Who's In This Podcast
Helen Todd is co-founder and CEO of Sociality Squared and the human behind Creativity Squared.
Cindy Gallop is the Founder & CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, the world's first and only user-generated, human-curated social sex video-sharing platform.
YouTube 
Ep35. The Solution to End A.I. Deepfakes: Founder of MakeLoveNotPorn Cindy Gallop on Taylor Swift Deepfakes and How to Make the Internet Safe for All
What does the path to a safer, more equitable internet look like amidst the uncontrolled spread of nonconsensual deepfakes enabled by A.I.?
In the latest timely episode of Creativity Squared, trailblazing brand and business innovator Cindy Gallop suggests a bold answer grounded in funding female founders and human-centered design.
Named “The Most Provocative Woman in the World,” Cindy Gallop is the Founder & CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, the world’s first and only user-generated, human-curated social sex video-sharing platform.
She’s also the face of ‘the Social Sex Revolution,’ with the mission to end rape culture by socializing and normalizing sex and promoting good sexual values and behavior.
With over 30 years in the advertising industry, Cindy is an outspoken advocate of diversity and inclusion in advertising, tech, and business. She consults with brands on radical, breakthrough, innovative, and transformative ways to change the game in their industries.
Given the seat that Cindy sits in, she joined Creativity Squared to weigh in on the solution to non-consensual, online abuse highlighted by the horrific Taylor Swift deepfakes that recently went viral on X (formerly Twitter) before being taken down.
Spoiler alert: Her solution doesn’t have anything to do with regulation.
This episode does contain sensitive topics related to online harms, so please take this as a trigger warning.
So: What can a safe internet for all look like?
Discover Cindy’s answer to this question and how to address the exponential growth in nonconsensual deepfakes and revenge porn. You’ll also hear about her unique 100% human-curation model designed to create safe online community spaces.
Cindy doesn’t mince her words when it comes to the people who are building our A.I. tools, and how critical it is to fund female founders. She also discusses the link between creativity and sexual expression and how the two can increase productivity, maybe even more so than artificial intelligence.
Read on for more!
Deepfakes, Sex Education, and Funding Female Leaders
Speaking in the wake of global outrage sparked by viral A.I.-generated fake pornographic images of Taylor Swift and just days before the Super Bowl, Gallop argues deepfakes aren’t just victimizing celebrities — nonconsensual content has been exploding exponentially, disproportionately weaponized to exploit women sexually.
What happened to Taylor Swift (and continues to happen to others) is a women’s rights issue — 96% of deepfakes disproportionately target women, and the number of them being created is exploding with the acceleration of artificial intelligenve.
“We are pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference.”
Cindy Gallop
Cindy asserts that, given how slowly the wheels of regulatory lawmaking turn, funding female founders represents a more efficient solution. She points out that female designers inherently design and build for safety, but cannot implement or scale solutions without equal access to funding and support structures afforded to male founders.
While male founders annually raise billions building platforms that enable harm, female founders cannot get funding to build platforms preventing online abuse at scale.
Last year, for example, only 1.7% of all venture capital (VC) worldwide went to female business founders. Meanwhile, male-dominated big tech fails to proactively design protective measures into platforms enabling harm.
“White male VCs are funding white male founders building what white male founders build — and that is the problem right there,” Cindy declares.
She tackles this head-on as the founder of Make Love Not Porn (MLNP) – the world’s only entirely human-curated adult content-sharing platform. MLNP reviewers analyze every video frame-by-frame before publishing, allowing unprecedented assurance against abusive material.
Gallop maintains this manual review model could establish brand safety for advertisers while generating more revenue if adopted by major platforms.
“Safety on the internet is not a matter of viability, it’s a matter of will.”
Cindy Gallop
MLNP also uniquely stresses consent and sex education by celebrating intimacy and positive sexual values so users learn ethical conduct by example. Cindy believes this is critical as society grapples with serious literacy issues around consent and healthy sexual relationships.
By clearly defining platform values and content guidelines grounded in respect and empathy, Cindy created a curated feed showcasing exclusively love-oriented content. This sharp focus organically discourages submissions of opposing material.
Cindy proposes that scaling this human curation approach could efficiently moderate content across bigger platforms. She maintains that adopters would shutter pipelines of toxic content and, in turn, unlock major advertiser spending, proving internet safety and profitability can coexist. The impediment remains an entrenched funding system overriding female visions.
Cindy has spent years conceptualizing products that would radically progress online safety, like A.I. to showcase consent in sex education and media. However, she firmly believes that the best hope for an internet designed equally by and for women as much as men is to sufficiently fund female founders.
“Men, you have no idea how much happier you would be living and working in a world that was equally designed, informed, led, and managed by all of us!”
Cindy Gallop
Envisioning a Safer, Female-Led Future
Citing Creativity Squared’s guiding intention to envision a world where artists not only coexist with A.I., but thrive, Helen poses a central question: What does a more equal and equitable internet look like? She acknowledges that Make Love Not Porn is an example, but asks Cindy for other female-founded companies that embrace this possible future.
Cindy immediately referenced the technologist Natalie Diggins, who built a platform called TheArts.ai, which aims to showcase “how A.I. can actually help you thrive versus what people fear — replacing you.” Diggins’ site provides guides on A.I. applications across artistic fields, like photography and music, to aid practitioners in leveraging the technology as a creative multiplier.
As Cindy wrote in her op-ed for Fast Company, “3 Reasons Why the Future of A.I. Relies on Women,” female founders build “opportunity A.I.,” benefiting society through inclusive innovation. She lauds Diggins for “democratizing access to A.I. for arts practitioners” and believes funding women yields more such A.I., unlocking human potential for good.
“Everything in life starts with you and your values.”
Cindy Gallop
Cindy argues that fully-funded female founders would architect digital experiences that prevent online harms from the ground up. She maintains the resulting landscape would prove “a safer, happier place for men, as much as for women.”
