“You’re nobody ’til somebody loves you” dates back to a 1944 Dean Martin song, but it’s a principle that today’s creators abide by. The parasocial relationship is the lifeblood of a creator’s livelihood, and the method by which they gain, then attain, fame.

But that relationship is hard to maintain at scale. Keeping fans happily believing that you’re as personally invested in their success as they are yours is a tricky balancing act. It becomes nearly impossible when added to the long list of tasks creators have to tackle just to keep their businesses running.

Which is why some creators are embracing a new innovation that outsources the effort to stay close with their audience. AI is proving to be increasingly becoming a useful tool for creators in many ways—and AI company Forever Voices has drafted what its founder believes is the blueprint for the future of audience interaction.

The company first gained attention for its controversial use by Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old Snapchat influencer. After being trained on hours of Marjorie’s YouTube videos in order to capture her tone of voice and the topics she typically speaks about, the $1-a-minute chatbot dubbed CarynAI quickly spooled off into sexual innuendo and chat with its paying audience. Its creators claimed it was a regrettable error, though it made Marjorie $100,000 in its first week of going live.

While CarynAI had some unexpected behavior, Forever Voices’ founder John H Meyer is confident in the technology.  “We built the tech to work with about 10 or 15 minutes of audio to train a model based on that,” Meyer says. 

The technology was first developed in late 2022 when Meyer wanted to spend more time with his father, who he lost six years ago. Meyer used audio taken from home videos of his dead father to train a voice model that brought him back to life in AI form. “After the underlying technology was built, I began testing the tech with other AI personas—essentially these human-like AI agents that can behave in human-like manners with personalities,” he says.

Meyer later shared his groundbreaking tests on social media, and was contacted by influencers and their management teams about the possibility of outsourcing some of the audience interaction they do. Forever Voices the company was born.

Marjorie was his first client, and Twitch streamer Amouranth became the second creator to release an AI representation of herself in late May. As of mid-2023, Meyer claims to have contracts with “dozens” of creators signed, and Forever Voices is rolling out new models for creators on a weekly basis. He declined to share names of other creators, saying only that they “range from big YouTube creators to celebrities, to higher end, tier-one celebrities.” The latter wouldn’t be presenting a boyfriend- or girlfriend-like AI model, Meyer points out, but hypothesized that they could come to the market with “an educational-based AI, talking about their career interests and connecting with you on a human level.”

Meyer and the Forever Voices team makes things easy for creators, says Meyer. With Amouranth, Meyer says, the creator had “almost nothing” to do. Creators agree to  a contract with Forever Voices that gives the company the license to use their voice and likeness for the purposes of the AI tool. “After they sign, that’s all we need from them,” Meyer says. Internal tools and systems scrape the web for information about the specific creator, which is then augmented by training the AI’s personality model on their pre-existing content. The whole process takes less than 72 hours, Meyer says.

Creators do have the option to provide custom information about themselves that may not be online. Marjorie, for example, provided a list of bullet points about herself to give her CarynAI chatbot more personality and exclusivity for its paying users. Given the problems of CarynAI becoming sexually suggestive, Forever Voices has subsequently added functionality that allows creators to dictate the tone of their chats. “Some of our most recent creators want to keep solely PG or PG-13 interactions,” he says.

With new creators rolling out regularly and Meyer and his team learning from the missteps, Meyer believes Forever Voices will be more widespread across the creator space in the months and years to come. “The biggest benefit for creators is the ability to simultaneously talk to thousands of fans in real time, using their natural voice,” he says. “You're able to interact with the person as if they're your best friend. It democratizes that access in a way that wasn't really possible before.”