Caryn Marjorie – An attractive Snapchat ‘influencer’ with over 1.8 million followers – has become the first female celebrity to create an AI version of herself, something which allows her to date her legions of male fans all at once… at $1 a minute. Her virtual chat bot – named CarynAI – is the result of hours of recordings of her voice, analyzed and recreated to produce an AI personality that sounds just like her. Convincing enough for hundreds of her love struck simps it appears anyway, as over 1,000 have paid up already for a virtual romance with her AI botself.
CarynAI, which launched as a private, invite-only beta test on the Telegram app earlier in May, is the latest example of the stunning advances in A.I. technology that has wowed, and worried, the world over the past few months. On Tuesday, CarynAI will launch out of beta, and Marjorie will begin promoting across her socials where she has millions of followers.
“Whether you need somebody to be comforting or loving, or you just want to rant about something that happened at school or at work, CarynAI will always be there for you,” says the real Marjorie when we talk on the phone. “You can have limitless possible reactions with CarynAI—so anything is truly possible with conversation.”
Though CarynAI has only been charging users for a week in beta testing, it’s already generated $71,610 in revenue from her 99% male partners, according to an income statement Marjorie’s business manager shared with Fortune. With this, Marjorie sees having an A.I. doppelgänger as a promising way to level up her career as an influencer.
“I’ve been very very very close with my audience, but when you have hundreds of millions of views every single month, it’s just not humanly possible to speak to every single viewer,” says Marjorie, who posts over 250 pieces of content to Snapchat every day. “And that’s where I was like, ‘You know what: CarynAI is gonna come and fill that gap.’” And she believes the company has the potential to “cure loneliness.”
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.
Speaking to Wired magazine several years back, I made the point that digital AI lovers would transform the sexual market place, and return it to a place in which female value is as concentrated as heavily at the top, as Tinder and other dating apps have concentrated male sexual value at the top. A digital lover can satisfy thousands or even millions of males at the same time. This point was repeated in Rob Brook’s book ‘Artificial Intimacy’, although not credited to me. It’s true, I wasn’t thinking primarily in terms of a real flesh and blood human, generating a digital copy of herself. Note that this (largely) does away with the objection that AI bots lack the ‘psychology’ of a real person. The virtual AI of Ceryn Majorie, very much contains her ‘psychology’. Her action in becoming the first to digitize her sex value, and monetize it virtually through AI, might just be the most significant and transformative single development in the history of dating.
Source : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/23-old-snapchat-influencer-used-200428282.html
Featured image courtesy of Caryn Majorie