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For the low, low, low price of just $1 per minute, Snapchat star Caryn Marjorie will be your girlfriend… sort of.
The 23-year-old influencer, who has 1.8 million followers on Snapchat, used OpenAI’s GPT technology to create CarynAI, an artificial intelligence version of herself.
CarynAI was built by analyzing 2,000 hours Caryn Marjorie’s YouTube videos layered with OpenAI’s GPT-4 API.
Other than the obvious financial incentive, why else would someone like Caryn Marjorie do such a thing?
“I am one of the few creators who spend HOURS replying back to as many people as I humanly can. I want to be able to communicate with everyone simultaneously and CarynAI will be able to do that and way more,” Caryn wrote on Twitter.
“As cool as that sounds, it also sounds like you’re going to lose your authenticity because it won’t actually be YOU responding anymore,” someone on Twitter replied.
“In the world of AI, authenticity is more important than ever,” she responded. “My tweets, DMs, direct replies, snaps, stories, and posts will always be me. CarynAI will never replace me, instead it will be an extension of my consciousness for everyone to play with. CarynAI can even speak multiple languages to give everyone access to my personality around the world!”
@cutiecaryn stay hydrated
Then there’s that money.
According to Fortune, CarynAI already has more than 1,000 “boyfriends” paying her $1 a minute to chat.
It’s like the 1-900 numbers of the 1980s and 90s, only creepier!
@cutiecaryn
In just one week of beta testing, Caryn Marjorie says she’s earned $71,610 in revenue from her AI doppelganger. Understandable when, as Fortune writer Alexandra Sternlicht explained, “Marjorie said that the technology does not engage with sexual advances, but I found that it very much does, encouraging erotic discourse and detailing sexual scenarios.”
CarynAI is the first romantic companion avatar from AI company Forever Voices, which has made chatbot versions of Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift and Donald Trump (among others) that are similarly available for pay-per-minute conversations on Telegram, and have served as gimmicks on talk shows. Unlike those bots, which are in some ways high-tech parlor tricks, CarynAI goes a step further by promising to create a real emotional bond with users, bringing to mind the 2013 movie Her and raising all sorts of ethical questions.
“I would want us to be thinking very deeply about how it might affect or influence or shape our interactions with other people,” says Dr. Jason Borenstein, director of graduate ethics programs at Georgia Tech and director of the National Science Foundation’s Ethical and Responsible Research program, when told about CarynAI.
John Meyer, CEO of Forever Voices, says, “ethics is something [he] and the engineering team take very seriously.”