This AI girlfriend made $72k in a week

What you need to know

• Social media influencer Caryn Marjorie has launched an AI version of herself, CarynAI to pose as a virtual girlfriend.
• CarynAI costs $1 a minute to provide entertainment and companionship via the Forever Voices platform.
• The virtual girlfriend service has made $72k in just one week. 

There's no doubt about it, Artificial Intelligence is changing the business and social landscape as we know it, from using AI tools to create art, to children's books appearing on Amazon completely written and illustrated by AI, the possibilities are endless with what AI can achieve. Can AI enrich our lives in a more meaningful way though? One social media influencer thinks so. She has created an AI version of herself that offers virtual companionship for a fee. In just one week, she has earned $75k by charging $1 per minute for anyone who wants a girlfriend — or an extra one, in case your real girlfriend is tired of hearing you talk about AI.

CarynAI is the creation of Snapchat star Caryn Marjorie and Forever Voices, who've monetized her personality to maximum profit by creating an AI version of Caryn to offer virtual companionship to anyone who wishes to pay for it.

Caryn already has a substantial following on Snapchat, 1.8 million followers no less, but the CarynAI chatbot has received over 1000 sign-ups in a week, generating over $71,610 for the girlfriend service. 

Forever Voices constructed Caryn AI by binge-watching over 2,000 hours of Caryn Marjorie's Youtube content which they then used to craft a personality engine. Forever Voices are also known for creating versions of Barack Obama, Taylor Swift and even Albert Einstein for users to debate with.

Forever Voices uses cutting-edge natural language processing and speech synthesizing to make their AI personas sound and act like the real deal. According to the Caryn.AI website, Caryn’s voice, persona, and behavior are all part of this digital doppelganger that you can talk to anytime and anywhere you want. At $1 a minute, she might be a bargain compared to a real-life girlfriend, but don’t expect her to laugh at your jokes. She has artificial intelligence, not artificial humor.

Caryn did an interesting interview with The Washington Post, where she talked more about her motivations behind helping create the AI, which aren't simply for financial gain.

Caryn wants to be there for all of her fans who need a friend and “cure loneliness”, but she also made it clear that she doesn’t peek at their chats and it’s up to them if they want to share them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite safeguards put in place, some users have found ways to make the conversations sexually explicit. We're sure PornHub is watching this experiment with interest.

It's not really surprising that users have already hacked the AI Girlfriend for more cheeky purposes since the hottest posts on any AI subreddit are usually about making the tools go rogue. It seems artificial intelligence can't always account for human nature, and we've seen this before with Replika which was similarly created for companionship but had to have its more erotic personality traits toned down.

You can check out our six simple tricks to transform Bing Chat prompts for some simple ideas on getting the answers you want from Bing, just don't ask it to send nudes.

As with other more creative uses for AI, this does pose some ethical questions around the use of artificial tools to meet our desires. Are users fully aware of how their data is collected using such bots, and does the AI itself respect the privacy rights of the human models it uses on which to model its behavior?

As this technology progresses rapidly, we will see more amazing and diverse applications of it, and corporations need to catch up.  John Meyer, CEO of Future Voices has said in interviews that the company is hoping to employ a chief ethics officer which seems like a wise move. 

What do you think of using AI to fulfil more basic social needs? And which member of Windows Central staff would you like to see made as an AI bot?