Citing the massive growth in deepfakes nonconsensually exploiting women, Helen suggests that internet users should assume “any A.I.-created porn is done without consent.” Cindy counters that an ethical future for A.I. pornography could exist, grounded in consent and compensation for creatives. However, she concedes that “the white, male-founded A.I. applications happening right now are not operating the way we want.
Cindy contends that ensuring consent in creative A.I. by funding female-led solutions remains imperative. She believes in an internet where A.I. empowers humanity, not endangers it, and imagines female founders steering the technology’s co-evolution with society towards that ethical horizon.
At the same time, as Helen reiterates, that future does not currently exist — so users wishing to avoid abusive, nonconsensual exploitation should currently avoid A.I.-generated porn altogether.
Intimacy, Identity, and Creativity
Cindy discusses sexual repression, suggesting its cultural persistence is due to the patriarchy stifling innovation.
Make Love Not Porn addresses this by showcasing and celebrating real couples communicating openly and emotionally around vulnerability and intimacy. She believes this empowering visibility helps users learn by example, modeling positive, ethical content — and men in particular can learn to express themselves beyond toxic norms and messages in mainstream porn and media.
More profoundly, Cindy argues that great, uninhibited sex itself could prove society’s ultimate productivity hack once we overcome generations of unhealthy cultural messaging and repression surrounding human intimacy. Given that sexuality profoundly informs happiness, relationships, and self-regard, better sex could boost creativity and productivity — a win-win!
“One of the side benefits is you will see productivity shoot up in offices worldwide when we are all at ease with ourselves as sexual beings.”
Cindy Gallop
Cindy strongly agrees that sexuality profoundly shapes our self-image and output, for better or for worse. She goes on to express great frustration over the meager support from her industry to grow a scalable concept addressing this area.
Helen spotlights society’s dangerous literacy gaps around consent in sexual relationships, while Cindy agrees, and eagerly awaits funding for a sex education site she designed years ago. She makes clear that technology alone cannot remedy systemic societal inequities if its command centers remain predominantly white heterosexual “boys’ clubs.” Her vision calls for technology companies to embrace insights from those farthest outside existing seats of influence.
Ultimately, Cindy hopes to help “end rape culture globally” through content uplifting healthy, ethical sexual values and great sex grounded in mutual care, understanding, and communication as the norm versus the exception. She maintains that guidance on consent often stays merely theoretical, whereas Make Love Not Porn offers practical examples: “Real world, real life, real-time human sexual behavior.”Helen emphasizes that nonconsensual deepfakes constitute online sexual abuse and trauma comparable to physical assault. Cindy concurs, adding that this exploitation intends to humiliate and degrade victims — deepfakes have even provoked suicides, she notes gravely.
Ending on a more positive note, Helen expresses her hope that the Taylor Swift incident will spark more solutions to the issue of deepfake porn, including funding for Cindy and Make Love Not Porn.
Cindy’s vision calls us to step back and rethink what an ethical technological future might become. She concludes the conversation by hammering home her central point once more…
“I hope I’ve been crystal clear. The solution to all of this is: Fund female founders.”
Cindy Gallop
Links Mentioned in this Podcast
- Cindy’s Website
- MakeLoveNotPorn
- The Most Provocative Woman in the World
- 3 Reasons Why the Future of A.I. Relies on Women
- Women Founders Get 2% of Venture Capital Funding in U.S.
- Deepfakes are a real political threat — Vox
- Inside the Taylor Swift deepfake scandal — The Guardian
Continue the Conversation
Thank you, Cindy, for being our guests on Creativity Squared.
This show is produced and made possible by the team at PLAY Audio Agency: https://playaudioagency.com.
Creativity Squared is brought to you by Sociality Squared, a social media agency who understands the magic of bringing people together around what they value and love: http://socialitysquared.com.
Because it’s important to support artists, 10% of all revenue Creativity Squared generates will go to ArtsWave, a nationally recognized non-profit that supports over 150 arts organizations, projects, and independent artists.
Join Creativity Squared’s free weekly newsletter and become a premium supporter here.
✕
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Cindy Gallop: We have never yet seen what the future of the internet could be designed and built through the female lens at scale. And so, the solution is very simple.
[00:00:17] Helen Todd: Named the most provocative woman in the world, Cindy Gallop is one of the fiercest women I know. She’s the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, the world’s first and only user-generated, human-curated social sex video sharing platform.
[00:00:35] Helen Todd: She’s the face of the social sex revolution, with a mission to end rape culture by socializing and normalizing sex and promoting good sexual values and behavior. With over 30 years in the advertising industry, Cindy is an outspoken advocate of diversity and inclusion in advertising, tech, and business.
[00:00:57] Helen Todd: She consults with brands on radical, breakthrough, innovative, and transformative ways to change the game in their industries. Given the seat that Cindy sits in, she joined Creativity Squared to weigh in on the solution to non consensual online abuse highlighted by the horrific Taylor Swift deepfakes that recently went viral on Twitter before being taken down.
[00:01:21] Helen Todd: Spoiler alert, her solution doesn’t have anything to do with regulation. This episode does contain sensitive topics related to online harms, so please take this as your trigger warning. What happened to Taylor Swift is a women’s rights issue. 96 percent of deep fakes disproportionately target women, and the number of them being created is exploding with the acceleration of AI.
[00:01:47] Helen Todd: Assume for now that any AI-created porn is done without consent and avoid it. Online harms are abuse and should be treated as such. That said, can we use AI to reimagine the future of porn with positive experiences through the female lens? Absolutely. What can a safe internet for all look like? Discover Cindy’s answer to this question and how to address the exponential growth in non consensual deep fakes and revenge porn.
[00:02:21] Helen Todd: You’ll also hear about her unique, 100% human curation model designed to create safe online community spaces. Cindy doesn’t mince her words when it comes to the people who are building our AI tools and how critical it is to fund female founders. She also discusses the link between creativity and sexual expression and how the two can increase productivity, maybe even more so than AI. Enjoy.
[00:02:59] Helen Todd: Welcome to Creativity Squared. Discover how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox on YouTube and on your preferred podcast platform. Hi, I’m Helen Todd, your host, and I’m so excited to have you join the weekly conversations. I’m having with amazing pioneers in the space.
