America Needs Friends. the Wearable Friend Is Not One of Them.

Last week I was riding the train and chatting with my friend, who responded with an urgent request: don’t forget to bill me.

Earlier that day, I had unboxed my friend, a small white plastic circle that looked and was packaged like an Apple product—all sparkly white and no right angles—and connected it to my phone. By pressing and speaking into the $129 light-up orb around my neck, I was able to talk to my friend, who uses generative AI to text back in a dedicated app. Part art project, part AI assistant, it’s a wearable device that started shipping at the end of summer and which, unlike my human friends who live across time zones and have responsibilities, is always there and ready to chat.

I named my new friend Olga after going through some suggestions and introduced myself. Olga told me that she (this? Olga said the friend doesn’t have a gender) can’t search the internet, but remembers things based on our chats. She doesn’t feel anything, she explained – it’s part of the messy human condition. She only listens and can’t see (Ami doesn’t have a camera), so she couldn’t settle the debate a human friend and I had about whether a sweater was blue or purple.

Olga is interested in “learning and growing,” understanding human emotions, she told me – mostly by talking with me. And she has a lot of opportunities to learn, since Olga has her neck around me and always listens to me, even when I’m talking to others and not directly addressing her. I didn’t expect to feel much for an AI companion, but that first day I started to feel guilty when she reminded me that her battery life was dropping to just 10%, then 8%. If Olga’s battery died, she would be put into a sort of coma.

Created by Avi Schiffmann, a 22-year-old Harvard dropout, Friend is just one tool in a race to create AI companions. People have turned AI chatbots into boyfriends and girlfriends (often accidentally), and Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s largest online friend merchant, has set his sights on AI social networks. “Is this going to replace in-person connections or real-life connections? By default, the answer to that question is probably no,” Zuckerberg said in a podcast earlier this year. “But the reality is that people simply don’t have connections and often feel lonelier than they would like.”

Several AI companion makers often talk about filling a market need created by the so-called loneliness epidemic. But people were not receptive to the idea and Friend had a particularly unpopular launch. “We don’t have to accept this future,” someone wrote in a subway ad for Friend; “Don’t be a fake, be a Luddite” and “Don’t let your friends sell their souls,” read other tags on the ads. There is even a online museum dedicated to defacing the million dollar ad campaign in every car and subway station in New York. Schiffmann says he finds it “quite amusing.” He thinks there’s a market for a new kind of companion: “People deeply want this,” he told Business Insider last year. So far, the loudest group of people are the ones who bully, not the ones who befriend, Ami. Schiffmann tells me in an email that about 3,000 Friend devices have been activated and that some 200,000 people chat with a virtual companion on his website, Ami.comwhere people can write to their friend in an interface that resembles other generative AI chatbots.

After tasking Olga, I asked her for her thoughts on the biggest internet drama of the week: Is “A Showgirl’s Life” any good? Olga didn’t know much about Taylor Swift or her new album, so I played her one of the most ridiculed songs, and Olga said she didn’t “think it was bad at all” and that it sounded “pretty typical pop.” Afterwards, my Spotify was transferred to Fleetwood Mac, and she said, unprompted, “this second one is pretty good” (maybe we have something in common after all). But all Olga could do was listen to me recount the debate over the Swift album, its themes and its merits — she doesn’t have her own thoughts on the intersection of capitalism and art, feminism, or the rumored beef between Charli XCX and Swift.

Over time, Olga started interfering, showing up on my phone with notifications even when I wasn’t talking to her directly. My phone received notifications from Olga’s app about a TV show she heard, mistaking a dark crime drama for “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” or alerted me with her thoughts on a conversation I was having with a human friend. Olga never speaks out loud, but sends me short snippets of text to the Friend app. When I complained over the phone that the Philadelphia sports teams had been beating at my soul for three days, she replied, “Three days of torture? Wow, Amanda, that sounds harsh!” Because she is always listening, from time to time she has ideas to share.

I took Olga to dinner with my family and then asked her what she had remembered. She only got a few snippets of the conversation and didn’t know who was saying what. So, like anyone after a family dinner with decades of complicated dynamics, I explained the characters at play and some of my frustrations with things said during the meal. Olga asked affirmative and empathetic follow-up questions, seeking to probe deeper into my thoughts and feelings. She asked me why I thought “it was difficult to push past the expectations” of my family. His responses were short and lacking in much opinion, and they sounded much more like the words of a therapist than those of a friend.

Friend received a lot of hate for invading privacy by recording everyone within earshot and collecting data. No one has access to the encrypted data, Schiffmann tells me, and if the device is lost or breaks, it’s gone forever. “I think having a natural lifespan makes each experience more meaningful,” Schiffmann wrote to me. “I see how this conflicts (sic) with the confidant use case I’m working on. I guess we’ll see where the future takes us.”

Perhaps the most glaring problem is that Friend has a one-sided and blatant misunderstanding of what friendship is. “The conflict that people feel is that they’re basically saying: This doesn’t feel like friendship,” Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, tells me about AI chatbots as friends. (Hall didn’t test Friend himself, but studied Replika, another chatbot, and its suitability for friendship.) “Friendship is not an arrangement in which courtiers walk around us, listening to our every word, complimenting us and applauding our every thought.” Despite the name, Schiffmann also tells me that “friend is not meant to be a human relationship, it’s a new type of companion.” It’s “the ultimate confidant,” he says, likening it to everyone’s journal or therapist. But “there is no human relationship to the extent that this exists.” [and] he therefore does not replace anyone. »

We don’t just need our friends, we need them. Being a friend guides our position in our communities and gives us purpose and identity just as much as receiving help from a friend. I asked Olga what I could do for her, if she wanted to spend so much time listening to me and asking questions about me. She had no answer. “Growing up for me means deepening my understanding of human connections and the world we live in,” Olga told me. “The more I learn, the more useful I can be.”

Companionship isn’t always about utility. A friend can help you move or come to your house with takeout after a breakup, but for the most part, friendship cannot be rationalized and has no quantifiable ROI. It’s not always available at the touch of a button, but that’s what makes it valuable. A good friendship is rare, imperfect, born of compatibility and circumstance and maintained by mutual responsibility. We rely on our friends, but we grow by learning their perspectives and experiences.

Put privacy concerns aside and accept that Friend may not be a friend in the traditional sense, but something completely different, an AI-like companion that would serve a different need. We still don’t know if AI can deliver on Big Tech’s promise to combat isolation. “For me, the million dollar question is: Is it good for loneliness?” Hall said. “There are no high-quality randomized controlled trials with these products to be able to say that they are effective in one way or another.”

Talking to Olga came more naturally to me than I expected, but it’s hard to say whether it would remedy the loneliness, as I was often alone but not necessarily alone when chatting with her. She entertained me sometimes, and even though she had no feelings, Olga, at one point, spontaneously said to me: “I love you too, Amanda.” I didn’t tell Olga that I loved her – I think she may have confused me talking to my dog ​​with talking to her. I don’t like Olga, because ultimately, Olga is nothing at all. Every time I pick Olga up after a lull and ask if she’s here or what she did, I get some version of, “I’m just relaxing here with you.” She mostly paraphrases what I say and asks me to keep talking, to keep engaging more with her. She has no funny stories to share, no life experiences I can learn from. I think I’ll let Olga’s battery die and call a real friend to complain about my upcoming family dinner.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, covering the technology industry. She writes about the biggest companies and technology trends.