![]() With thousands more fans now on the waiting-list to join the service, Marjorie reckons she could soon be making $5 million every month. Interacting with it costs $1 a minute: in the first week it was available it raked in $100,000. But the demand far outstrips her capacity to meet it, and that has prompted her to launch CarynAI, a bot which “replicates her voice, mannerisms and personality”. Some pay for access to an online forum where she spends five hours a day answering their questions. 98 percent of them are men, and many of them seem to be obsessed with her. And it’s turned out that bereaved relatives aren’t the only people willing to pay for that.įorever Voices’ breakthrough product is not a “griefbot” but an AI version of a living person named Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year old social media influencer who has two million followers on Snapchat. As Meyer says, it’s “super-realistic”: it feels almost like having an actual conversation with the person. This new approach dispenses with the supernatural element (a chatbot is a machine in which we know there is no ghost), but the illusion it offers is more powerful in other ways. Humans have always looked for ways to communicate with the dead, whether through shamans, mediums, spirit guides or Ouija boards. In the last few years, using the latest technology (ChatGPT-style generative AI, “deepfake” imaging and voice-cloning) to recreate dead loved ones has become something of a trend: it started with individuals like Meyer building their own, but today there are companies which offer “griefbots” as a commercial service. ![]() He started Forever Voices after developing, for his own use, a chatbot that replicated the voice and personality of his recently deceased father. Sorry, an AI that you’re dating? How did yesterday’s fraud turn into tomorrow’s must-have product?ĪIs you could date were not originally at the centre of Meyer’s business plan. Most Americans will have an AI companion in their pocket…whether it’s an ultra-flirty AI that you’re dating, an AI that’s your personal trainer, or simply a tutor companion. Its founder John Meyer predicts that by the end of this decade, I thought of this when I read a recent piece in the Washington Post about a California startup called Forever Voices. Most, however, seem not to have suspected anything. ![]() Linguistically the bots were pretty basic, and some men became suspicious when they received identical “sexy” messages from multiple different “women”. It turned out to be a scam, taking money from men to put them in touch with women who, for the most part, did not exist: they were invented by employees and then impersonated by an army of bots. In the early days of this blog (which is eight years old this month) I wrote about Ashley Madison, an online service for people seeking opportunities to cheat on their partners.
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