There was a media company in Switzerland that advertised chatrooms with your favorite influencers and many many german Influencers advertised it and told people how happy they would be just to have 1on1 chats with their fans.
Of course it turned out it was a huge scam and even though a lot of the advertised influencers were female, the overwhelming majority of paid chatters from the media company were of course guys. Some of those chats got steamy too and the company briefed their staff to love bomb and exploit their customers as much as possible. They even went as far as to fake soft porn images of the influencers they officially worked with.
There was a lot of drama, pointing fingers between influencers and the media company and legal prosecution. But most exploited fans will never see their money back or get damages for being systematically emotionally abused.
cabbage@piefed.social 4 days ago
404media had an interesting inteview with a Kenyan "data labeller". He talks about his jobs working with AI companies, and how he had to pretend being all kinds of things. He’d work at least 18 hours a day, constantly switching between roleplaying different characters of different genders to people who thought they were talking to AI.
So even people who think they are talking to robots might be sexting some underpaid guy in Kenya.