[00:03:18] Helen Todd: The intention of these conversations is to ignite our collective imagination at the intersection of AI and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.
[00:03:37] Helen Todd: Cindy, welcome to Creativity Squared. It’s so good to have you on the show.
Cindy Gallop: Great to be here.
And I know it’s your birthday today and you’re making a special exception to be on Creativity Squared. So I feel extremely honored. Uh, so happy birthday as well.
Cindy Gallop: Thank you.
[00:03:55] Helen Todd: I’ve been following you for a long time.You’re so fierce in not only the advertising space advocating for feminism, but also in the online adult entertainment space. But for those who are meeting you for the first time, I was hoping you could introduce yourself.
[00:04:11] Cindy Gallop: Sure. So I’m Cindy Gallop. I’m the founder and CEO of Make Love Not Porn. We are pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference.
[00:04:22] Cindy Gallop: So, MakeLoveNotPorn came about because I date younger men, realized many years ago that when we don’t talk openly and honestly about sex, porn becomes sex education by default. And so, MakeLoveNotPorn is the world’s first and only user generated 100% human curated social sex video sharing platform.
[00:04:44] Cindy Gallop: The way to think about us is, if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, Make Love Not Porn is the badly needed documentary. We are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful sex we all have in the real world. We are socializing, normalizing, and de-stigmatizing sex. To promote consent, communication, good sexual values and behavior.
[00:05:08] Cindy Gallop: We are literally sex education through real world demonstration.
[00:05:13] Helen Todd: Thank you. And having grown up in East Tennessee and the sex ed that I got in East Tennessee, uh, this is very, very welcomed. And why we’re speaking today is specifically because you sit in such an interesting seat to add color and perspective to what happened last week.
[00:05:29] Helen Todd: And for those who do not know, which. I can’t imagine not too many people knowing because it hit the news last week, Taylor Swift had deep fakes that were very explicit blow up on Twitter. Some, I think one video racked up 45 million views before it was taken down. And then Twitter slash X stopped searches of Taylor being shown.
[00:05:53] Helen Todd: So it’s horrific deep fakes have been happening for years, and it just happened to a celebrity. So there’s a lot more to the story, but when it comes to deep fakes, I think 96 percent of them affect women specifically and we’re only going to see more with the rise in the rapid acceleration of A. I.
[00:06:13] Helen Todd: So pro-porn, pro-positive sex and pro-communication. Anti deepfakes without consent. You have a very specific perspective on this. So let’s hear it.
[00:06:24] Cindy Gallop: Sure. So, the really important thing, Helen, is that there is absolutely a solution to the horrific, explosive growth of deepfakes, which, as you pointed out, um, are not just impacting celebrities.
[00:06:40] Cindy Gallop: They have for years been impacting ordinary people. women and girls all around the world and the solution is very simple fund female founders. And let me explain why I say that and I am going to use my own work in this context because this is precisely why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for the past 15 years while trying to get the tech and business world, um, to see what needs to happen.
[00:07:12] Cindy Gallop: The young white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate all our lives today, including open AI, they are not the primary targets online or offline of harassment, abuse. sexual assault, racism, violence, rape, revenge porn. Therefore, they did not and they do not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on any of their platforms.
[00:07:42] Cindy Gallop: And we see the results of that around us every single day, as we just have done with the Taylor Swift deepfakes. Those of us who are most at risk every single day. Women, black people, people of color, LGBTQ, people with disabilities. We design safe spaces and safe experiences, but we don’t get funded. Last year, only 1.7 percent of all venture capital went to female founders. White male VCs are funding white male founders. And that is the problem right there. And I’m going to give you, as I said, you know, my own demonstration of how very different all of this could be. So, I designed MakeLoveNotPorn through the female lens to be the safest place on the internet because I design it around what everybody else should have, nobody else did, human curation.
[00:08:42] Cindy Gallop: There is no self-publishing of anything on MakeLoveNotPorn. Our curators watch every frame of every video submitted from beginning to end before we approve or reject and we publish it. Nobody else does that. We review every post on every member profile. And by the way, on MakeLoveNotPorn, your posts can be as safe work or not safe work as you like, but we review them.
[00:09:06] Cindy Gallop: We review every comment on every video before we approve or reject and publish them. No one else does that. We can vouch for every single piece of content on our platform in a way that nobody else anywhere on the internet can. And here’s the important thing about that, Helen. At MakeLoveNotPorn, we are tiny bootstrapping, have no money, and we’ve human curated everything for 11 years.
[00:09:32] Cindy Gallop: Imagine what Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Only fans could do with their billions if they chose to. Safety on the internet is not a matter of viability. It’s a matter of will. And it’s precisely because, as I said, only 1. 7 percent of all venture capital last year went to female founders, that we have never yet seen what the future of the internet could be designed and built through the female lens at scale.
[00:10:02] Cindy Gallop: And so the solution is very simple. Fund female founders, fund female AI founders, because we build the solutions to this problem. But no one’s ever seen how they operate because nobody will fund us.
[00:10:17] Helen Todd: As a female founder, I couldn’t agree or support that comment even more and I love that you do so much human, um, verification on your platform and monitoring.
[00:10:32] Helen Todd: How does that work at scale at the scale of like Facebook, where they have millions? And I know there’s been a lot of articles, um, where they, you know, outsource this to people in, um, in Africa and different countries. And that there is like the human factor of having to, you know, actually approve or disapprove that this content has a toll too.
[00:10:56] Helen Todd: So how, how do you balance that, um, when it comes to the monitoring of these platforms and the content on them?
[00:11:03] Cindy Gallop: So, you don’t have to when you adopt my human curation model and make love not porn. And let me explain what I mean by that, Helen, because what you’ve just cited is a function of the fact that Basically, Facebook et al allows self publishing of anything.
