One of the weirdest things that has come out of this technology hype over something marketed as artificial intelligence is that a SnapChat influencer has launched an ‘AI’ version of herself that will be your girlfriend for $1/minute.

Probably the funniest part is that her name is phonetically the same as Karen. So you can have an artificial Karen as your girlfriend for only $1 a minute.

Still, it’s disturbing enough that men and possibly women would pay her in the first place. Sort of like a lot of the OnlyFans stuff that I keep hearing about.

Someone capitalizing on their looks is really nothing new. I don’t know much about her other than she’s not bad looking. She has people paying for a knock off version of herself, so I suppose there’s a market – but why is there a market for pseudo-intimacy?

It’s not as if the planet hasn’t become more populated with people. Where once you could throw a rock and hit someone, now you can throw an elbow and hit at least one person.

The even weirder thing is that another company, in completely unrelated news, seems to be working on custom chat-bots that could be used for much the same thing: Deep Fakes as a Service (DFaaS). It’s coming from China, too, one of the more populated nations on the planet… but it’s likely not looking at the Chinese market too much.

These technologies are basically Bayesian probability deciding from words in a dictionary on how to respond. Attach a pretty moving image, and tada – you’ve gotten to the emotional equivalent of a robotic stripper with a great vocabulary.