Influencer Creates AI Double To Be Rented As A Girlfriend
Illustration 275806854 © Yaroslav Veretin | Dreamstime.com
Have you ever heard of falling in love not with someone, but the idea of them? One social media influencer is taking this notion to a whole new level with ‘CarynAI’, a voice-based artificial intelligence clone of herself.
CarynAI is the chatbot extension of 23-year-old Caryn Marjorie, who is lending her voice—and undivided (artificial) attention—to a thousand boyfriends. The bot charges US$1 per minute for her time, which might actually be friendlier on the wallet than a romantic dinner.
CarynAI is powered by Forever Voices, a startup that has created two-way voice replicas of celebrities like Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, and Taylor Swift, and gets its smarts from OpenAI’s GPT-4, per a report by Fortune.
To develop the bot’s speech and personality, Forever Voices scanned 2,000 hours of now-deleted footage from Marjorie’s YouTube channel, before training it with GPT-4. Accordingly, messages to CarynAI are end-to-end encrypted, ensuring that all lovers retain their privacy.
pretty in pink 💕💗🌸💖💠pic.twitter.com/i8tZrveyTR
— Caryn Marjorie (@cutiecaryn) June 1, 2022
“CarynAI is the first step in the right direction to cure loneliness,” explains Marjorie, who has 1.8 million followers on Snapchat and hundreds of thousands more on her other social media channels. “Men are told to suppress their emotions, hide their masculinity, and to not talk about issues they are having. I vow to fix this with CarynAI.”
The influencer tells the news outlet that CarynAI can be there for anyone who needs comfort, affection, or just to rant about their day. Since her AI twin is envisioned as a romantic companion, it can even engage in more sexual conversations, says the report.
caryn AI coming soon… pic.twitter.com/xgNuPudzLf
— Caryn Marjorie (@cutiecaryn) May 2, 2023
Since rolling out as an invite-only beta test on Telegram earlier this month, CarynAI has been subscribed to by 1,000 paying customers—99% of whom are men—and has made a purported revenue of US$71,610. With her large following, Marjorie anticipates that she could amass US$5 million per month from her robotic counterpart.
On Twitter, however, she explains that she hopes to eventually adopt a system where the AI girlfriend can be rented for free by her “most dedicated supporters,” with users tipping her only if they wish to. Currently, the technology is too expensive to support this ideal, but the social media personality foresees operational costs will be reduced with time.
The human Marjorie, who is protected 24/7 by security personnel, shares that CarynAI is her way of getting closer to her fans—something that is “not humanly possible” for somebody who has “hundreds of millions of views” every month, she tells Fortune.
But if you just need a voice, not a feeling, might we suggest interacting with Grimes’s digital double instead? The musician has launched a platform that lets anyone remix her voice into AI-generated music for free.
