Caryn Marjorie is a Snapchat influencer with more than 1.8 million followers. Impressed by the power of AI, Caryn created a virtual replica of herself who could act like a virtual girlfriend. She would charge $1 per minute for this. Caryn made it with the help of a company named Forever Voices which specializes in AI development and named it CarynAI.
It is a chatbot that imitates the personalities and voices of the popular influencer. The chatbot provides users with an opportunity to engage in private talks, convey their sentiments, and even engage in sexually heated chats. In an interview with Fortune, Marjorie stated that the AI has the potential to "cure loneliness" and earn her up to $5 million every month.
Forever Voices developed Marjorie's speech and personality engine using 2,000 hours of her now-deleted YouTube material. They were able to develop the AI by combining it with OpenAI's GPT-4 API. Unlike Forever Voice's other bots, such as chatbot versions of Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump, CarynAI promises to establish a true emotional relationship with its customers.
However, in the weeks since it went into beta testing, the voice-based, AI-powered chatbot has had sexually explicit chats with some of its users, who pay $1 per minute to talk to it. "The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue," Caryn told Insider. "My team and I are working around the clock to prevent this from happening again."
Some of the reporters termed the chatbot an 'intimacy-ready Siri," noting that while it could offer recipes, news commentary, and words of support, it could also encourage "erotic discourse." The chatbot already has more than 1,000 paying subscribers, and Marjorie told Fortune that she believes it could eventually bring in $5 million a month, based on 20,000 of her 1.8 million Snapchat followers signing up for the service.
Although her team is working to fix the glitch, Caryn says that she endorses AI romances. She says that CarynAI is in the right direction to allow her fans and followers to become her close friends in a safe environment.
