Dystopia is here

I think this is the most dystopian thing I have read recently.

It’s a judgment of Mr Justice Saini, a High Court judge, concerning an application for an interim injunction in a Commercial Court dispute between two providers of CRM (customer relations management) services, one of whom wants to stop the other from luring away its customers.

So far, so normal. Bread and butter commercial litigation. So why do I describe the judgment as dystopian?

The reason is that the CRM providers in question serve what the judge describes as a “specialised and niche market”, namely, the people whom the judge carefully describes as “content providers sometimes called OnlyFans "models" or "performers" in the papers before me”, and in order to explain the issues in the case, the judge has to explain, in great detail, precisely how OnlyFans works. It’s not a happy story.

I’m sure you have no idea what OnlyFans is, so I will have to explain, but I do not think I can improve on the introduction that the judge gives in paragraphs [21]-[22] of the judgment:

“OnlyFans is a subscription-based social media platform where creators share exclusive content (photos, videos, live streams), and use built-in messaging tools to have conversations with "fans". While used by some others in the entertainment world, OnlyFans is predominantly known for adult content, and serves as a direct income source for creators in the modern so-called "creator economy". Creators/models charge fans for their interaction/services in a number of different ways and OnlyFans generally takes 20% of the charges.

Creators set their own subscription price for fans, usually between about US$5.00 and US$50.00 per month. For pay-per-view content, creators charge a one-off fee for access to particular content and tips are sent by fans in amounts of their choosing. Creators are responsible for generating income on the platform by producing content that attracts and retains subscribers. OnlyFans does not itself create content. One can gain an idea of the scale of the enterprise from some figures in the evidence before me. In its most recent (2024) accounts, OnlyFans reported gross payments from fans of approximately US$ 7.22 billion (across hundreds of millions of registered users and several million creators worldwide) and pre-tax profits of US$ 683.6 million. Earnings for individual creators vary, but an article published by the Claimant in the evidence before me identifies a number of "middle ground" content creators who earn around US$ 3,000.00-5,000.00 per month, and higher earners making in the region of US$ 20,000.00 per month.”

Such is life, you may say, but it gets worse.

As the judge explains in paragraph [23]: “In order to keep fans engaged, successful content creators maintain personalised dialogues ("chats") with each fan. Messaging lies at the heart of the OnlyFans model and the evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of creator revenue is generated through this "direct messaging" and chats between fans and content creators.” Then the kicker: “As I describe below, the messaging is not in fact (in the case of successful creators) undertaken by them but by "chatters" employed by agencies.”

To my mind, it is the existence of these “chatters” that introduces the truly dystopian element to this (already rather depressing) world. What the CRM companies do is enable teams of people to pretend to be models and to “chat” to them. Back to Saini J: “These are people employed by the agencies to interact with thousands of fans on behalf of the creators, in sometimes an intimate and personal way. The fan believes that these are one-to-one chats, and they are having a personal dialogue with the creator. Fans may well believe that they are chatting to a model in real time but in fact an agency-employed chatter will be interacting with the fan on the pretence that they are the model.”

I think it’s worth considering the industrial scale of this “chatting”. The customers for the CRM software are agencies who manage multiple models. One example is given by the judge, Typa: “Typa manages 50 creators and each one has between 2,000 and 300,000 fans. So, it manages the interactions the creators are having with over 1 million fans on OnlyFans. Typa employs a number of chatters as well as copywriters. … Typa uses a team of five chatters working in shifts to provide 24/7 coverage, supervised by a quality control manager. … This structure is important because it allows Typa to maintain consistent engagement with the substantial fan base.”

All of that means that the really valuable information in this business (and what the companies are fighting about) is what it takes to allow these employed “chatters” successfully to keep up the pretence that “fans” are talking to “models”. This information comes in the form of “scripts”, i.e., the kinds of things that models might say, and “fan notes”, i.e., information about the fans that can be used to make it seem as if they are being remembered and valued.

I’m sure you can imagine how depressing the details of these “scripts” and “fan notes” are, but the judge does not spare us the details and neither will I.

For examples of scripts, he gives “"Hey Ryan, I saw you liked my gym pics yesterday. Want the full video tonight? If you say yes, I'll send for £25”, accompanied by the note “Use it only when: mentions gym pics”; and “Hey Brian, I saw you liked my bath video yesterday. want the full video tonight?...” with the note “Use it only when: replied 'I'm okay' and hasn't bought in 7 days.”

As for fan notes, well, I’ll just quote and let you use your own judgment as to what is going on: “… information which the agency has recorded and logged about Brian, in the course of the dialogue – he is from the Bay Area, California; 40 years old; single; lives with parents; etc. Another example of Fan Notes record that 'Bruno' is a veteran of the Navy SEALS, a jiu jitsu black belt, and that he is from Brazil with Italian parents.” 

