"Ah, look at all the lonely people"

Caryn Marjorie is an influencer, with millions of followers across her social platforms. She's only 23, and has been pulling in about $1M a year. But she figured that, given the primarily male audience she influences, she was leaving money on the table. 

So she decided to take advantage of AI technology and turn her persona in CarynAI

...a voice-based chatbot that bills itself as a virtual girlfriend, with a voice and personality close enough to that of human Marjorie that people are willing to pay $1 per minute for a relationship with the bot. (Source: Yahoo (originally from Fortune)

To create this "virtual girlfriend," AI technology at Forever Voices ingested thousands of hours of the "real" Caryn Marjorie, culled from her old YouTube videos. 

In the first week of a paid beta, CarynAI brought in over $70K in revenue. They anticipate that CarynAI could be worth about $5M per month, spending:

...anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours every day in individual conversations, discussing plans for the future, sharing intimate feelings and even engaging in sexually charged chats.

The real Caryn sees something more than dollar signs. 

...she believes the company has the potential to “cure loneliness.”

Up until now, Forever Voices as produced chatbot versions of celebs like Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump.

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.

Ya think?

How healthy is it to have men developing relationships with a call girl - or is it a call bot? - rather than developing relationships with a real, live woman. The sort of relationships in which there's always the possibility that there'll be real, live sex, rather than jerking off while a call bot talks dirty to you - you and thousands of other guys, because AI-bots can wildly scale. 

At least in the good old phone sex days, you were talking to a human being. (Or so I gather. Phone sex is beyond my experiential sphere.)

I find the entire thing incredibly sad. Right down to the founding story of Forever Voices.

CEO and Founder John Meyer feels that his tech is important for young people who are, like himself (Asperger's, I take it) neuro-atypical, and who may have a hard time making connections. Some believe it may actually help users become more socially adept, able to transfer the skills they're building conversing with a bot to real life. 

Meyer created his first AI bot so that he could replicate his father, who committed suicide in 2017. 

“It’s this magical experience,” he says, speaking to the AI simulation of his father. “And it’s incredible to apply to other forms.”

Trust me when I say that I still miss my father, who died in 1971. If there's an afterlife, I'll be delighted to catch up with him. But I can't imagine how creepy, depressing, and weird it would be to have a convo with his AI doppelganger. Instead, I'll just keep settling for sharing "Dad memories" with my sibs.

As for those who get addicted to hanging with Caryn AI

...Meyer says that at two hours per day of use, they “might” start “in very subtle ways” training the AI to “slow down a little bit.”

Operative word here: "might." 

When there's big bucks at stake... 

In addition to the romantic/sexual bots out there, some developers are creating chat therapists. Sort of.

DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman recently unveiled an A.I. chatbot called Pi that’s designed to listen to the daily stresses in people’s lives and offer a “supportive line”—though it makes clear to users that it is not meant to be a substitute for a real life therapist. 

Oh, not at all... 

There's a lot of cautionary talk emerging about putting the brakes on chat AI until the ethical issues are better thought through. But methinks the genie is pretty much out of the bottle.

Scary. Scary and sad.

So I'll leave you with a bit of the Beatles, Eleanor Rigby from way back in 1966, when all we needed to worry about was real relationships, not artificial ones. 

All the lonely people (Ah, look at all the lonely people)

Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people (Ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all belong?

Another reason I'm just as happy to be from then, not now...