Yesterday, X user Avi Schiffman announced a new AI-powered device called The Friend. His post about it quickly went viral—probably not because people were excited about the technology on display, but because the video he used to promote it presents a depressing vision of our AI future that only a tech bro could find appealing.
The video shows off the wearable pendant that purportedly listens to everything you say and responds to you "conversationally" via a chat window on your phone. You can speak directly to your Friend by hitting a button, but it's apparently always listening anyway, and it will comment, unprompted, on the goings-on in your life, like a Tamagotchi that spies on you, or a real person you'd get a restraining order against.
My first instinct, unpon seeing the video, was that the whole thing is bullshit vaporware. It smells like an online hoax, like the air umbrella or those bonzai kittens. It's such viscerally creepy idea that I figured it had to be some an attempt at social commentary, or joke, or an ad for next season of Black Mirror. The announcement video plays like a parody, and it didn't help that the official friend.com website was flagged as a "suspicious site" by my ISP:
But upon further investigation, it appears I was wrong: The Friend is still just as stupid seeming, but it's actually real. Wired says they've seen one and spoken to the creator, who has the right kind of background to have developed something like this. Twenty-one-year-old Avi Schiffman was named a Webby person of the year, and was a guest at the 2020 WIRED 25 conference, among other accomplishments—including spending $1.8 million of his company's $2.5 million in seed money to acuire the friend.com URL.
You can preorder The Friend right now for $99. Wired reports that will get you a pendant that's powered by Claude AI and connects to your phone via Bluetooth, has a battery life of around 15 hours, doesn't require a subscription fee (yet), and will ship some time in 2025.
Unlike multifunctional AI devices like the Humane Ai pin and Rabbit R1, The Friend doesn't seem to do anything except have LLM-powered conversations with you—it's not designed for productivity, just companionship, like an AI girlfriend you wear around your neck. “Productivity is over, no one cares,” Schiffmann told Wired. “No one is going to beat Apple or OpenAI or all these companies that are building Jarvis. The most important things in your life really are people.”
The device's creator said the goal is for The Friend to develop a personality that "complements the user" and that it could eventually become your best friend. “I feel like I have a closer relationship with this fucking pendant around my neck than I do with these literal friends in front of me,” Schiffmann said, which seems normal.
I mean, did you watch the commercial? I'm not exactly sure why the mere idea of The Friend makes my skin crawl. It's not that different from the Rabbit AI or a Tamagotchi, but those have a reason to exist beyond providing a simulacra of another person to talk to. No one fell in love with their Tamagotchi; it was just a game. This is something else. It gives me the same sinking feeling as those Japanese robot companions.:There's something just wrong about the concept that a machine—whether a robot or a LLM—can or should stand in for actual human companionship.
People inventing tech gadgets to replace (as opposed to enhance) human connection feels like a line we shouldn't cross. It feels like evidence that things are going in a very wrong direction. Picture a world where The Friend catches on (it won't), in which people walk around talking to their AI friends all day, and ignoring all the real people they pass. It makes me want to buy a one-way ticket to someplace where no one has ever heard of AI.
