Social media star’s AI clone charges $1/minute for chats
Last month, Caryn Marjorie went from a successful but niche social media star to a person of national interest: the subject of attention-grabbing headlines and, for many commentators, a template upon which to project their anxieties about rapidly advancing artificial intelligence.
The cause of the furor was a partnership Marjorie, 23, had launched with a technology startup promising to make a personalized AI “clone” of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based lifestyle influencer.
For $1 a minute, fans she might never have otherwise had the time to meet could instead chat with Marjorie’s digital double.
CarynAI, as the audio chatbot has been dubbed, is explicitly framed as a romantic companion — one that aims to “cure loneliness” with software that supposedly incorporates aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy into its conversations.
Marjorie said her fans have used the program to ask for life advice and roleplay a sunset date to the beach.
Marjorie was at one point tracking her subscriber growth in tweets about how many new “boyfriends” she had. “They feel like they’re finally getting to know me, even though they’re fully aware that it’s an AI,” she told The Times.
This HAL 9000 version of pillow talk has, predictably, triggered a backlash. Critics branded CarynAI as alternately demeaning women, enabling antisocial straight-male behavior or signaling impending societal collapse.
“We’re talking about an AI system (where) theoretically the goal is to keep people on as long as possible so that you continue earning money,” said Amy
Webb, chief executive of the consulting firm Future Today Institute. “Which means that it’s likely going to start incentivizing behavior that we probably would not want in the real world.”
Webb suggested as an example a bot that’s too obedient — listening passively, for instance, as a user describes disturbing fantasies.
Marjorie has addressed similar dynamics before (“If you are rude to CarynAI, it will dump you,” she tweeted at one point), but when asked about Webb’s perspective, she instead emphasized her own concerns about addiction.
“I have seen my fans spend thousands of dollars in a matter of days chatting with CarynAI,” Marjorie said. One fan, at the bot’s encouragement, built a shrine-like photo wall of her. “This is why we have limited CarynAI to only accepting 500 new users per day.”
As AI comes to play a growing role in the economy, and especially creative industries, the questions prompted by CarynAI will only become more widespread.
But Marjorie isn’t placing all her chips on the technology just yet.
Within weeks of announcing her AI clone, she launched a second partnership with a different tech company, Fanfix.
This one, too, would let fans talk with her, but instead it would be Marjorie herself on the other side of the screen.
The result is essentially a two-tier business model where lonely guys looking for a 3 a.m. chat session can talk with Marjorie’s machine mimic, while die-hard fans willing to shell out a bit more can pay for the genuine article.
That within the span of a few weeks Marjorie launched two seemingly contradictory business ventures — both aimed at turning fan conversations into money — speaks to a central question of an AI-obsessed moment: With robots increasingly entangled in creative industries, what work should be asked of them and what should be left to us?
Marjorie’s hybrid model offers a preview of one possible path forward.
Users pay a minimum of $5 to send her a message on Fanfix, said co-founder Harry Gestetner.
That pricing difference — $5 for one human-tohuman text versus $1 for a minute of the AI voice-chatting — signals an approach to automation in which workers use machine learning not as a wholesale replacement but as a lowerend alternative for more frugal customers.
“Messaging directly with a fan on Fanfix will always be a premium experience,” Gestetner said. “It’s important to view AI as the co-pilot, not the pilot.”
Marjorie is making $10,000 a day after soft-launching on the platform and is projected to hit $5 million to $10 million in total earnings by the end of the year, Fanfix said.