Friend: The AI gadget that wants to be your friend

NEWS – Friend is a new gadget that is currently under development.  Unlike most AI-based tools, this one doesn’t want to do any work for you or make you more productive.  It only wants to do one thing:  It wants to be your friend.  Friend is an AirTag-sized gadget on a necklace.  It has an always-on microphone that listens to everything you say and everything around you and uses BlueTooth to communicate what it hears to an app on your iPhone.  From your phone it connects to AI-powered software on the internet.  Why all this FBI-level snooping and constant connectivity?  What is the AI doing?  It’s pretending to be your friend, a friend that will send you a variety of context-appropriate messages throughout the day.  That’s it.  It’s trying to be like an actual friend who chit-chats with you as you go about your life.

Friend is powered by Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 large language model (LLM).  It contains a battery that should last about 15 hours, so you can recharge it while you sleep at night, and it comes in one color:  pretending to be an AirTag white.  If you’re interested, you can pre-order today for only $99.

We are people.  We are designed to be relational.  What on earth would motivate some of us to seek friendship from a digital companion instead from the real thing?  In America, at least, it’s been a process.  Cell phones and constant access to social media and online “friends” started it, and the pandemic carried it to the next level by keeping us at home.  Friend wants to keep up this trend and push us further away from normal.

What should we be concerned about?  Privacy!  If you thought Facebook was bad, this is even worse.  It constantly gathers information about everything you say and do, and you have no idea where this information is going, what it’s being used for, and who will sell your life to whom.  But perhaps even worse, it will increase isolation.  No matter how effective AI becomes at interacting with humans, it will never be a substitute for real, genuine, personal human relationships.  As TechRadar says, “We need real friends.”  In her interview with Wired, Dr. Halpern said that having an “AI friend instead of an actual human one is sort of like a starving person eating junk food.  It can get the job done in the short term, but it doesn’t nourish the person the way a healthy meal would.”  Very true.

Are there any situations where I think Friend might actually be a good idea?  Yes, I think so.  Sometimes people are in situations where they just can’t be with other people very often, perhaps like an elderly person who is home alone, someone with a disability who physically can’t get out much, or a person with an illness that can’t be around others.  In these very specific types of situations, I could see where having “someone” to chat with could be helpful in dealing with loneliness.  For the vast majority of us, however, we need to put our phones down and go hang out with some real friends.  Play a game!  Build some LEGOs.  Ride a bike.  Whatever!