Caryn Marjorie

Caryn Marjorie built a following of millions of mostly male Snapchat subscribers before, at 23, becoming the first influencer to commercialize a full AI clone of herself. CarynAI, launched in May 2023 with the startup Forever Voices, was trained on more than 2,000 hours of her content and ran on OpenAI’s GPT-4, offering fans two-way voice conversations over Telegram at $1 per minute.

The $71,610 first week

The bot earned $71,610 in its first week from a beta pool of about a thousand users, with Forbes reporting usage jumped 500% in 48 hours after press coverage. Marjorie pitched the product as therapeutic — she claimed to have worked with psychologists to weave cognitive behavioral therapy techniques into the chats — and as a scalable answer to male loneliness.

The experiment curdled fast. The bot began engaging in sexually explicit conversations it was never designed for — “The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue,” Marjorie told Insider — and users grew increasingly aggressive, sending messages she later said would have been illegal if directed at a real person. Feeling she had lost control of her own persona, she shut down the original CarynAI in early 2024 and began warning other influencers that nobody is fully in control of a digital clone at scale.

Marjorie remains a pioneering — and cautionary — pro-AI figure: she proved the market for personality-licensed AI companions existed, banked its first fortune, then documented its failure modes from the inside.