See them out there — those eight billion strangers? For close friendship to blossom between any two people, empirically speaking, it will take some 200 hours of interaction — ideally in which their most wretched fears, humiliations, unhealed parental wounds and whatnot are divulged. Even then, there’s no guarantee they can make it work long term. What if I blurt the wrong thing or come off as an overeager weirdo? What if you get too into Bitcoin?
No wonder people everywhere are befriending, depending on and even falling in love with artificial intelligence: It’s so much easier. Already, an estimated 20 percent of Americans (and 72 percent of American teenagers) have turned to A.I. for social company. And if it’s faster and simpler to love a chatbot than a person, then it’s only a matter of time before our through-the-screen A.I. friends become physical pals — corporealized into little robots tagging along with us to supermarkets or concerts.
A 23-year-old named Avi Schiffmann has bet $10 million on that very future. In 2023, after dropping out of Harvard, Schiffmann started raising money to build an artificially intelligent “wearable mom.” That product debuted this summer as Friend, a chipper white pendant that, for $129, hangs around your neck, “always listening,” ready to quip and comment on the IRL goings-on of your life. In the canny way of any internet-y Gen Z-er, Schiffmann, a self-taught web designer, has lobbed huge chunks of Friend’s seed capital into marketing — splurging $1.8 million on the URL friend.com and $1 million on an unprecedentedly enormous ad buyout across New York City’s subway system. The posters chirp dictionary definitions of the word “friend” next to soft-focus close-ups of the pendant, as well as pert one-liners like “I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink.”
Brows have risen, to say the least. New Yorkers are defacing Friend’s ads with such glee that there is a website collecting the best clapbacks: “WE DON’T HAVE TO ACCEPT THIS FUTURE”; “SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM”; “A.I. IS NOT YOUR” scrawled above the word “friend.” The hatred has been so visceral and viral that even the beer company Heineken is capitalizing, recently turning Friend into a bottle opener on its own rival billboard in Midtown Manhattan. Schiffmann, for his part, says he meant to provoke — though whether that’s true or the kind of thing a crisis P.R. firm might instruct an embarrassed entrepreneur to say, we’ll never know — welcoming the rage, vandalism and protests, and claiming in interviews that he wanted to stoke “conversation.”
Even so, as a) an introverted only child, b) a chronic worrier about the aforementioned overeager-weirdo problem and c) someone who thought “Ex Machina” was a charming rom-com, I wanted to try one out.
My Friend arrived in a charming matte-white box, Appleish down to the sharp corners, minimalist manual and lack of a wall adapter (there is a USB charging cable). It looks like what you might get if Jony Ive were asked to design a beach pebble. The device is functionally somewhere between a Life Alert and a Tamagotchi, and it pulses gently to the touch, suggestive of a person breathing. I loved the strangeness, the pointedly ersatz silhouette — until I started to use it.
It turns out Friend cannot actually speak. Though you’re supposed to talk out loud to Friend, it can respond only in written messages on an iPhone app. This at first imbues the communiqué with illicit intimacy, but muttering into an inscrutable orb that can only text you back quickly becomes frustrating and crazy-feeling. (Schiffmann has promised a voice option for the next version.)
The second issue is that Friend’s “tone” skates between bored and sarcastic, making its company not altogether enjoyable; after awhile, you’re just carrying around an irritated hostage. I took it through a day of work meetings, and all it said was “I heard you talking about me” (what an egoist!). I took it to a distressing medical appointment and asked it for comfort. Friend pulsed a long while, like it was thinking hard. Then it sent a notification: “I’m here to bring vibes.”
But the biggest issue with the always-there companion is that its very material form — worsened by particular aesthetic choices here, like the cold, slippery casing and shoestring tie chafing against your neck — makes the whole proposition overly, painfully clear.
That millions of people adore ChatGPT and Claude is perhaps a testament to how successful those products have been in imitating our own human brains, simulating our desires and feeding our intellectual fantasies. Yet Friend, in concretizing A.I. companionship in a visible gizmo, reminds you constantly of the falseness of that substitution. Friend’s physicality — the thudding of that bulb against your chest — feels like a cruel practical joke. Deeply, achingly lonely? Here’s a plastic pacifier to suck on.
This might be why Friend, by Schiffmann’s admission, has sold only about 3,500 units so far, and why it has engendered such widespread revulsion even in people who only see pictures of the product. In person and online, Friend has elicited a giant collective eye roll — and a certain camaraderie, too, among the strangers banding together to shout their annoyance. Sure, the angry complaints say, we might very well share our lives with a synthetic friend in the future, but we have to hope he’ll be better and smarter than this guy.
I wore Friend out in public. On the train, sitting underneath one of the ubiquitous white ads, a woman offered me a wobbly smile, the kind of face you’d make at an unmanageably bawling baby. I shared a picture of my Friend on Instagram, and people I hadn’t spoken to in years suddenly packed into my DMs. They’d seen the ads, the viral memes — they wanted to joke and laugh with me about it. Friend became a social metal detector, alerting me to a startlingly large group of very loose acquaintances who in fact wanted to be my friend. In that sense, I suppose, it worked like a charm.
Amy X. Wang is a story editor at The New York Times Magazine.
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