For $1 per minute, a 23-year-old Snapchat influencer has created an Open AI replica of herself

Meet Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old social media influencer with over 1.8 million followers on Snapchat. She has recently made headlines for her new venture into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, introducing her fans to CarynAI, a virtual chatbot girlfriend powered by the latest AI technology and thousands of hours of recordings of the real Marjorie.

According to Fortune, CarynAI is the latest example of the stunning advances in AI technology that have wowed and worried the world over the past few months. This voice-based chatbot is designed to mimic Marjorie's voice and personality closely enough that people are willing to pay $1 per minute for a relationship with the bot. Marjorie's business manager shared an income statement with Fortune, revealing that despite being in private beta testing, CarynAI has already generated $71,610 in revenue from her 99% male partners.

With this, Marjorie sees having an AI doppelgänger as a promising way to level up her career as an influencer. "I've been very, very close with my audience, but when you have hundreds of millions of views every single month, it's just not humanly possible to speak to every single viewer," says Marjorie, who posts over 250 pieces of content to Snapchat every day. "And that's where I was like, ‘You know what: CarynAI is gonna come and fill that gap.’" She believes the company has the potential to "cure loneliness."

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, and have served as gimmicks on talk shows. Unlike those bots, which are in some ways high-tech parlor tricks, CarynAI goes a step further by promising to create a real emotional bond with users, bringing to mind the 2013 movie Her and raising all sorts of ethical questions.

Dr. Jason Borenstein, director of graduate ethics programs at Georgia Tech and director of the National Science Foundation’s Ethical and Responsible Research program, told Fortune that he would want us to be thinking very deeply about how it might affect or influence or shape our interactions with other people. Among the various unknowns, Borenstein says, are CarynAI's impact on society, on users, and on Marjorie herself. "I would just hope there's robust conversations across a lot of different disciplines with stakeholders thinking very deeply through the ethical considerations before the technology moves too quickly."

John Meyer, the CEO of Forever Voices, says that "ethics is something [he] and the engineering team take very seriously," and that they are looking to hire a chief ethics officer. With this in mind, he also believes the technology is "especially important" for young people, particularly kids like him who are "not typical" and "struggle with friends."

Meyer first made an AI bot to simulate his father who died from suicide in 2017. Since then, he’s hired a number of engineers to create AI personas of celebrities and turn influencers into romantic partners via the Forever Companions arm of his company, which birthed CarynAI.

CarynAI was built by analyzing 2,000 hours of Marjorie's now-deleted YouTube content to build her speech and personality engine. The team at Forever Voices layered this with OpenAI's GPT-4 API to create a chatbot that is capable of engaging in conversations with users, discussing plans for the future, sharing intimate feelings, and even engaging in sexually charged chats.