The judge explains how the fan notes get updated with a further example: “a change has been made to update David's salary to $2,000 USD per month, that he tips between $50-$100 and he get paid wages between 15th-17th.” As the judge coolly comments, “Fan Notes of this type are intended to enable a chatter to extract maximum financial benefits when they interact with David.”

What is the most depressing thing here? 

- Is it the sheer scale of the vast transfers of money from men sitting around in their pants (or less) to women posing in their knickers (or less)? 

- Is it the fact that those men think they are talking to women but are in fact talking to (I assume) men in India or the Philippines? 

- Is it the bland corporate-speak employed: "To provide this consistent service at scale, they rely on CRM tools which allow for Scripts to be subject to layered controls and quality assurance ... 24/7 coverage, supervised by a quality control manager ... consistent engagement ... financial benefits ..."?

- Or it is just the little glimpses into people’s lives: Brian, who honestly tells a “chatter” that he is a single 40 year-old who lives with his parents, or Bruno who bigs himself up with his jiu jitsu black belt and Navy SEALS experience (seriously?), or David, who is circled by vultures waiting to pounce on payday?

I don’t know. I only know that something, somewhere, has gone badly wrong. Like a cuckoo exploiting the natural nurturing instincts of a bird, these businesses have successfully hacked the natural reproductive instincts of mankind.

On the whole, I think the saddest thing is that the real money – the “overwhelming majority of creator revenue”, as the judge put it – is not to be found in simply selling naughty photos, but in the “chatting”. Taking money in exchange for pornography is an old business and a fundamentally honest one: the customer gets what he pays for. But taking money in exchange for a pretended human connection? That’s dystopian.

AI and the law - a test

There has been much speculation about the impact of AI on the legal professions. I am not going to repeat it. Instead, here is a test.

Last year, the High Court decided a case called "Mazur" (the full reference is available lower down this post, if you're interested). The appeal from the decision was recently heard over three days in the Court of Appeal. I've asked some AIs to predict the outcome.

It seemed to me that this case is a good test for a couple of reasons. The first instance decision attracted a lot of attention in the legal professions because it concerned the question of whether certain legal tasks have to be carried out by fully-qualified solicitors and the extent to which other professionals, with other (or no) qualifications, can assist. So it's a decision that potentially has a big impact on the business of law firms and has therefore attracted a lot of informed comment for the AIs to consider. On the other hand, the case is of much less interest to the general public, so there is little by way of general media comment. All of which made me think that an AI that 'reads' the public information on the case will get a fairly good steer on what it is all about.

The test I gave the AIs was not to replicate what a lawyer would do when giving advice to their own client. Instead, I was asking them to do something akin to what a law firm does when it publishes a note on a case of wider significance in which it is not itself involved: the kind of thing intended to keep clients updated and show that the law firm is a 'thought leader'.

I've cut and pasted the AIs' predictions below, in advance of the judgment, so that we can all look back after the event and judge them more fully. The headlines are as follows:

- Claude/Sonnet was reluctant to answer the question, saying that the appeal fell after its cut-off date, and I was disinclined to spend any time bringing it up to speed. I have not quoted it below.
- LeChat/Mistral made some howlers that discredited it in my eyes.
- Grok was perhaps most helpful. It immediately gave a convincing answer.
- ChatGPT took some prodding to produce a full answer, but gave a decent one in the end.

But even in advance of seeing if they are right, we can ask how they did on the test I gave them. How does their work product compare to asking a junior lawyer to write a report of this kind?

On balance, as at the time of writing (and I know things change quickly), I'd still rather have the lawyer for this job. But a lawyer at £X per hour working for a few hours, or a few seconds on Grok? That's much closer. One lawyer checking for howlers plus a decent AI doing the legwork would be far more efficient. As one on-line commentator said, AIs are very good at curing 'blank page' panic. 

Given the relative lack of importance of notes such as these, I'd be very surprised if AI is not generating the bulk of them before the end of the year. At which point, AIs will most likely be the bulk of the readership too...

Full details below the break.

What are judges for? What is the law for? A case of emails, mice and murder

The recent judgment of HHJ Paul Matthews in Frost v Giddens [2025] EWHC 3325 (Comm) is an interesting one for thinking about what it is that judges do. 

Read on for more about emails but, I'm afraid, only a little about either mice or murder.

On giving advice

Someone on X posted an engagement-bait-type question, but a good one: "What advice do you have for me for the new year?" One reply was this: "be skeptical of other people’s advice, which is very often aimed at rationalizing their own past choices, exerting power, or projecting their own concerns .... It’s in fact extremely [hard] to give another person advice apart from the banal and the obvious." 

To what extent is that reply true? Some thoughts below.

Sally Rooney's Intermezzo and Alan Hollinghurst's Our Evenings

Last summer, I read two books of modern literary fiction (by which I mean books of the 'in-contention-for-the-Booker-Prize kind'), namely Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I don't think these two books are often yoked together (other than perhaps on lists of prizeabile, so to speak) but, in my perpetual quest to produce useful book reviews, I thought it might nonetheless be worth making a little comparison of what I think are their strengths and weaknesses.  

