricing parameters on OnlyFans, but ultimately as a creator, you choose how to price your content.

10:42Enabling creators to understand how to dynamically price their content using AI, very helpful tool for creators, doesn't cannibalize their income and instead actually helps them to generate more income on the platform. Where we draw the line is on fully AI synthetic content creators. There's a number of reasons for that. Number one, it again cannibalizes our actual human creators who are the backbone of our business and who are the people who we are there to serve and who have helped to grow the platform to what it is today. If we were to allow a wholly synthetic profile not attached to any individual and ultimately we're cutting that creator out of the cutting creators out of the financial equation.

11:22That's not why we were set up. Also, I think that when you think about human beings and how and why people choose to follow a content creator on OnlyFans, it is to have a connection with an individual, right? It's not just to access anonymous content. It's because of the person behind that content. And at this stage, I don't think people are after a synthetic AI content that's not attached to an individual in that case. We do allow creators to utilize AI tools to enhance their content as long as it's still recognizable that it's the individual creator in question and as long as it's transparent to the fan so it's not that there's no AI it's just no wholly AI generated content um I hear that you're a beekeeper and you are a reader which are two notably offline hobbies driven your your profession what content do you personally gravitate towards on OnlyFans um I oh that's a great question it's hard because I follow so many different content creators.

12:21I follow a lot of our adult content creators. There's certain folks who I've been following for a very long time. I always find it very interesting to see how they're utilizing the platform. There's a lot of comedians on OnlyFans as well. So I follow some of them. There's Whitney Cummings and others. And we've recently launched community hub pages for some of those genres. So we've got a OnlyFans.com slash comedy page, OnlyFans.com slash podcast page, which makes it easier for people to navigate towards specific genres. I follow a lot of our athletes as well during the Olympics we had a lot of Olympians join the platform to help fund their sports so you saw a peak in sports we saw a real peak in sports content and there's a real role in particularly for niche sports on the platform so your extreme runners, your cliff divers your slightly off-piste racers, downhill mountain bikers people who perhaps don't traditionally monetize all that well purely from their sport, find OnlyFans a great way of supplementing their income.

13:19In fact, last year, I think we had 285 athletes join the platform across a plethora of sports. Healy, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate you being here in Santa Barbara. Thank you very much for having me. Next up, it's CEO Source with Diane Brady and Marissa Mayer, tech titan and founder of Dazzle AI. So Marissa, you came to Google in 99. You were the first female engineer. Here you are, you've been head of Yahoo, you've done Sunshine, you've Dazzle AI, you're in a lot of boards. Give me a sense as to how Silicon Valley's changed in your mind. Well, I think that people change, and I think that the technology and its capabilities change.

14:00But there is an underlying love in Silicon Valley for taking new ideas, taking new technologies, and building with it. And I think that sense of play, that sense of how can we apply technologies to make the world fundamentally better, I think still underpins what drives people today. And because AI will be the technology that defines our lifetimes, even more so than the Internet, I really do believe that. I think that one of the things that's gotten lost because it is so monumental and it is so consequential is that AI is fun. And Dazzle launching and coming out in stealth, even though we're still invite only, has been extremely energizing just because it's really, to me, very empowering and really electrifying to see how someone uses something you built in their daily life.

14:50How have your positions in the past, you mentioned Yahoo, you've been Starb's Google, how has that informed even the way you're thinking about Dazzle and the opportunities there? Sure. I think that my career has been defined not only by technology and AI, but it's really been informed by consumers. On Google, I was privileged to lead search and maps and Google image search and lots of different initiatives, but they're always on the consumer side. Yahoo is a very consumer-oriented company. And the boards that I sit on, Walmart, AT &T, Hilton, Starbucks, are consumer companies. I really select for that because I love studying consumers.

15:33And I look over my career and all these wonderful, amazing companies I've been able to be involved with. There is that common thread of really caring about the consumer or the user and how to be really focused on the user and their problems going through the journey from their perspective. And it's really informed at Dazzle we tried to create a technology that is for outside of work. Yeah. Because we think that that's where the technology is ready to go, right? I think in some very specific domains and enterprises, we need to see those frontier models pushing even further from maybe a master's level, a master's degree level of understanding to a PhD level of understanding.

16:10But in consumers, there's a lot we can do right now with the state-of-the-art technology. Let's tell people quickly what Dazzle does. Sure. Dazzle is a personal AI assistant, and it learns from your camera. And what that essentially means is we understand your taste, we understand your lifestyle, but we're also coupling that with AI agents that can help you get things done. And we also, by the way, have humans in the loop too, sort of preserving things that are beyond the AI's capabilities or are particularly high value or intricate. We have some of the founders of the Frontier Models now talking about their own concerns about what it will do to humanity, et cetera.

16:48How do you think about that? I think that anyone who says they know how this all works out is lying, arrogant, or both. And I think that we have to understand that we're dealing with a new form of intelligence. It's probably the most powerful piece of technology. It's been compared to fire, electricity, et cetera. It's going to change things really profoundly. Because we don't know how this is going to work out, there is a chance. We can debate how big it is. that there is a chance that things are not going to work out correctly or that there's, you know, that things won't work out for the best.

17:22And when you acknowledge that, I think sometimes because people tend towards fear of the unknown, et cetera, what is a, you know, 1 to 20 percent chance gets the focus. But what gets left out in that is that odds are things are going to work out for the better. And when you think about what this could do for diseases and for science, what this can do for creativity, right, and be helping people, you know, achieve creative outcomes and creating the kind of confidence that that requires in that creative process, I think it can be really powerful and dramatic. And I think it's really important to realize that, yes, we need to acknowledge and guard against the less than 50 % chance that things don't go well, but not over-focus on to the point that we forgo the opportunities in those positive odds.

18:19Okay. Thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. That's it for Fortune Daily. That's it for us at Most Powerful Women 2026. We have so many fascinating conversations here and we've only been able to show you a tiny fraction of them on this week's show so you'll be seeing more of them next week and beyond but for now we're all headed back to New York we'll see you next week