Sex workers are fighting to own their likenesses in an AI world

When Nevada’s legal brothels reopened in 2021 after a 14-month closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, licensed sex worker Jupiter Jetson told The Nevada Independent, she noticed a new hiring practice at Sheri’s Ranch, the Pahrump brothel where she worked from 2018 until February.

“Traditionally, most of the workers in Nevada brothels tend to be a little more anonymous,” said Jetson, who uses a stage name for safety.

But starting in May 2021, the brothel began “prioritizing the hiring of online creators and porn actresses. … They aggressively encouraged us to create content,” she said.

Sheri’s Ranch is now at the center of an effort to unionize sex workers, led by Jetson. It began after the brothel’s managers presented workers with a new contract that would grant them perpetual control over workers’ intellectual property, or the creative product or content that people can generate and copyright.

Lawyers, professors and sex workers who spoke to The Indy say control over image and likeness has always been a sensitive area in adult industries. Those questions are becoming even more crucial today as online adult content grows more lucrative and as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes widespread. Legal sex work in Nevada is changing as a result, making women’s likenesses more profitable but also opening them to new forms of exploitation and abuse.

“Whether it’s sex workers, or whether it’s women who are just going about their lives, we have seen enough of what can be done with someone’s likeness,” said Genevieve Dahl, a sex worker who was fired by Sheri’s Ranch for supporting the union push. She pointed to the recent controversy where Grok, the AI tool embedded in X, followed instructions to generate thousands of images of undressed women and children.

OnlyFans, a subscription-based website primarily featuring adult content, launched in 2016 and exploded in popularity during the pandemic, when cooped-up Americans turned to their phones for entertainment. According to the data-tracking website OnlyFans Stats, the number of site users increased by 1,200 percent from 2019 to 2025. Last year, adult websites were a $1.3 billion industry.

Two former sex workers with Sheri’s Ranch told The Indy that to attract attention online, the brothel has turned to recruiting women with large social media followings or encouraging existing workers to develop such followings. It’s a useful tool because brothel advertising is illegal or heavily limited throughout the state.

Some sex work advocates say websites such as OnlyFans empower women in adult industries to generate larger, more predictable profits in a less risky, self-directed setting.

“It has given sex workers and adult performers control over the means of production like never before,” said Lynn Comella, a UNLV professor who researches adult media.

But others say that while sex workers might benefit from adult content, it can also put them at new risk of personal burnout, overreach by brothel management or the unauthorized dissemination of their image online.

The internet brings new pressures, expectations for adult workers

Jetson began making adult content online in 2021, a direct result of her work at the brothel. She recalls Sheri’s Ranch repeatedly telling workers they were welcome to film adult content on the ranch’s property, including in more lavish rooms the women traditionally must pay to stay in. Most of her former colleagues at the brothel now post content to websites or apps, she said.

Jetson enjoys having an online persona, she said. But some other adult workers say it can contribute to stress, particularly when it comes to the unexpected ways images can travel online.

Dahl, for instance, maintains a hidden identity around her sex work. Her social media accounts solely promote upcoming stays at the ranch, and she never shows her face in photographs posted to those accounts or to the brothel’s website. Her desire to remain anonymous has led her away from creating adult content.

“Other people can step away from in-person sex work tomorrow and now they have this whole following, they could pivot in any other direction,” Dahl said. “For me, it’s different.”

Even for women who enjoy making adult content, it can be an exhausting endeavor. Nina Nova is a Las Vegas-based porn actress who worked briefly at Sheri’s Ranch in 2024. She said OnlyFans has made working in the industry more taxing.

“We signed up to make adult content,” Nova said. “We didn’t necessarily sign up to also run a full-time social media brand and have a TikTok 24/7.”

Of particular concern to sex workers is the potential threat that AI tools will be used to warp or change images they voluntarily post to adult websites. Nova said she and other friends in the industry “are having to double, triple check our contracts to make sure that we’re not accidentally signing away our likeness for use of AI purposes.”

But even sex workers who are diligent about checking contracts have little power to prevent people from making digital replicas of their adult content.

“Creators’ intellectual property rights do not fully protect against AI-generated likeness and digital replicas, at least not through copyright alone,” said Lauren Diaz, a professor and technology law expert at Nova Southeastern University. The U.S. Copyright Office has called for new federal legislation to protect content creators from unauthorized, AI-generated copies of their work, but no progress has been made yet.

