A Snapchat influencer partnered with an AI company to produce a chatbot clone of herself which she says can “fix social issues” associated with men’s loneliness.
Caryn Marjorie, who has nearly two million subscribers, launched the voice-based chatbot with the AI company Forever Voices.
“Men are told to suppress their emotions, hide their masculinity, and to not talk about issues they are having,” Marjorie tweeted.
“I vow to fix this with CarynAI. I have worked with the world’s leading psychologists to seamlessly add [cognitive behavioral therapy] and [dialectic behavior therapy] within chats. This will help undo trauma, rebuild physical and emotional confidence, and rebuild what has been taken away by the pandemic.”
The chatbot’s website describes itself as a “virtual girlfriend” which allows Marjorie’s fans to “enjoy private, personalized conversations” with the program that has been trained on thousands of hours of her social media videos.
In its beta testing phase, the chatbot had over 1,000 subscribers who paid $1 per minute to chat, generating $71,610 in revenue in its first week.
According to an update from Marjorie, the chatbot now has over 10,000 subscribers, who she referred to as her “boyfriends”.
Ethics Researchers Appalled
Irina Raicu, director of internet ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said the chatbot’s claims to be beneficial amount to a cash grab.
“These kind of grand claims about a product’s goodness can just mask the desire to monetize further the fact that people want to pretend to have a relationship with an influencer,” she said.
She also expressed concern that its claims of curing loneliness could actually have the opposite effect, saying it adds a “second layer of unreality” to often unhealthy relationships between influencers and their fans.
“These are claims that AI researchers have been trying so hard to combat, to tell people this is absolutely not what such tools do even if the language now is sounding like there’s sentience behind it,” she said. “There isn’t.”
Need same for women 2 aside men & Boomers
“These are claims that AI researchers have been trying so hard to combat, to tell people this is absolutely not what such tools do even if the language now is sounding like there’s sentience behind it,” she said. “There isn’t.”
Creators of Skynet: Skynet isn’t sentient.
Rational people: That doesn’t change what Skynet is doing.
AI Other issues:
Replicate voices for phone calls
Mislead voters
Fake Video ads
, Very scary for abuse