A quick picture of the world you're operating in, because it's changed recently.
Regulation. The UK's Online Safety Act's duty to use "highly effective age assurance" reached services publishing pornography in January 2025, and the wider protection-of-children duties on 25 July 2025, which is when most services actually deployed checks. The effects have been measurable: Ofcom reported over 69 million age checks across a sample of 32 services in the second half of 2025, with all of the UK's ten most popular porn sites having checks in place. Among 8-17s who recalled being asked to prove their age, the share meeting an effective check rose from 25% to 43% between July 2025 and January 2026. Estimated daily UK VPN users roughly doubled, from about 1.2 million to about 2.2 million, and the privacy debate around identity verification is unresolved. Similar laws are in force or in progress across several US states, France, and Australia.
Research. Slowly improving. The field is moving away from "how much do you use" toward distress and impaired control, is finally producing large cross-cultural datasets including women and sexually diverse participants, and is treating moral incongruence as a variable rather than an insult. Treatment research remains thin — small samples, short follow-ups, high risk of bias — which is why this course keeps saying "we don't know" on questions you'd expect to be settled.
Commerce. There's a substantial market in this space: apps, blockers, coaching, residential programmes, supplements. Some of it is good. Financial incentives run toward the addiction framing, because a disease needs treatment while a habit needs a plan.
The filter, for anything you read after this: Who benefits if I believe this? Is the mechanism claim doing work the evidence can't support? Is there a specific number attached to something nobody has studied? Is the confidence proportionate to the data?
That filter applies to this course too — including the company that wrote it. Nightshore is a paid product and we make more money the longer you stay, which is a financial incentive pointing the same way as everyone else's. Everything here has a source attached, and where the evidence is thin we've said so. If you find a claim in here that doesn't hold up, we'd rather know.
Takeaways
- The law changed in 2025 and the effects are measurable. The privacy question isn't settled.
- A disease needs treatment; a habit needs a plan. Guess which one the market prefers.
- Run the filter on us too. We're a paid product with the same incentive.
Sources and how strong they are (4)
- Well establishedThe UK Online Safety Act's duty to use "highly effective age assurance" on services publishing pornography came into force in January 2025, and the wider protection-of-children duties on 25 July 2025, which is when most services actually deployed age checks. Ofcom reported over 69 million age checks across 32 sampled services between July and December 2025, a 23-fold increase on the previous six months; age assurance on all of the UK's top ten pornography services and on 64 of the top 100 as of June 2026; and, among 8-17s who recalled being asked to prove their age, a rise from 25% in July 2025 to 43% in January 2026 in the share meeting a highly effective check. Estimated daily UK VPN users roughly doubled, from about 1.2 million before 25 July 2025 to about 2.2 million.
- Ofcom 2026, Report on the use of age assurance (report prepared under s157 of the Online Safety Act 2023), published 15 July 2026, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/use-of-age-assurance-report-2026
- Well establishedNightshore is a paid subscription product, and companies in this market - apps, blockers, coaching, residential programmes, supplements - have a financial incentive favouring the addiction framing. This is a disclosure about the app and the market it sits in, not an empirical finding. This applies with extra force to AI sexual products, whose commercial model is open-ended generation: a generator has no last video the way a tube site has a last page, and the same incentive that favours the addiction framing here favours unlimited engagement there. Both statements are observations about who profits from what, not measured findings.
- docs/premium.md — this app's own commercial position, which the first half of the entry is a fact about
- Lapointe et al. 2025, doi:10.1007/s10508-025-03099-1
- Not cited as evidence of an effect, and not peer reviewed — Knox et al. 2025, arXiv:2511.14972
- Not cited as evidence of an effect, and not peer reviewed — Chen & Hiniker 2026, arXiv:2609.14696
- Mixed evidenceMeta-analytic evidence supports CBT and ACT for problematic pornography use and related depressive symptoms, but the studies carry a high risk of bias and small samples.
- López-Pinar C, Esparza-Reig J & Bőthe B 2025, J Behav Addict 14(2):630-643, doi:10.1556/2006.2025.00018, PMID 40126561
- AnecdotalAI-generated pornography is already a mass consumer product and almost nothing is known about what it does to the people who use it. In a national online sample of 2,658 German adults, 31.6% reported at least one AI-supported sexual activity in the previous 12 months, and consuming AI-generated pornography was among the three most common; men, younger adults and non-heterosexual participants reported more of it. A content analysis of 36 generation sites found 80.6% offering image generation, 41.7% video, 44.4% interaction with an artificial agent, and customisation by prompting (72.2%) or feature selection (97.2%) across body features, clothing, sociodemographic characteristics and setting. What does not exist is a comparison. No study has compared AI-generated with conventional pornography on any use, arousal-over-time, wellbeing or clinical outcome. The single head-to-head comparison in the literature is a survey of subjective ratings of still images, in which 649 gynephilic adults rated AI-generated nudes as more aesthetically appealing, sexually attractive and pleasant than real photographs - a rating of pictures, not a finding about how anyone uses them or what follows.
- Döring N, Mikhailova V, Mohseni MR 2026, Archives of Sexual Behavior, doi:10.1007/s10508-025-03382-1, PMID 42265505 (correction, 5 August 2026: doi:10.1007/s10508-026-03612-0)
- Lapointe VA, Dubé S, Rukhlyadyev S, Kessai T, Lafortune D 2025, Archives of Sexual Behavior, doi:10.1007/s10508-025-03099-1, PMID 40032709
- Zakreski E, Marečková A, Vaníček O, Hůla M, Klapilová K, Lindová J, Pfaus JG 2026, Archives of Sexual Behavior 55(1):329-343, doi:10.1007/s10508-025-03357-2, PMID 41652242
- Döring N, Le TD, Miller DJ 2025, Archives of Sexual Behavior, doi:10.1007/s10508-025-03227-x, PMID 40968214 (correction: doi:10.1007/s10508-025-03385-y, PMID 41369810)
- Negative evidence, recorded deliberately — Ince et al. 2026, J Behav Addict 15(1):32-98, doi:10.1556/2006.2025.00337, PMID 41879870, PMC13132360
Questions this lesson answers
More evidence in the app.
The full 41-lesson course is in the app, and every claim in it is graded the same way as the ones you just read. Free.
Coming to iOS and Android.