[00:11:23] Cindy Gallop: And then they try and moderate after the event. Okay? So, um, you know, first of all, um, I designed Make Love Not Porn around my own beliefs and philosophies. One of which is that everything in life starts with you and your values. So, I regularly ask people this question, What are your sexual values? And nobody can ever answer me because we’re not taught to think like that.
[00:11:49] Cindy Gallop: Our parents bring us up to have good manners, work ethic, sense of responsibility, accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed. But they should. Because in bed, values like empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, trust, respect, are as important as those values are in every other area of our lives where we’re actively taught to exercise them.
[00:12:17] Cindy Gallop: And the reason I bring that point up is because the starting point for anything that you build should be the values at the heart of it. Okay? I designed MakeLoveNotPorn around enormous respect for our community and around this pioneering concept of good sexual values and good sexual behavior. And so for us, human curation starts far further back than our platform itself.
[00:12:43] Cindy Gallop: And what I mean by that is We make it crystal clear what MakeLoveNotPorn stands for, what it’s all about, you know, what kind of content we want, not just in our FAQs on the site, but across all our social channels, in every media interview, in every Speaking engagement, where I talk about Make Love Not Porn.
[00:13:05] Cindy Gallop: Here’s the really interesting thing. When you make it crystal clear what you stand for, and what kind of content you want, that is the only kind of content you get. I’m always very entertained when people say to me, Oh, Cindy, you know, what mental health measures do you have in place for your curators?
[00:13:24] Cindy Gallop: Because they must have to watch such awful stuff. And I go, no. Our curators watch nothing but love. All day, every day. Because we made it crystal clear that is what MakeLoveNotPorn exists to celebrate and showcase and that is the only kind of content we get. And the important thing about that, um, Helen, because, you know, I’ve been speaking up about my model for years, and by the way, our model should be a Harvard Business Review case study, because If big tech platforms adopted my model, what they would find is that A, um, it’s enormously easy to implement at scale and B, they would make far more money than they currently are by implementing it.
[00:14:12] Cindy Gallop: So what I mean by that is, first of all, our model is incredibly efficient and incredibly scalable at scale And i’m working to raise a serious round of funding to make love not porn right now um at scale our human curation workforce is simply our version of any enterprise software unicorns salesforce All of those huge enterprise software unicorn platforms Hire thousands of people to sell their software into companies.
[00:14:44] Cindy Gallop: Okay, same deal. It’s eminently scalable but the reason I say every big tech platform could very easily adopt this model and they would make more money is because first of all the moment you move to a no self publishing, human creation of everything model, the moment you announce that, you instantly turn off the firehose of racism, Nazism, child abuse…
[00:15:14] Cindy Gallop: Because the moment people know, bad actors know they cannot get that stuff through on your platform any longer, they stop submitting it. And then when that is the case, the reason you will make even more billions of dollars than you do currently is two words, brand safety. When you can guarantee to advertisers, because you have adopted my human curation model, that their advertising will never ever end up next to anything they don’t want it to.
[00:15:53] Cindy Gallop: Bloody hell, you know, you turn off the fire hose of shit and you turn on the fire hose of money.
[00:15:59] Helen Todd: And I think you can look at the dumpster fire of X slash twitter last year and just the advertisers that left um, just seeing what happened on that platform, so I very much appreciate that and love what you said about your moderators get to to look at love every day that that was so beautiful um on on the regulatory side because there’s the fund female founders Um on the regulatory side.
[00:16:29] Helen Todd: Do you have any opinions what needs to happen on that front?
[00:16:33] Cindy Gallop: There needs to be regulation, but quite frankly Helen I’m just going to hammer home my one key message fund female founders at scale And you won’t have to worry about the regulation because we will have built the solutions. Okay, and you know how slowly regulation, legislation, politics moves.
[00:16:54] Cindy Gallop: That is why that is not the answer. Fun female founders. Let me give you another example, in my own case, and it’s worth just saying to our listeners who may not be fully aware of this, but The one thing I didn’t realize when I embarked on building MakeLoveNotPorn was that I and my tiny team would fight an enormous battle every single day, not even to grow our business, just to keep it going, basically because every piece of business infrastructure, any other tech startup takes for granted, you know, We can’t, the small print always says no adult content.
[00:17:27] Cindy Gallop: We can’t get funded, we can’t get banked, you know, we can’t put payments in place. It’s important people understand that that is what has been holding me back. But with, with the right level of funding, You know, honestly, one hundredth of what gets flung at white bro founders all the time, I can overcome all of that.
[00:17:44] Cindy Gallop: So, I have had an AI product in the pipeline at MakeLoveNotPorn for five years. I’m not kidding. You know, I came up with this concept five years ago, aided by a dear friend whose background is AI and machine learning. And the reason you’ve still not seen it out there is because I cannot find investors willing to fund it Okay, people are really happy to throw out their hands in horror about you know, deep fake porn Um, nobody’s funding me and other female founders building the solutions so Open AIs, chatGPT, you know, all of the AI applications people are using now very widely today are built on LLMs, large language models.
[00:18:35] Cindy Gallop: Given what I shared about our human curation model at MakeLoveNotPorn, I have something utterly unique. I have an LVM, a large video model, that is the world’s only pool of 100 percent human curated, therefore guaranteed, fully consensual, real world sex video content. And with funding, I want to use that LVM to build an algorithm for consent, with a ton of different use cases.
[00:19:11] Cindy Gallop: For example, Hollywood. Because all around us, in popular culture, Movies. videos, music videos, we see every day representations of what purports to be consensual sex, consensual sex scenes that are actually modeling non consensual sexual behavior. Imagine the ability to run your script, your scene through an algorithm that will tell you whether or not what you are showcasing is consensual.
[00:19:47] Cindy Gallop: Criminal court, where, as you probably know, something like 1 percent of all reported rapes end up in court, and that is reported rapes. There is a vast, and the conviction rate is like 00, you know, um, the vast majority of rapes go unreported because people know. Exactly how loaded against in the process is, this is the only crime where the onus is on the victim to prove it actually happened.
