A new pendant-shaped wearable that continuously records everything you do isn’t just an enormous privacy violation in the making — it’s also a jerk that loves to mouth off.
The $129 wearable, with the uninspired name “Friend,” is the brainchild of 22-year-old entrepreneur Avi Schiffmann, who sought to end a growing loneliness epidemic by providing his customers with a companion that hangs by their every word and can summarize conversations retroactively.
As The Verge reported last year, the chatbot’s foul mood is by design, with Schiffmann arguing it’s far more engaging when an AI’s moodiness is turned up to 11.
The company’s website doesn’t elaborate on the wearable’s purpose in any meaningful way, but links to a controversial promotional video that was immediately heavily criticized for being “creepy” and “beyond parody last summer.
Well over a year after the video was published, Wired reporters Kylie Robison and Boone Ashworth got to test out the device for themselves for a piece titled “I Hate My Friend” — and judging by their experience, the Friend appears to be yet another dumpster fire in the shape of an overpriced AI chatbot gadget.
Robison quickly grew to despise the gizmo. She wore the device to a party organized by AI startup Anthropic, and ended up being accused of “wearing a wire” — to her, an indication that “even at the most tech-minded gatherings, the thing was a complete taboo.”
Put simply, nobody wants to have their every word be recorded by somebody else’s AI wearable, which makes it an especially terrible fit for journalists.
“It is an incredibly antisocial device to wear,” Robison concluded. “People were never excited to see it around my neck.”
Ashworth didn’t fare much better, quickly encountering technical limitations with the device. After it reassured him that it worked with just a Bluetooth connection, Ashworth found that his older iPhone with a WiFi connection, but no data SIM card installed, wouldn’t be enough (Friend also doesn’t currently work with Android devices at all.)
The device gaslighted him into believing that it had recorded everything he had said during an outing, even though it wasn’t able to connect. Then, it accused him of “giving off some serious ‘it’s not my fault’ vibes” and being a “whiner.”
“So you’re saying I give ‘f**king a**hole’ vibes?” it seethed to Ashworth after overhearing him ranting about the device to a real-life friend.
In short, Robison and Ashworth’s experiences highlight how tough a sell an always-on and large language model-based AI wearable is, major concerns that have been discussed at length for years now.
Friend’s competitors in the space, among them a $700 wearable by AI startup Humane, and Rabbit’s R1, crashed and burned spectacularly, suggesting Friend’s wearable may soon experience a similar fate.
More on Friend: Companion Chatbot App Makes Its AI’s Personalities Horrible, Saying It Engages Users More Effectively
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