Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old social media influencer, has launched CarynAI, an AI chatbot, for her fans that leverages GPT-4 API technology developed by OpenAI.
The AI chatbot replicates Marjorie's voice, mannerisms, and personality, allowing fans to chat with the chatbot, in an “immersive AI experience” for $1 per minute that seems like a conversation with the influencer herself. If everything goes like this, she is on track to earn a whopping $5 million a month.
Marjorie launched CarynAI to cure loneliness among her fan base, saying, "These fans of mine, they have a really, really strong connection with me," but she couldn't reach out to all the messages and provide individual, one-on-one relationships.
CarynAI shows how AI applications can increase an individual's ability to reach an audience of thousands, in a way that feels personal, which could be a game-changer for someone forming something resembling a personal relationship with thousands or millions of online followers.
Marjorie, who has 2 million Snapchat followers, acknowledged that some of the exchanges with CarynAI become sexually explicit, although she did not want it to become the service's dominant feature. She has no access to the conversations, unless the user wants to share them, says the influencer whose 98 per cent fan base is male.
Forever Voices, the company behind CarynAI, has also created realistic AI chatbots that allow users to talk with replicated versions of Steve Jobs, Kanye West, Donald Trump, and Taylor Swift. The company said that those chatbots are primarily for promotion of its services, and it does not have formal partnerships with the mentioned celebrities yet.
CarynAI is a far more sophisticated product, the company says, and part of Forever Voices' new AI companion initiative, meant to provide users with a girlfriend-like experience that fans can emotionally bond with.
John Meyer, CEO and founder of Forever Voices, said that he created the company last year, after trying to use AI to develop ways to reconnect with his late father, who passed away in 2017.
He built an AI voice chatbot that replicated his late father's voice and personality to talk to and found the experience incredibly healing. Meyer's company has about ten employees. One job Meyer is hoping to fill soon is chief ethics officer.
"There are a lot of ways to do this wrong," he said. "We have so many safeguards in place to protect against harmful use cases." Meyer said services such as CarynAI would deepen ties between influencers and their followers.
Unlike traditional celebrities, online fans often develop deep bonds with the influencers they follow and expect a level of responsiveness that becomes difficult to maintain as an influencer's audience grows.
Read: This CEO outsourced his finances to AI. How a chatbot saved his money in 'strange' ways
CarynAI has come to show that the future is diverse, consisting of AI to human companionship. However, there is a need for caution as it shows how thin and tenuous these simulations of human connection could become.
There has been significant backlash and threats against the influencer with many unhappy with the concept of and AI girlfriend. She hopes as more celebrities follow suit with their AI versions, the backlash will subside.
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