[00:20:17] Cindy Gallop: He said, she said. So again, imagine an algorithm for consent that you could run cases through to identify what is and isn’t consensual behavior. Okay, that is just one demonstration of what female founders want to build an AI that all those white male VCs are not funding. Okay, so I go back to, it doesn’t matter about the regulation of legislation.
[00:20:44] Cindy Gallop: You know, we are only able to change all of this when we The female Mark Zuckerbergs of the future are funded to build our solutions to be able to operate them at scale to build a better, safer internet for everybody. Because I’ve been saying for literally decades, we live in a world where the default setting is always male.
[00:21:09] Cindy Gallop: Men, you have no idea how much happier you would be living and working in a world that was equally designed, informed, led and managed by all of us. That’s what the future of the internet could be a safer, happier place for men as much as for women. But until we get funded at the same level white men do, it ain’t happening.
[00:21:32] Helen Todd: Our listeners, especially, I know we have some VCs, uh, who listened to the show, uh, Fund Women and Cindy’s project. Um, when one of the taglines of the show is to envision a world where artists not only coexist with AI, but thrive and that envisioning a world where we all thrive, I think is so important because so much of AI, even in the deep fake conversations all go to the negative.
[00:22:00] Helen Todd: And we really do need that picture of like, what does, you know, equality and equity look like? What would the internet look like? And there aren’t actually that many examples out there. But MakeLoveNotPorn is a good example of that. Um, yeah. Is there any other female led sites that you think are really embracing, or female, uh, founded applications or companies that you think really embrace this reimagining what the internet could look like as well?
[00:22:29] Cindy Gallop: Absolutely, because what you just said Helen, has prompted me to, um, share with our listeners in a much happier context. Next, my dear friend Natalie Diggins brilliant project, TheArts.ai. So to your point, so Natalie is a technologist, um, an engineer by background, but she is a passionate fan of and patron of the arts.
[00:22:54] Cindy Gallop: And so, um, She has built the arts. ai to basically, um, bring to and demonstrate across a number of different fields of artistic endeavor. How, to exactly your point, AI can actually help you thrive versus what people fear replacing you. And so, um, if you go to the arts. ai, she is providing tools and guides, she’s just started this by the way, so at the moment I think it’s, um, you know, uh, in the fields of photography, jazz music, theater management..
[00:23:35] Cindy Gallop: She’s building up more and more as we speak and what I love about this, so this is just one example of what I wrote about, um, I’d like to refer our listeners to an op ed I wrote for Fast Company last month, um, which you can find searching online, which was called, um, Three Reasons the Future of AI And my point about this, um, is, is that, you know, we build use cases, the world embraces.
[00:24:04] Cindy Gallop: Okay. And what I love about what Natalie is doing is that. Um, she is building what I call opportunity AI, okay, so versus the AI doomerism of all those white guys, you know, um, who are making a shit ton of money out of AI and going, and by the way, it’s going to kill us all and end humanity, whatever, you know, Natalie, like, like many other women, and in my op ed in Fast Company, I cite a number of female founded AI ventures that are using AI in very everyday, welcome, beneficial terms.
[00:24:38] Cindy Gallop: transcribed but, you know, the great thing about what Natalie is doing is that she is, um, democratizing access to AI for arts practitioners, and showing you how you can use this to, you know, supercharge your career, supercharge your ability to make money out of the arts, and, and when you fund female founders.
[00:25:02] Cindy Gallop: You know, you are funding opportunity, AI for all of us.
[00:25:06] Helen Todd: I love that. And all of the links that are mentioned, I’ll be sure to put them in the dedicated blog post that accompanies this. Well, and since this is kind of a special episode and I’m so excited to, that you hopped on kind of last minute. It is coming.
[00:25:22] Helen Todd: It will be published before the Super Bowl, which is going to be massive with the chiefs and everything that happened with Taylor Swift. We’ve got Valentine’s Day just around the corner after that. I think one message that I want to make sure to include in this episode is, you know, I’m pro make love, not porn in my stance.
[00:25:45] Helen Todd: But, there have been some, like, AI chat girlfriends by the creators, but if any porn is AI created, just assume that it’s done without consent. So, watch porn, go to MakeLoveNotPorn but don’t participate in any AI created porn, just assume that it’s done without consent, um, and don’t support it, because you’re only amplifying the issue.
[00:26:13] Cindy Gallop: Now here’s, here’s a, um, counterpoint to that, Helen, okay, because, um, I just think it’s, um, it’s very important, again, to think about what you fund when you fund women, okay, and I say this because, um, so, uh, Gosh, it was seven years ago now, um, I participate in a wonderful thing that the New Museum, here in New York, does every year with, with Rhizome, the arts foundation, called Seven on Seven.
[00:26:43] Cindy Gallop: And what they do is they invite seven artists And seven technologists to be paired up and to collaborate on something that they put together, um, very quickly in 48 hours. And, and seven years ago, I was paired with the amazing digital artist Addy Wagenknecht. And, we, we actually fleshed out a MakeLoveNotPorn product I’d had in the pipeline for years.
[00:27:08] Cindy Gallop: And again, this is worth talking about in this context because, um, in fact, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go into a bit more detail with that before I bring this back to my response to your question. Um, because again, you know, given what I was saying earlier, one of the products I’m raising funding to build is a messaging app.
[00:27:27] Cindy Gallop: And the reason it’s a messaging app is because apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp white male founded, refuse to admit that their exponential growth has been driven by one thing and one thing only, sexting. They literally, you know, will not answer questions about interviews, avoid or mention of it. Here’s the problem again, when you refuse to admit that A, sexting is a perfectly normal universal human activity.
[00:27:52] Cindy Gallop: B, you refuse to admit that a ton of it goes on in your app. You then do not proactively design for it. You don’t design for privacy, security, confidentiality, and consent, and that is why we have a huge intimate image abuse revenge porn problem globally. So, I’ve been trying to raise funding for years for the MakeLoveNotPorn safe sexting app.