Websites such as OnlyFans “have made adult workers less dependent on managers in the porn industry, less dependent on traditional directors and producers,” said Heather Berg, a feminist studies professor at UCLA. “But it makes them more dependent on big platforms that are exploitative in their own ways,” she said, explaining that OnlyFans doesn’t include robust protections for creators’ rights.

Research has shown that nearly 80 percent of OnlyFans profits flow to only the top 0.1 percent of creators, a dynamic that Berg said means the site “makes money off of sex workers’ labor while offering very little in return.”

Concerns about image exploitation

Women’s fears about their online names and images being exploited were a central cause of the unionization drive at Sheri’s Ranch, which began in February. Since The Indy‘s initial reporting on that effort, Jetson said Sheri’s Ranch has fired four more women, bringing the total number of terminated sex workers to seven.

The contract Sheri’s Ranch presented to workers in December grants the brothel “irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual” rights to any content produced while staying on the business’ property. Jetson said the contract came after management complained to her that the brothel was “losing out on money that they were owed” from women monetizing their adult images and videos.

Jetson said she worries that by giving the brothel perpetual control over women’s likenesses, the new contract will preclude women from generating income from their images and harm women who eventually want to leave the industry.

“They could claim copyright over our names and our videos and our clips and sell them on the website without compensation,” she said. “For all time, until after I die.”

Sheri’s Ranch did not return a request for comment.

Image exploitation in adult industries is hardly a new issue, said Caity Gwin, a Las Vegas-based lawyer and former dancer. She said strip club employees — of which there are approximately 20,000 in Nevada — frequently get into legal disputes with bosses who use their promotional photos on websites or billboards without their permission.

But in the digital age, Gwin said the potential harms from employers exploiting women’s image rights have accelerated. Some workers are worried the brothel’s proposed intellectual property clause would make it easier for them to manipulate and distribute AI-edited images. It’s an especially concerning prospect for a worker such as Dahl, whose face is not publicly posted.

“They want to have control over our identity completely, and there’s no actual legal protection saying my face won’t be put into some kind of AI composite,” she said. “There’s normal people, all over the world, who are finding themselves with deepfakes. I don’t want to see that happen.”

The workers say their fears about Sheri’s Ranch owning the rights to their images reflect the broader power imbalances in the brothel.

“They want to treat us as employees where it benefits them, but they don’t want us to ask for the rights and protections of employees,” said Dahl.

“We need the right to reject unfair clauses”

With claims to intellectual property becoming more complex and difficult to prove in the digital age, sex workers seeking to unionize say the stakes of their efforts are higher than ever.

Representatives for legal brothels, including Sheri’s Ranch, Mustang Ranch and Chicken Ranch, told The Indy that sex workers’ classification as independent contractors protects their intellectual property rights.

“Copyright law is very clear that independent contractors have to own the copyright to the content that they produce,” said Berg.

But those rules are less clear-cut if workers are classified as employees, as employers often automatically own the copyright to their workers’ products. The former sex workers from Sheri’s Ranch are toeing a difficult line, simultaneously pushing for control over their individual intellectual property but also for group recognition as employees.

Women involved in the union efforts say the challenging labor questions raised by their situation only underscore the need for sex workers to have collective bargaining rights.

Jetson said she couldn’t imagine “seeing us agree to a contract that says that we cannot maintain a social media presence, considering so many of us are already online personalities.” But she said those issues should be debated and decided through fair negotiations with the brothel.

“We would be the ones with the final vote on any contract, and we need the right to reject unfair clauses,” she said.

Workers and their advocates say there’s precedent for such a balancing act.

““To me, this is the same fight as the screenwriters’ guild, and all of the actors’ guilds,” said Scott Goodstein, a spokesperson for the brothel workers’ union effort. Goodstein was referring to the historic 2023 strike by members of the Screen Actors’ Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, when artists negotiated contracts with AI protections to give them more control over digital replicas.

That effort underscores the importance of being represented by a union, Goodstein argued, especially in the digital age.

“Your job doesn’t own your being outright,” he said. “This is such an overreach.”

The post Sex workers are fighting to own their likenesses in an AI world appeared first on Salon.com.