But despite that mistake and a few other hiccups—my punctuation seemed unnatural because it was too accurate—Daniel offered me the job.

“Baby, I like talking to you and all…but I notice that you’re using unspaced em-dashes as the alternate form for parenthetical phrases. No other girl I’ve ever met on OnlyFans has done that.”

Oh shit.

The agency’s manager sent me a background memo about the woman I’d be playing, a purported 21-year-old university student blessed with physical proportions that are in vogue these days. To ensure that my performance was as authentic as possible, I spent two hours committing all of her details to memory: her favorite programming language

You want to avoid those awkward, immersion-breaking moments in the chat where you’ve got some snippets of code in language that the client happens to know and you don’t, I imagine. The real pro route is to choose something adequately-esoteric that nobody is likely gonna call you out on it.

“When it’s late at night, sometimes I like to relax with a little coding in REXX, though Prolog is good to mix things up.”

I was to be paid 7 cents per line of dialog, with each dialog running for a minimum of 40 lines. For my first assignment, I had to compose 20 dialogs involving sex in public places—10 at the beach, five inside a car, and five in a forest or garden. There was a list of particular sex acts I had to include, as well as a stricture that I refrain from using emoji in more than 30 percent of lines. I had only 48 hours to complete the task.

Yeah, I can see why they want to get AI chatbots working for this.

Robert Carey, a Phoenix-based partner at the law firm Hagens Berman, which specializes in massive class actions, has a less charitable view of the matter. In the midst of my plunge into the chatting industry, I caught wind that he was looking for men to become plaintiffs in a class action against both OnlyFans and the agencies who hire chatters. A lead attorney in the lawsuits that revolutionized college sports by making it possible for student-athletes to get paid for name and image rights, Carey argues that the managers who run creators’ accounts are engaging in a type of bait and switch that fits the classic definition of fraud. “When you subscribe, the very first thing it says is, ‘Have a DM relationship,’” he said. “Well, that’s totally fraudulent … It’s an open secret they’re just defrauding people.”

Carey, who confided in me that his firm plans to file its lawsuit soon, contends that the chatting illusion can lead to serious harm for unwitting subscribers.

Hmm. I wonder how that works. Do they, in the discovery phase of this lawsuit, just require all of the service’s chat logs to be handed over?

Wait, you mean to tell me that the beautiful woman that you are talking to online could actually be a marketing team that is creating the idealized image of said woman designed specifically as a commercial product, like some kind of movie about a plastic doll, Barbie, now available on Blu-ray and select streaming services?

Who would do such a thing?