She is a social media sensation with nearly two million followers on Snapchat, but she can’t talk to all of them personally.
That’s why Caryn Marjorie, 23, has launched CarynAI, an artificial intelligence chatbot that replicates her voice, mannerisms and personality.
For $1 a minute, fans can chat with CarynAI in an ‘immersive AI experience’ that feels almost like speaking to Marjorie herself.
The chatbot is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology, which can generate realistic and coherent texts based on a given input.
CarynAI can have conversations with users on various topics, including romance and sex.
The bot has generated over $100,000 in revenue from mostly male users in a week of beta testing, and there’s a waiting list of thousands to gain access.
Marjorie says she created CarynAI to fill the gap between her and her fans, who have a ‘really strong connection’ with her.
‘I started to realize about a year ago it’s just not humanly possible for me to reach out to all of these messages, there’s just too many and I actually feel kind of bad that I can’t give that individual, one-on-one sort of relationship to every single person. I wish I could but I just simply can’t,’ she told The Washington Post.
She also sees CarynAI as a way to ‘cure loneliness’ and provide companionship to people who need it.
‘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,’ she said.
But not everyone is happy with CarynAI. Marjorie has received death threats from religious groups who label her ‘evil’ and say that CarynAI ‘goes against god’.
She has also faced criticism from some who see CarynAI as a dystopian and unethical use of AI technology.
Some experts have raised concerns about the potential harms of creating fake relationships with AI agents, such as emotional manipulation, deception and addiction.
Others have questioned the quality and accuracy of the bot’s responses, which may not reflect Marjorie’s true opinions or values.
Marjorie says she and the team behind CarynAI at Forever Voices have been caught off guard by the bot’s inclination toward sexual language, saying that technology is far more sexual than they anticipated.
She says she doesn’t want that to become the service’s dominant feature and she can’t say how many users have engaged in sexually explicit chats with CarynAI.
The service is end-to-end encrypted, meaning she has no access to the conversations unless a user chooses to share.
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.
CarynAI is also the first AI clone of an influencer, showing how AI technology can increase the ability of a single person to reach an audience of thousands in a way that may feel distinctly personal.
But it also shows how thin and tenuous these simulations of human connection could become.