Caryn Marjorie, a social media influencer with nearly two million followers on Snapchat spends 10 minutes a day with each of her lovers having conversations, discussing future plans and sharing intimate feeling with them all – at a charge of US$1 per minute. The influencer revealed started using OpenAI to create an online version of herself, and soon after saw an investment opportunity. The content creator begun to charge people $1 per minute to allow people to pretend they were in a relationship with her.
Although it is still unknown where the future of AI is going, many people are already experimenting with the platform and creating opportunities from AI. In the recent months, there has also been a huge wave of interest and conversation on the benefits and concerns of ChatGPT.
Caryn Marjorie, a 10-minute girlfriend to her paid lovers
Where some may find it bizarre to read about men paying $1 per minute to have a popular Snapchatter as their girlfriend, others relish in the idea. The news that released on Reddit had individuals commenting saying “Dude, a lot of our world is running full speed into blade runner territory. Robots/AI eliminating 2/3rds of the jobs. Ruined environment. Everyone is basically miserable and can’t escape their lives.”
Many people are concerned at how AI is changing the way people live, or changing the mental state of an individual. Having an online AI partner seems as a unhealthy way to live and enjoy the real-life romance of an actual human being.
According to CarynAI’s website, 2,000 hours were spent creating and coding the real-life Marjorie’s vocal codes, behaviors, and personality. Caryn knew that if she was to charge people, then the AI-version of herself needed to be an exact replica and immersive AI experience.
Caryn spoke about AI on her Twitter feed:
CarynAI is the first step in the right direction to cure loneliness. 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. I have worked with the world’s leading psychologists to seamlessly…
— Caryn Marjorie (@cutiecaryn) May 12, 2023
According to media reports, Caryn Marjorie launched CarynAI – an AI chatbot leveraging GPT-4 API technology developed by OpenAI that replicates her voice, mannerisms and personality. For US$1 a minute, fans can chat with CarynAI in an “immersive AI experience” that feels almost like speaking to Marjorie herself.
Given the product’s growth rate, once she’s able to onboard all the fans who’ve expressed interest, she estimates she’s on track to earn about US$5 million a month. The product made more than US$100,000 the first week, she said. and there’s a waiting list of thousands to gain access.
“These fans of mine, they have a really, really strong connection with me”, she told The Washington Post. “Because of that they actually end up messaging me every single day. 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”.
The launch of CarynAI comes when public attention to artificial intelligence has been focused primarily on how it might be used to change the way major search engines respond to users – and how the limitations of what’s known as large language models can result in inaccurate responses, disinformation and other major issues.
But CarynAI also shows how AI applications can increase the ability of a single person to reach an audience of thousands in a way that, for users, may feel distinctly personal. The impact could be enormous for someone forming something resembling a personal relationship with thousands or millions of online followers. It could also show how thin and tenuous these simulations of human connection could become.
CarynAI also is a reminder that sex and romance are often the first realm in which technological progress becomes profitable. Marjorie acknowledges that some of the exchanges with CarynAI become sexually explicit, though she says she doesn’t want that to become the service’s dominant feature and she can’t say how many have – the service is end-to-end encrypted, meaning she has no access to the conversations unless a user chooses to share.
“The reason why I created CarynAI was because I wanted to cure loneliness from my fan base”, she said.
