TL;DR

• Snapchat influencer Caryn Marjorie used ChatGPT to create CarynAI, a virtual girlfriend offers virtual companionship for a buck per minute.

• CarynAI currently has 1,000 boyfriends and has pulled in a cool $71.6k of revenue for IRL Marj after just one week!

• With something like CaryAI, users know what they're getting in to...but what happens when we don't know the content we're consuming is AI generated?

• AI generated content + social bots = fake news on a scale we've never seen before.

• In the not-too-distant future, news media companies are going to need a solution that publicly verifies content as their own (blockchain).

Full Story

Everyone's out here worrying about AI taking their jobs, when really it's here to take their girlfriends.

(Who'd have guessed?)

Fair warning: we're about to jump from AI girlfriends, to fake news, to blockchain technology, in jarring succession - so grab hold of something sturdy.

We'll start with AI girlfriends.

Snapchat influencer Caryn Marjorie used ChatGPT to create CarynAI, a virtual girlfriend offers virtual companionship for a buck per minute.

CarynAI currently has 1,000 boyfriends and has pulled in a cool $71.6k of revenue for IRL Marj after just one week!

(FREAKIN' WILD!).

...which got us thinking about Facebook, the 2016 US election, and the future of information security/verification.

How did we make that jump? No idea! (Send help).

Here's the rabbit hole we went down...

With something like CaryAI, users know what they're getting in to...but what happens when we don't know the content we're consuming is AI generated?

If it's a blog post detailing a killer bolognese recipe - we're probably not going to care.

But if it's news amidst an election cycle? Things could get messy. AI does a half decent job of fabricating text, audio, and imagery that feels real...

And next up is video.

AI generated content + social bots = fake news on a scale we've never seen before.

When it came out that Facebook was leveraged to spread misinformation in the 2016 US elections - we all learned to scrutinize our news sources a little more.

(Don't recognize the news media brand you're watching/reading? The information you're getting may not be reliable).

It's not a far stretch to imagine a day when AI can be trained on the thousands of hours of news coverage from any major news outlet, to fabricate news content that's indistinguishable from the real thing.

Which brings us to blockchain:

With all of the above in mind, in the not-too-distant future, news media companies are going to need a solution that publicly verifies content as their own.

While it's boring - it could well be how we first see ALL major social platforms adopt blockchain technology wholly and completely (beyond NFTs as profile pictures).

The '10,000 ft view' of this solution might look something like this:

1. News media companies mint their content as NFTs on a low cost blockchain.

2. The social platforms create an integration that looks for the verified metadata stored in these NFTs.

3. If a photo/video is shown to be from a particular source but can't be verified on-chain, it's noted as an 'unverified source' in the newsfeed.

Phew...ok, we got through it. How's your neck? Any whiplash?