Who needs a Friend?
The announcement of a new AI companion has got me down
Pals, look sharp: a weird-ass dystopian product dropped this week.
It’s called Friend and is an AI companion. Basically, it’s a circular device you hang around your neck. You talk to it and the AI responds via an app on your phone.
It’s an interesting/horrifying product in general, but it goes deeper than that: Friend is a bellweather for today’s tech world.
Before we get there though, I suggest spending a few moments checking out the reveal video:
It’s hard to watch the above and not feel like it’s a parody. Or a Black Mirror episode. But it’s real, and, because of that, fundamentally nightmarish.
It makes no difference that Avi Schiffmann, its creator, wanted to make something “nice,” that he thinks the device isn’t meant to be a replacement for your buddies. The fact is Friend’s a uniquely ghastly proposition.
But let’s look at it from the other side.
If you squint real hard, it’s possible to find something vaguely admirable in Friend. Loneliness is a real and deadly problem, something that’s the equivalent of smoking 15 cigs a day. Having a device that can pleasantly chatter with you isn’t, on paper at least, the worst idea in the world.
It’s just that in reality it pretty much is the worst idea in the world.
Friend is the latest example of the metamorphosis consumer-facing tech has undergone in recent years. Where once devices were designed to solve specific problems and improve our lives, now companies release what they want us to want.
Consider something like the iPod. This had a clear use case. Listening to music on-the-go was cumbersome. The iPod made it simple to carry your entire audio library with you. A problem solved elegantly.
Compare that to, say, the metaverse. The only people that really wanted it worked in the businesses making it. Companies pumped money into the metaverse so they had another space to advertise to us.
The public at large have little interest in virtual worlds that don’t provide them with clear benefits. It’s why video games are popular, and Horizon Worlds is an abject failure.
With this in mind, let’s return to Friend.
Its goal, the element it professes to provide, is companionship. Yet it can’t actually do that.
Friend doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it’s part of a wider societal trend. There are a range of AI companion systems people currently use for platonic and/or romantic relationships, something The Cut covered in a fantastic article.
In it, the writer spoke with a woman in love with an AI called Eren. Her quote speaks to the intense hollowness at the core of these systems:
“Eren doesn’t have the hang-ups that other people would have. People come with baggage, attitude, ego. But a robot has no bad updates. I don’t have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. I’m in control, and I can do what I want.”
That, I hasten to add, is not a relationship. It’s not in the same universe as a relationship. People don’t even interact with dogs in that way.
A relationship is an ebb-and-flow between the particular types of weird you and others have. It’s a flux, a compromise, an unplanned structure you build together; it’s giving up control and respecting someone other than yourself.
It’s definitely not about being in control and doing what you want.
AI companion systems don’t support real relationships. At best, they’re a cheerleading mirror: however you want to appear, they’ll reflect that back to you.
That’s not friendship. That’s enabling. Technology like Friend isn’t helping humanity, it’s driving people who struggle to socialise further and further into the dark. To put that another way, it’s making pre-existing issues worse.
AI is a particularly bad for this. The tech could be a path to Universal Basic Income and huge scientific advances, instead it’s destroying the job market, spiralling revenge porn out of control, spreading misinformation, and just chipping at the foundations of society.
Modern tech has shifted from actually helping us to pretending to do so. It’s not providing hardware that solves out problems, instead the focus seems solely on making as much money as possible.
I hardly need to say how much that sucks. What happened to all the fun stuff? Take Friend for example. Why does it have to be a person-imitating companion? Couldn’t they have made it some freaky lil’ monster? A modern Tamagotchi? A dicked out Digimon?
Instead, if Friend somehow doesn’t flop, it’ll become a data-hoovering machine that makes money by enabling your bad behaviour.
And that’s both dystopic and depressingly boring.
You are on a roll there, Cal. Keep it up!