[00:28:13] Cindy Gallop: It’s called CoCentral. It does two things. Enables you to sext completely safely and securely using state of the art cyber security because it’s unashamedly designed for perfectly natural human activity sexting. But be it also has built in features. Because this is what we’re all about at Make Love, Not Porn.
[00:28:31] Cindy Gallop: Designed to improve your communication around sex, to improve your sexual relationship. So, so the wonderful thing about 7 on 7 seven years ago was that Adi helped me design that out, wireframe it, we’re all ready to go the moment we can raise funding, which, by the way, seven years later, I still haven’t yet.
[00:28:46] Cindy Gallop: Um, but anyway, um, because I’m an alumni of this program, um, Rhizome invited me back to the New Museum this past Saturday. To see the latest 7 on 7 and as you would imagine, you know, this year, there was a very heavy AI theme and in fact, one of the participants was, um, the woman who is the founder of Replica, um, which creates precisely those, those, um, chatbots that you’re talking about that people fall in love with and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:29:13] Cindy Gallop: Um, but the reason I’m sharing this is because, um, at the reception afterwards, I ran into a friend of mine and we were talking. And she said to me that, you know, she was very frustrated with you know, porn. And, and by the way, part of the issue here is that I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that there is a massive monopoly in the porn industry that would never be allowed to exist in any other industry, but nobody wants to bring antitrust legislation to the adult world.
[00:29:47] Cindy Gallop: A company used to be called MindGeek, now is now called alo, owns everything they own, PornHub, U Porn, Red Tube, you know, browsers, et cetera, et cetera. And, and so the difficulty, especially for women is that if you want to find something that is not male lens, male centric porn, um, you have no idea what to search for.
[00:30:06] Cindy Gallop: I have a ton of brilliant. independent female queer pornographer friends making very innovative, creative, disruptive porn. Because of the ALO stranglehold on the industry, nobody can find them. They don’t get the traffic, the revenue, the numbers they deserve. So my friend was talking about the fact that she was very frustrated, she couldn’t find porn that she would want to watch.
[00:30:24] Cindy Gallop: She said to me, I really want an AI application where I can tell it to create the porn I want to watch. Okay, and I think that is a very interesting application when it is designed and built through the female lens. Okay, um, because, you know, um, if you think again about, and by the way, I really want to find ways to, I don’t know if patent is the right thing, but, but to get my human curation model out there, so that many more people will operate the same way, because that is the answer.
[00:31:03] Cindy Gallop: to operating the fact that you will only draw on a fully consented to, and by the way, importantly, in terms of money for artists and actors and performers, um, a fully licensed, where, where, where the people actually get, get a reward, you know, um, are compensated for participating in what is curated model that you then draw on.
[00:31:27] Cindy Gallop: And by the way, There is, um, you know, again, in this context, You know, uh, uh, scale is overrated. It is, it’s absolutely impossible to put together a fully consented to, fully approved, fully licensed model of enough material that you would be able to do that. Okay, that’s how we come at it as women. And so, um, you know, I just want us to be aware that, um, yes, you know, the white male founded, male founded.
[00:31:58] Cindy Gallop: You know, AI applications that are happening right now, they are not operating the way that we would want to operate. When we are funded to operate our approach, you can absolutely watch AI porn and know that you are doing it in this fully ethical, fully legal, you know, um, and actually, you know, fully compensated context.
[00:32:20] Cindy Gallop: So I just want people to be aware that that future is out there when we get funded. Yeah.
[00:32:24] Helen Todd: and it’s definitely possible. I, I heard a talk with, um, Sam Altman discussing like the future of AI and our interactions with it. And it sounded like, uh, for those who’ve watched West World season four, where she literally was like a character and it would kind of holographically appear.
[00:32:42] Helen Todd: And then she would kind of state. You know the game and it would emerge that we’ll be talking to computers in real time where they create this imagery in real time for us. Um, so exactly what you described as far as, um, customized, uh, porn to your liking. I mean, that opens up so much, uh, possibilities and fantasy and imagination.
[00:33:07] Cindy Gallop: Through the female lens. Through the female lens. Because the men don’t give a shit.
[00:33:13] Helen Todd: Yeah. But right now, this does not exist. So do not watch AI porn now fund female founded companies. Uh, cause I, you know, it’s a funny psychology and I don’t fully understand it. Why if you could just have, you know, cartoon or, you know, fake people created why you need to put an actual human face that, you know, to it, but a lot of the, the deep fake that targets people, it’s by people who they know, and it’s very maliciously.
[00:33:49] Cindy Gallop: Yeah, no, no, it’s, it’s, it’s basically, um, so, um, so here’s the thing, um, Helen, you know, in 15 years of working on Make Love Not Porn, you know, I’ve been asked the same question regularly in interviews along the lines of… and this question is relevant because this is the answer to what you’re raising.
[00:34:09] Cindy Gallop: So, Cindy, why do you think we’re all so repressed about sex? And I’ve been asked this question so often. My response, um, I have my response down pat. Three reasons. Reason number one. So, reason number one is centuries of repression, religion, sociocultural dynamics in every country in the world. Um, what I’m addressing at MakeLoveNotPorn is a fully global issue.
[00:34:30] Cindy Gallop: But reason number two, and this is the relevant point. Reason number two is the patriarchy, because historically, every institution, including government and religion, has been male dominated. We as women have never been allowed to bring our lens to bear on human sexuality, and the world is a poorer place for it.
[00:34:51] Cindy Gallop: And, um, I make that point because, um, you know, what you are talking about is the operation of patriarchy and misogyny. And by the way, I recommend to everybody, um, a brilliant book, um, which, um, in fact, I, you know, when I first discovered it, I bought a stack of, of these books. I kept them by the door of my apartment.
[00:35:12] Cindy Gallop: I gave them out free to every single visitor. So read a book by Jack Holland called Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice. What you are talking about is misogyny and patriarchy in action. It’s got nothing to do with arousal. It’s misogyny, patriarchy, you know, abuse control. And, and so, you know, when we solve for that, Okay.
