Presearch's "Doppelgänger" is trying to help people discover adult creators rather than use nonconsensual deepfakes.
For three days in February, porn star Alix Lynx flew to Miami for her first exclusive creator gathering where she was in full grind mode: shooting Reels and talking strategy with other creators. "It was kind of like SoHo House for OnlyFans girls," she says of the experience, which is called The Circle and drew more than a dozen sex workers, including Remy LaCroix and Forrest Smith.
Lynx, who is a former webcam model turned OnlyFans starlet, has a combined 2 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and X. She joined OnlyFans in 2017 with "the luxury of having my own following," she says, but those numbers haven't always translated to subscriptions. It's why she was in Miami.
"I don't think people understand. I do a shitload of marketing," Lynx says."That's the big misconception with OnlyFans -- when creators join they think it's going to be easy. But unless you're a genius at marketing on social media, which is few and far between, it's genuinely hard to get found and gain a following."
Many of OnlyFans' 4 million creators have said the same thing: native discovery on the platform sucks. "There's just a frustration," Lynx says. "In a perfect world, there would be that searchability feature because it makes it an even playing field for creators." (According to OnlyFans, the platform limits its search feature as a safety precaution so users don't accidentally stumble across content they didn't intend to see.)
It's a problem that Presearch -- a free, private, decentralized search engine -- wants to fix with the launch of its image-based discovery tool Doppelgänger.
Doppelgänger is the newest addition to Presearch's Spicy Mode, a NSFW feature for searching adult content. Users can upload an image of a celebrity -- or any person they think is hot -- to find OnlyFans creators that resemble them. The technology matches the user with similar creators who want an audience rather than to deepfake platforms that are nonconsensual and illegal. Ever wondered who Sabrina Carpenter's or Pedro Pascal's porn doppelgängers were? Wonder no more.
According to the company, Doppelgänger is built with specific guardrails -- no tracking what users search, explicit age-gating -- and runs on Presearch's decentralized index, "which surfaces content traditional search engines and commercial AI suppress," says Brenden Tacon, head of product and business development at Presearch.
"We're trying to offer a place where you might serendipitously become discovered," Tacon tells WIRED. "You won't on OnlyFans. If you're hustling yourself on Instagram, Reddit, and all these places, it's so hard to break through the noise."
With 300,000 daily active searches on Presearch -- according to the company -- Doppelgänger is one of the first tools on the market pushing for ethical discovery of adult creators at scale. Unlike traditional reverse image tools that scan across the open web to locate where a photo appears or attempt to trace someone's identity, Doppelgänger does not search the broader internet, does not surface personal information, and does not attempt to identify a person. "It simply returns visually similar public profiles based on image features, making it structurally more limited and, in many ways, more privacy-protective than a standard reverse image search," Tacon says.
Still, the accuracy of Doppelgänger could use some improvement. In multiple tests run by WIRED, the AI seems better tailored to find matches for women than men. I had no problem finding look-alikes for Cardi B and Sydney Sweeney. But when searching for Michael B. Jordan look-alikes, it suggested female creators Chanell Heart (the number 3 match) and Chamile Symone, in addition to Uncut Jock NYC, a white-presenting Brazilian sex worker. In fact, five women were suggested among Jordan's top 40. Curious if this was a glitch, I dragged a photo of actor Jeff Goldblum -- a perennial "hottie," according to the subreddit r/VintageLadyBoners -- into the image finder, and the top search result was for Jean B, a self-described "twink content creator," followed by 38 suggestions of large-breasted women. (A second search for Goldblum -- who, for what it's worth, is more zaddy than twink -- with a different photo, did not fare any better; the lone male "look-alike" was for YCC, who is Chinese.)
