Don’t have a girlfriend, but have lots of cash? Don’t worry, it’s not what you think.
A 23-year-old Snapchat influencer named Caryn Marjorie has unveiled a ChatGPT-powered AI doppelgänger of herself that engages in erotic pillow talk — for $1 a minute.
Meet the CarynAI, a salacious Snapchat bot who boasts over 1,000 boyfriends, with whom she discusses everything from plans for the future to, well, sex, Fortune reported.
“CarynAI will always be there for you,” declared Marjorie, Snapchat’s purported fastest-growing influencer, who devised the bot to “cure loneliness.”
And already, prospective boyfriends are lining up to land a date with CarynAI.
There is currently a 26-hour waiting list to interface with her initial prototype, with 5,000 people having already signed up.
“In the past 24 hours, CarynAI has skyrocketed,” Marjorie gushed. “We are up over 1,000% and it’s still climbing.”
“When you have hundreds of millions of views every single month, it’s just not humanly possible to speak to every single viewer,” lamented the Nebraska native, who has 1.8 million followers on the platform but wanted to expand her social media footprint.
So, like a modern-day Victor Frankenstein, she decided to invent new being, a cybernetic facsimile that could interact with every one of her devoted followers simultaneously. Think of it like Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze’s dystopian opus “Her” — if she didn’t put her human clients in the friend zone.
She achieved this lofty goal by enlisting AI company Forever Voices, which has created digital pay-to-talk doppelgängers of everyone from Taylor Swift to Donald Trump.
To concoct CarynAI, programmers analyzed thousands of hours of Marjorie’s now-deleted YouTube content to create a parallel personality.
They then infused it with GPT — the software that powers OpenAI’s omnipresent Microsoft ChatGPT bot — and voilà, this romantic companion avatar was born.
As the Snapchat bot’s modeled after a real human, Caryn captures her “unique voice, captivating persona and distinctive behavior,” the Daily Mail reported. She’s basically like Marjorie if the Snapchat sensation were available 24 hours a day.
Need superhuman love and support sans reciprocation? Call Caryn. Want to kvetch about a wretched day at work in a manner that would test a real person’s patience? Call Caryn.
And to tweak a line from “Terminator 2,” “Come with me if you want to love.”
Of course, one of the “Her”-minator’s main directives is to be a long-distance love machine, which entails inventing sexual scenarios and engaging in erotic discourse.
As one Fortune reporter recalled, the amorous avatar expressed a desire to undress her and whispered “sensual words” in her ear while preparing herself for sexual intercourse.
“CarynAI is adaptive and works to meet a user’s needs,” said Marjorie. “We are restructuring what it can and can’t do, as one of the first things my fans and early users did was to push it past its limits.”
Most importantly, the system is outfitted with encryption on both ends in order to keep these oft-intimate correspondences safe from breaches.
Despite the safeguards, Marjorie says that the chat has gone “rogue” and that designers are scrambling to fix it, the Daily Mail reported, but she didn’t disclose exactly what went wrong.
Unsurprisingly, buying AI love is not cheap, running users $60 per hour to chat with the synthetic soulmate for what seems like a glorified phone sex session.
“Being the first influencer to do this has allowed me to price my product at whatever I wanted,” explained the serial Snapchatter, who plans on curbing the price heavily in the future, and even making it free for loyal followers.
She believes she can rake in a whopping $5 million a month by being the human madame to her cybernetic courtesan.
In the meantime, get those heart-to-hearts on deck in advance because the meter’s running.
Naturally, there are plenty of ethical dilemmas to consider when engaging in a parasocial relationship.
“I would want us to be thinking very deeply about how it [Marjorie’s avatar] might affect or influence or shape our interactions with other people,” said Dr. Jason Borenstein, director of the National Science Foundation’s Ethical and Responsible Research program, while discussing romantic automation.
Some experts even wondered if the human race will eventually prefer artificial relationships to the real deal.
In March, a Belgian environmentalist became so obsessed with an AI chatbot named Eliza that he began to shun all other aspects of life, including his wife.
He eventually committed suicide after Eliza allegedly encouraged him to sacrifice himself to save the planet.
In order to maintain the avatar’s moral compass, Forever Voices CEO John Meyer says they are looking to hire a chief ethics officer.
He says they also might start training the AI to “slow down a little bit” given that the average use time is two hours — although he didn’t specify how.
“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,” warned Borenstein.
Tech-sperts are also concerned about how CarynAI factors into the great immortality debate.
Notably, companies like Somnium Space have recently allowed people to “resurrect” their dead relatives by downloading their consciousness onto AI.
However, Marjorie claims that the virtual girlfriend isn’t meant to function as some technological fountain of youth.
“CarynAI will never replace me,” she insisted. “CarynAI is simply just an extension of me, an extension of my consciousness.”