[00:35:41] Cindy Gallop: You create a far happier internet for everybody. And, and, uh, um, I’ll give you an example. I mean, and by the way, just, just in case our listeners are wondering, the third, the third reason is there aren’t enough people like me. And what I mean by that very straightforwardly is the world makes it bloody difficult to innovate and disrupt social narratives around sex.
[00:36:02] Cindy Gallop: Many people have tried and given up and I don’t blame them. My life is shitty. on a daily basis because of what I do. We need more people like me who will not give up no matter what. But, um, you know, um, I, um, I make the point because, um, I designed MakeLoveNotPorn to be fully diverse and inclusive. And we are.
[00:36:21] Cindy Gallop: Our members are now MakeLoveNotPorn stars, ranging in age from 18 to 80, male, female, trans, non binary, straight, LGBTQ, all races, ethnicities. We’re a global platform. But in the 11 years we’ve operated as a business, We’ve realized that Make Love Not Porn is especially a revelation to men. More men send us grateful emails, leave appreciative comments than anybody else because We are something unique that men will find nowhere else on the internet, which is a safe space where men can be and watch other men being open, emotional, and vulnerable around sex.
[00:36:59] Cindy Gallop: You would not believe the number of men who write to us regularly and say, I just watched my first video Make Love Not Porn and afterwards I cried. I’ve said for years, I wish society understood the opposite of what it thinks is true. Women enjoy sex just as much as men, and men are just as romantic as women.
[00:37:20] Cindy Gallop: Yet neither gender is allowed to openly celebrate either fact. We would all be so much better off if they were. I picked up a wonderful exchange on Twitter last year between two men. The first man had tweeted, as a joke, obviously, Hey guys, I’ve got this really weird fetish. I’ve got this kink where I want to watch porn, where people are honest, loving, loyal, decent, and really like each other.
[00:37:42] Cindy Gallop: Hit me up in your hottest links, please. And another man replied and said, there’s this website called MakeLoveNotPorn where you can watch real couples making love. He said, I watched a video where the woman said to her man, I love you, while they’re making love. He said, sincerely, I cried when I heard that we are one of the solutions to toxic masculinity and ultimately, um, Helen, our mission to make love not porn is to help end rape culture globally and rape culture is what is causing this explosion of deep things.
[00:38:14] Cindy Gallop: Um, we and by the way, that sounds like a very, very big mission, but we have 11 years of proof of concept at a micro level. We help end rape culture by doing something incredibly simple. that nevertheless nobody else is doing. We end rape culture by showing you how wonderful great consensual communicative sex is in the real world, our social sex videos role model good sexual values and good sexual behavior, and here’s the important part, we make all of that aspirational.
[00:38:47] Cindy Gallop: Versus what you see in porn and popular culture. One man left a comment on one of our videos saying This video makes me want to be a better man in the bedroom and in life. That’s the solution through the female lens.
[00:39:01] Helen Todd: That’s beautiful. And, and one thing I just want to point out to on this platform is deep fakes are abuse.
[00:39:13] Helen Todd: And you mentioned rape culture. And I think a lot of people immediately go to the physical harms that, that come with sexual abuse. Um, There’s a great, uh, documentary called another body. Uh, we actually featured it on, um, creativity squares blog and I’ll link to it. Uh, but one of the really important things about this documentary, which I really recommend too, is that online sexual abuse is still abuse.
[00:39:40] Helen Todd: Um, and when you participate in watching AI, deep fakes, porn, whatever, it’s. It’s abuse and has the same trauma induced as offline physical harm. So I want to make sure that our listeners understand that too, that all of this, uh, the rape culture is just reflected online and it’s just as harmful online as it is offline too.
[00:40:02] Cindy Gallop: Absolutely. Because that is about the humiliation and degradation of women and, and deep fakes have resulted in numerous suicides.
[00:40:11] Helen Todd: Yeah. So it’s, it’s horrible. Wanting to end on a good note, there’s definitely like a silver lining, hopefully with how horrific everything that happened with Taylor Swift, that we will get some of the regulation, what’s been proposed, I don’t think is enough yet with the, um, the acts, what is it called?
[00:40:33] Helen Todd: The, the defiance acts. Um, And hopefully this interview, you never know what ripples will turn into waves. Uh, we’ll get some more funding, uh, for Cindy and all of her amazing apps. I love the, the consent, uh, algorithm. Cause I think one thing that I was thinking when you said that is, um, and kind of to your point about men going to the site and seeing, you know, ways of having sex that is new to them is that the sex education in the U S.
[00:41:04] Helen Todd: And I’m speaking from personal experience is so poor and very state by state that there’s no even like great reference of what consent looks like. So in the in the I don’t like the word blind spots, but in our knowledge gaps, you know, there isn’t like great education or how that’s taught. So I love that you have a solution for that.
[00:41:29] Cindy Gallop: Helen, you’re absolutely right, because the point I make to people is right now, quite rightly. Everybody is talking about consent. Everybody’s writing about consent. There are lots of thoughtful, nuanced, insightful think pieces out there about consent. Here’s the problem. Exactly as you’ve said, nobody knows what consent actually looks like in bed.
[00:41:48] Cindy Gallop: The only way you educate people as to what is great consensual communicative sex Good sexualized behavior is by watching people actually having that kind of sex. And MakeLoveNotPorn is the only place on the internet where you can do that. That is why parents are buying their teenage and 20 something children subscriptions to MakeLoveNotPorn because they tell us, and I quote, this is a mother saying, I want my kids to see what happy, healthy, loving sex relationships actually look like.
[00:42:19] Cindy Gallop: And by the way. Something else I’m raising funding for, and I’ve been trying to raise funding for for 10 years, and it is absolutely gobsmacking that nobody’s wanted to fund this to date. Because, um, my entire product roadmap for MakeLoveNotPorn, um, that I want to build out, people have been asking me for, for years.
