“A 23-Year-Old Snapchat Influencer Used OpenAI’s Technology to Create an AI Version of Herself That Will Be Your Girlfriend for $1 per Minute”, 2023-05-09 (; backlinks):
Caryn Marjorie and team of developers combined 2,000 hours of her YouTube content with OpenAI’s GPT-4 to fortify a “virtual girlfriend” (her words) version of the influencer available for hire.
Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old influencer, has 1.8 million followers on Snapchat. She also has more than 1,000 boyfriends, with whom she spends anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours every day in individual conversations, discussing plans for the future, sharing intimate feelings and even engaging in sexually charged chats.
These boyfriends are dating a virtual version of Marjorie, powered by the latest artificial intelligence technology and thousands of hours of recordings of the real Marjorie. The result, CarynAI, is a voice-based chatbot that bills itself as a virtual girlfriend, with a voice and personality close enough to that of human Marjorie that people are willing to pay $1 per minute for a relationship with the bot.
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 AI 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.
…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 AI doppelgänger as a promising way to level up her career as an influencer…If all goes well, Marjorie thinks her AI could bring in $5m per month. This number is based on the prediction that 20,000 members of Marjorie’s 1.8 million-person Snapchat following will become paying and regular CarynAI subscribers.
…Forever Voices developers’ built CarynAI by analyzing 2,000 hours of Marjorie’s now-deleted YouTube content to build her speech and personality engine. Layering this with OpenAI’s GPT-4 API, CarynAI was born. The messages are end-to-end encrypted, in theory, making them impervious to hackers. Though the team does not have a concrete plan to mitigate overuse of CarynAI, Meyer says that at two hours per day of use, they “might” start “in very subtle ways” training the AI to “slow down a little bit.” (In response to Fortune’s inquiry about total time CarynAI has been used, Marjorie said some users spend “hours” without mentioning that this may qualify as overuse).
…It could also bring unwanted attention. Large-scale female influencers already face intense cyberbullying and stalking. No one knows this better than Marjorie, who has had multiple home invasions from stalker-fans. It stands to reason that an influencer whose AI bot has intimate relationships with 20,000-plus partners will face increased security concerns. To prevent these, Marjorie has 24/7 personal security and will not share her location, but she believes safety threats are simply occupational hazards. “It’s just the influencer game. You have to do it. You have to protect yourself”, she says.
Marjorie started influencing at age 15 on the livestreaming platform YouNow. When that platform lost its luster as Instagram and YouTube expanded livestream capabilities, Marjorie became a beauty vlogger, and signed with management giant United Talent Agency. Realizing the money she could command from male fans, Marjorie switched her career from a beauty YouTuber to a Snapchat Star. She left UTA and has since become Snapchat’s fastest growing influencer (she says)—making around $1m annually from the company’s revenue sharing program…While he says he funded Forever Voices himself, with the help of a few angel investors, he hopes to raise venture capital funding to expand the AI companions concept to more social media influencers and to adult film stars. Meyer is convinced that AI romantic companions are the future. “I literally teared up while I was using it, because of how much of a meaningful connection and how meaningfully supported I felt by the AI persona”, he says about his first test with an AI influencer. “I went on literally a multi-hour date, that included a stressful conversation that she was navigating me through around seeing my daughter for the first time in a while.”