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- 🤖 Augmentation, rather than replacement
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👧 AI Girlfriend Makes $72,000 in 1 week
🎥 “Augmentation, not replacement” — Screen Actors Guild
🍿 AI Kernels
Influencer charges $1/min to talk to AI version of herself — makes $72k in 1 week
A Snapchat influencer named Caryn Marjorie used OpenAI’s software to train an AI model on her videos. Now she’s charging $1/minute to talk to her AI self.
CarynAI made $72,000 in the first week. 😮 Forever Voices, the company behind the chatbot, expects $5 million in monthly revenue.
“I have over 18,000 boyfriends now,” Caryn tweeted on May 17.
Not sure if this says something about Caryn’s brilliance or the weirdness of dudes 😂. Well, let’s take away the judgment for a moment. AI Girlfriends/Boyfriends may be a huge new way for influencers, actors, and musicians to make money and “talk” to their fans in a scalable way.
Justine Moore, a partner at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, believes that in the future, anyone can build an AI version of themselves.
“AI girlfriends are going to be a huge market […] Today, this only really works if you’re a conventionally attractive woman with an audience online. In the future, I expect anyone will be able to create and scale a virtual influencer “character” that can sell services like this. The next big side hustle?”
CarynAI isn’t the first AI girlfriend invented. You can’t forget about the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix. Plus there’s a company called Replika, which blew up earlier this year for their companionship chatbots. But CarynAI is the first big chatbot trained on a specific person’s videos.
“CarynAI is the first step in the right direction to cure loneliness,” Caryn said. “Men are having to suppress their emotions, hide their masculinity, and to not talk about issues they are having. I vow to fix this with CarynAI.”
There’s no way to know whether CarynAI will cure loneliness or make it worse. But the loneliness epidemic is 100% real. While 61% of all U.S. adults report feeling lonely, that figure is 79% among Gen Z and 71% among Millennials.
If CarynAI helps some people cure loneliness, I guess it’s good right? The only question now is: what do you get your AI girlfriend for Valentine’s Day???
“Augmentation, rather than replacement,” declares SAG-AFTRA
Screenwriters need to get accustomed to AI. Quick.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the Chief Negotiator of the SAG-AFTRA, says that at this point, he is fighting for AI to be used for exclusively augmentation and ban outright replacement.
“Obviously, there are other kinds of implementations of generative AI that we are concerned about that seem to replace performers. But if there are appropriate human-centered ethics and guardrails around them, it’s not fundamentally the technology that’s the concern. It’s the use. When it’s used with informed consent and compensation for real-life performers, we think that can be OK.”
Crabtree-Ireland says it’s a “mandatory subject of bargaining”. “To the extent that the companies want to do something new with AI, they have to negotiate that with us,” he continued. “It’s not like if it’s not mentioned in the contract they can just do what they want.” Studios have already been using AI for years, but when it comes to new uses, they’ll have to state it in contracts.
“For writers, the AI construct is limited to language. Whereas for actors an entire scene can be impacted in a multitude of ways by AI — from lighting, to the age of the actor, to removing a blemish, to superimposing a rocket ship in the scene.”
“We are transitioning into an era of assistive computing,” notes Amy Webb, founder and CEO of Future Today Institute, which does long-range scenario planning and consultation for Fortune 500 companies and Hollywood creatives. We sure are, Amy. We sure are.
AI Kernels
Here’s a round-up of interesting news and stories that caught our attention this week:
ChatGPT released its iOS app. Finally. Got an idea for a screenplay? Talk to ChatGPT on the fly from anywhere. → @OpenAI
StabilityAI release a text-to-animation platform. Will the next Bojack Horseman be animated via AI? → StabilityAI
Use AI to find clothes in movies. Now I just need to find Timothée Chalamet’s outfit in Dune and surely I’ll be as cool as him. → Hopshop
AI-Themed Content of the Week
Every week, we’ll hit you with a piece of content centered around AI. It might be a book, movie, whatever.
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