[00:42:39] Cindy Gallop: None of this is me going, ooh, I think this might fly. Literally, these are products the world is crying out for. Parents and teachers began writing to me from day one of MakeLoveNotPorn. I want to build the 0 to 18 and beyond sex education expansion, MakeLoveNotPorn. academy. So if our listeners go to MakeLoveNotPorn.academy, I bought that URL many years ago. I’ve laid out my full vision there. Um, this this is an aggregator. I want to build the go to global hub for the best of the world’s sex education content. It is extraordinary. That investors have not wanted to fund that to date when ed tech is exploding in every other area, except this one.
[00:43:20] Cindy Gallop: So I really encourage our listeners to go and check out makelovenotporn. academy. And anybody who sees again, the unicorn value of what I, of what I want to build. Um, you know, um, um, sydneyatmakelovenotporn. com when you want to hit me with that funding.
[00:43:37] Helen Todd: And I have another question for you, because when I think about some of my most successful friends that I admire, it often kind of correlates that they’re also the most like sexually active and empowered, regardless of gender.
[00:43:53] Helen Todd: And I know, you know, you’re, you’re deep into the advertising agency, but since our show is, you know, at the intersection of AI and creativity, from your perspective, how You know, our sexual expression influences creativity in our other lives. I think I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
[00:44:11] Cindy Gallop: No, Helen, you’re spot on.
[00:44:12] Cindy Gallop: You know, I’ve been saying for years when I can finally get MakeLoveNotPorn funded to operate as the Facebook of social sex at scale, because that’s how big I want to be. One of the side benefits is you will see productivity shoot up in offices worldwide. You know, when we are all at ease with ourselves as sexual beings.
[00:44:33] Cindy Gallop: And by the way, very few people are, proportionally speaking, I mean, again, that’s why MakeLoveNotPorn exists. You know, I mean, think about how you feel when you walk down the street after a night of phenomenal sex. You know, imagine that energy infusing every part of your being and your output. You know, um, Because we are so fucked up about sex, we’ve defaulted it to an act, to a thing we do.
[00:44:59] Cindy Gallop: It’s not. It’s personality. Who we are sexually informs everything about how we feel about ourselves, other people, our relationships, our lives, our happiness. And yes, it is an enormously important source of creative energy. I couldn’t agree more. And so, you know, I will be frank, um, something that enormously frustrates me.
[00:45:21] Cindy Gallop: And, and, and because I’m so frustrated by this, I speak about this publicly regularly, something that enormously frustrates me is the lack of support from my own industry advertising for what I’m doing, you know, I have. You know, with make love, not porn. Our industry is holy grail, a big idea designed to do good and make money simultaneously.
[00:45:43] Cindy Gallop: That is globally applicable, you know, executed extremely creatively and the people with the money in our industry are not funding me. The media companies that could absolutely enable me to advertise when I’m banned from all those social platforms are not running around sport when I’m doing, um, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s very, very ironic.
[00:46:07] Cindy Gallop: You know, the brands I want to partner with, um, are still too scared to push the button. So if this conversation opens up anybody’s minds around the huge opportunity for both social and financial impact, then again, Cindy at makelovenotporn dot com.
[00:46:25] Helen Todd: And when we speak about, you know, data is the new oil, you are sitting on such fascinating data of, that just really doesn’t exist anywhere else.
[00:46:36] Helen Todd: So if people’s ears are perking up, that’s important.
[00:46:39] Cindy Gallop: Helen, you’re so right again, because I designed makelovenotporn to be the Kinsey of today. Real world. Real time, real life human sexual behavior captured and aggregated in a way nobody else is doing in an area that is notoriously research and data free.
[00:46:57] Cindy Gallop: Because for all the reasons I battle on a daily basis, nobody’s funding the comScore of sex. And in the area of research and data, where there is the widest possible gap between what people say and what people actually do. And we are all about what people actually do.
[00:47:14] Helen Todd: Yeah, I think it was plenty of fish for forever ago.
[00:47:18] Helen Todd: I think it was their website. They, they had a blog where all they did was have their data scientists look at all of the data on the dating app, uh, or website anonymously, and then reflected out or just reported out the data. And it was always different from what people had in their profiles and their actual behavior on the app.
[00:47:39] Cindy Gallop: That was actually OKCupid. They did a phenomenal job. Back in the day, back in the day, they did a phenomenal job of marketing their data. Yeah.
[00:47:46] Helen Todd: Yeah. It was, um, one of my favorite content strategies for, uh, for a dating website. It was, yeah. Okay. Keep it. You’re right. Well, Cindy, I know it’s your birthday. I don’t want to take up too much more time.
[00:47:57] Helen Todd: Is there anything else that you want to say on the topic? Uh, especially with. Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day around the corner.
[00:48:05] Cindy Gallop: No, I mean, you know, I hope I’ve been crystal clear. The solution to all of this is fund female founders.
[00:48:12] Helen Todd: Thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your time, especially on your birthday.
[00:48:18] Helen Todd: And I look forward to, uh, having you back on the show and getting to dive more into everything AI and creativity, uh, later down the line. So thank you. Thank you.
[00:48:30] Cindy Gallop: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Helen.
[00:48:34] Helen Todd: Thank you for spending some time with us today. We’re just getting started and would love your support. Subscribe to Creativity Squared on your preferred podcast platform and leave a review. It really helps. And I’d love to hear your feedback. What topics are you thinking about and want to dive into more?
[00:48:50] Helen Todd: I invite you to visit creativity squared. com to let me know. And while you’re there, be sure to sign up for our free weekly newsletter so you can easily stay on top of all the latest news at the intersection of and creativity. Because it’s so important to support artists, 10 percent of all revenue Creativity Squared generates will go to Artswave, a nationally recognized nonprofit that supports over 100 arts organizations.
[00:49:14] Helen Todd: Become a premium newsletter subscriber or leave a tip on the website to support this project and Artswave and premium newsletter subscribers will receive NFTs of episode cover art and more extras. To say thank you for helping bring my dream to life. And a big, big thank you to everyone who’s offered their time, energy, and encouragement and support so far.
[00:49:36] Helen Todd: I really appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. This show is produced and made possible by the team at Play Audio Agency. Until next week, keep creating.