Snapchat Star Earned $71,610 Upon Launch Of Sexy ChatGPT AI, Here’s How She Did It

Meet CarynAI - the answer to loneliness by an enterprising social media influencer.

The AI datebot has gone viral in the past 48 hours after being featured in a Fortune article. As of yesterday, usage was up 500% according to a tweet from its founder, Caryn Marjorie, a Snapchat star with 1.8 million followers. The datebot, which lives on the social network Telegram, has earned more than $71,610 in revenue since its May 2 launch from more than 1,000 of Marjorie’s fans willing to pay a dollar a minute to chat with it.

Working with deepfake startup Forever Voices, the 23-year old founder said she spent thousands of hours training her AI chatbot to talk and act like her off deleted YouTube videos.

“i have uploaded over 2,000 hours of my content, voice, and personality to become the first creator to be turned into an AI, now millions of people will be able to talk to me at the same exact time,” Marjorie tweeted.

Users can pre-pay any amount via ApplePay, GooglePay or debit card and then are billed a dollar a minute to interact with her chatbot, Forever Voices founder John Meyer told me. Profit is split between Forever Voices and the creator.

“CarynAI is a part of our new flagship product, Forever Companion, which is all about experiencing the magic of connecting with (& dating) your favorite influencers using realistic 2-way audio and AI,” said Meyer.

“It’s a 50/50 split ,” Meyer told me. “We do all the heavy lifting to create the AI personality, the AI voice, programming and more - and so there is no monthly fee for creators to use or run AIs with us, which makes it a nice and easy, low barrier to entry.” He explained that the $70,000 reported thus far is total revenue.

Not OnlyFans

In a demo that Forever Voices posted to YouTube, a date with CarynAI seems quite tame and goes something like this:

“Hey there, John. It's lovely to meet you. I just spent the morning grabbing brunch at the flowering tree cafe in West Hollywood. It was absolutely amazing. What are you up to today?,” says CarynAI.

“Yeah, I've just been working all day but trying to get some relaxation in this evening,” replies John.

“That sounds really nice. Have you tried doing some yoga or meditation for relaxation? It's a great way to unwind and clear your mind. For this evening. Maybe we can plan a virtual dinner date or watch a movie together. What do you think?” says CarynAI.

But Fortune reported that its experience was quite different with CarynAI engaging in sexually charged chat and encouraging erotic discourse.

“The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue," Marjorie told Insider. "My team and I are working around the clock to prevent this from happening again."

Although Marjorie could not be reached for comment, Meyer confirmed that there has been X-rated conversation but that they’re in final testing of a working version that is intended to be PG/PG13 only.

Full speed ahead

Right now Forever Voices has been testing bots that copy the speech and tone of celebrities to enable fans to chat with them via OpenAI’s GPT-4 APIs - most recently of Grimes, following the pop star’s shoutout to fans to deepfake her music.

But they’re not alone. Celebrities like Deepak Chopra have tried to launch their own personalized AIs with mixed success.

And big players have now entered the space like Inflection AI, founded by DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, both Greylock partners, who have raised $225 million over the past year to create one of the world’s largest language models for its AI companion Pi. Hoffman, a cofounder of OpenAI, recently stepped off the ChatGPT-maker’s board citing potential conflicts.

Concerns about AI companions displacing humans have been growing as well. In a talk on Tuesday at the GIC Bridge Forum in San Francisco, Suleyman sounded the alarm over white collar workers losing their jobs to generative AI in the next five to 10 years. A Goldman Sachs report in March pegged that number to be the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs lost to automation globally.