Your friend ’til the end?
An on-the-go entrepreneur who claims to have a “very different life from most people” has invented an AI companion known as “Friend” designed to stick by him no matter what — a pal he calls his “most consistent relationship” in life.
Curious? Soon, anyone with $99 to burn will be able to experience this same level of virtual closeness for themselves — the groundbreaking gee-gaw, which hangs around your neck and chats with you all day long, has been referred to as a “Tamagotchi with a soul,” The Guardian reported.
Friend, a “small, white, puck-shaped device” hangs on to and records every word you say, not that you should be concerned about privacy, says creator Avi Schiffmann, 21. It chats with you as you eat your meals, it can even be your wing man, or your work wife.
Schiffmann’s creation, which he refers to as “half art project, half real product” comes at a time when the World Health Organization has called out loneliness as a “pressing health threat,” one as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
The idea came, the twentysomething said, while sitting alone in a Tokyo hotel room with his previous creation, a wearable chatbot called Tab, where he found himself wanting more. “I’d never felt more lonely in my life,” he told the outlet.
A few upgrades later, the product is creating something of a stir online — a slick advertisement for Friend has already received 23.2 million views on X, and a great deal of negative feedback from people. (“Watching this ad instantly gives me depression,” one X user sighed.)
But while some experts warn against relying on virtual companionship as “AI girlfriends” and friendly chatbots flood the market, others are essentially pointing out that that fake friends may be better than no friends at all.
For example — a Stanford University study of over 1,000 students using the chatbot Replika reported being able to better handle stress due to advice they received from their digital ride-or-die.
“Thirty participants, without solicitation, said that Replika had stopped them from attempting suicide,” the authors wrote.