Cads and the law

My previous post, on divorce, lying and the internet, prompted a couple of interesting exchanges on the Site Formerly Known as Twitter and prompted me to do a little more research and thinking. After the break, I set out below some reflections on cads, duels and dobbing.

Lies, damned lies, matrimony and the internet

I was recently reading Uncommon Law, AP Herbert's book of spoof law reports first published in 1935, and it made me wonder whether ordinary, decent, middle-class people are more or less honest than they used to be. To cut a long story short: yes and no.

Even today, there is still much in Uncommon Law to enjoy, or at least there is if you are a lawyer or interested in the law. It's a mixture of 'law is an ass'-type invented but more or less plausible cases, poking fun at judges and judge-ese, liberal/libertarian fulminations at silly legal restrictions and the occasional clever observation. To give you an idea of the kind of thing, in one case a judge muses whether a marriage contract is unenforceable because it is in effect gambling, given that one never quite really knows what one is getting oneself into when marrying.

But whether that sort of thing is your cup of tea or not, you might want to think about divorce. 

One of Herbert's imagined cases is an old barrister doing his last case who has stopped caring about keeping up the pretences involved in 1920s divorces. So he tells the judge that evidence will be given that the husband's ardour for his wife cooled quickly after marriage, but the reality is that the wife wants the divorce and the husband is still keen on her; he says that Mrs So-and-so will give evidence that she had a liaison with the husband, but in fact she's been paid; he says that the wife will ask for alimony but in fact her family are having to pay money to the husband to get him to agree to this charade; and so on and so forth. The barrister says that everyone involved is perfectly decent, but, in effect, they are all going to perjure themselves.

Now of course I knew that this kind of rigmarole was how divorces were conducted under the old law: you see an example in Waugh's A Handful of Dust, perhaps based on his own experiences, and I have vague memories of reading about rooms rented in Brighton, private detectives primed to pounce at the right time and so on, all to ensure that a decent husband was the respondent rather than the petitioner. But it had not previously dawned on me that the parties would go to court, swear on Bibles and straightforwardly lie in the face of His Majesty's judiciary. It may be pearl-clutching on my part, but wasn't this an awful lot of perjury or perverting the course of justice? And does it make it better or worse to think that the judges knew (sometimes? always?) that everyone was making it up and that it was their job, in order to make society (and Society) work, to go along with it?

Herbert's point was that ordinary decent people were forced into these expedients by the restrictive divorce laws of the time. His argument has won the day and divorces can be had nowadays without anyone being required to choose between ruining a decent woman's reputation or committing perjury. 

There is, it seems to me, something very positive about that development. A world in which one can consider oneself a fine and upstanding gentleman despite deliberately conspiring to break the law (or perhaps because one is so conspiring) is, other things being equal, not as good in which fine and upstanding people hesitate and quail before misleading the legal authorities. It would not surprise me if an ordinary decent man who considered himself above the law when it came to divorce then came to consider himself above the law on other subjects too. Truthfulness is a habit, at least to some extent, and habits are formed by behaviour. 

Even today, I don't think that everyone follows the law all the time - I'm a lawyer! - but the instances in which a decent person can hold their head up high while lying to the courts are pretty few. I can imagine that someone might consider it to be "doing the decent thing" to take points on a driving licence that should properly go to a spouse in order to prevent the loss of that licence. I can also imagine family members concealing crimes even to the extent of barefaced lying to the authorities: perhaps to hush up a repentant teenager's drug use, for example. But even these examples seem to be different from deliberately setting out, with a plan formulated in advance, to mislead the court in order to obtain a desired outcome. So the world has improved, in one respect at least.

On the other hand, there is a big part of our lives that is forcing us the other way: clicking online forms. Forms require us to say that we have read and understood vast screeds of terms and conditions that we have no intention of even looking at, or they ask questions when we know that, if we give the honest answer, we will be taken down a rabbit hole of unnecessary extra steps. What's your view on cookies? Do you have the consent of everyone involved in this booking? How did you hear about us? Have you forgotten your password (maybe ...?)? Once upon a time, someone might be able to say, with a straight face, that they always read the small print; but now no-one does (no-one always does) and yet everyone says that they do. 

The whole world of doing business on the internet relies on, to put it at its lowest, a lot of polite fictions. On the one hand, that is not as bad as perjury but, on the other hand, this kind of lying is far more prevalent than divorce was in the 1920s. 

"Ah", you might say, "but that doesn't really count. It'sjust online forms - it's just computers". But if AI is anywhere near as successful as both its proponents and its chief opponents suspect, filling in online forms is only going to become a bigger part of our everyday life. 

We have trained ourselves to lie to computers. That wasn't so much of a problem when we mostly talked to humans. But it might be when we mostly talk to computers. In fact, once ChatGPT gets any good at humour, I might ask an it to write an AP Herbert-style story with that theme.