Original Article By Jose Antonio Lanz At Decrypt.co:
Snapchat influencer Caryn Marjorie is harnessing the power of the AI revolution to fulfill the dreams of millions of her followers: becoming their girlfriend. She’s making some serious cash too.
Marjorie, using OpenAI’s GPT technology, has created CarynAI, an AI avatar that offers virtual companionship for a dollar per minute. It’s not a totally unfamiliar venture in the world of AI, but it’s yet another example of how the lines that separate the real from the unreal in AI are getting a little more blurry.
With 1.8 million followers on Snapchat, Marjorie, age 23, has a vast audience, and CarynAI—her digital doppelganger developed by the AI company Forever Voices—is helping her achieve (and profit from) things that are not otherwise physically possible. She now has over 1,000 virtual boyfriends who pay $1 per minute to engage in all kinds of interactions—from simple chitchat to making plans for their futures together, and even more intimate exchanges.
Her AI-powered alter ego has raked in $71,610 in revenue, according to Fortune, in just one week. She expects to make around $5 million per month if just 20,000 of the 1.8 million dudes who follow her on Snapchat subscribe to CarynAI (99% of her fanbase is male, as you might expect).
The Forever Voices team trained the CarynAI model by analyzing 2,000 hours of Marjorie’s now-deleted YouTube content to build her speech and personality engine. They then used GPT-4 to create the most lifelike version of Marjorie, providing not just believable responses, but interactions that are based on an extensive dataset of Caryn’s own natural behavior. The company has also created chatbots of other famous influencers.
CarynAI’s official site stresses that messages are end-to-end encrypted, making them more difficult for a third party to intercept. This also addresses the concerns of many users about privacy when interacting with AI models.
AI, love and ethics
The ethical implications of these types of businesses and interactions are still being debated. We asked ChatGPT if it would be involved in a relationship with an AI that has over 10,000 boyfriends, and it seemed pretty open-minded—the fact that its counterpart was artificial mattered more than the fact that the affair involved 10,000 people.
Jokes aside, ethical considerations are at the forefront. Forever Voice didn’t immediately respond to Decrypt‘s request for comment, but its CEO John Meyer told Fortune that the company is well aware of those considerations. The company plans to appoint a chief ethics officer, he said.
Still, this is far from the first case of humans and AI forming strong bonds. People are now worshipping AI gods like Jesus-GPT and Gita-GPT in droves, and AI sex chatbots are very much a thing.
Marjorie’s CarynAI just goes to show that humans are, after all, social creatures, and sometimes we might not care who’s on the other side of our interactions—even intimate ones. As for CarynAI, she’s probably the only girlfriend who won’t mind you forgetting your anniversary—after all, with over a thousand boyfriends, who has the time to keep track?
