New AI companion goes all Black Mirror, listens to absolutely everything and dies if you lose it
We've been here already in the movies. Now it's time to try it in real life. The notion of AI becoming your intimate artificial friend, even partner, is nothing new. But it just came a step closer to reality with the new Friend. Yes, this new AI companion is just called «Friend» and sets out to do exactly what it says on the tin. To be your friend. And that's pretty much it.
The physical manifestation of the Friend is a circular pendant on a necklace that looks a little like an Apple AirTag at a glance. It's the brainchild of serial entrepreneur and 21-year-old tech-bro extraordinaire Avi Schiffmann, and it's essentially a chatbot that sits around your neck and listens to absolutely everything.
That allows the Friend to engage in fully context-aware buddy interactions which take the form of texts or notifications on the smartphone to which it is paired.
And that's it. There's no clever productivity functionality. It won't code a website, fold proteins, or even book a restaurant. It just talks to you. As Schiffmann said in an interview with Wired, “productivity is over, no one cares. No one is going to beat Apple or OpenAI or all these companies that are building Jarvis. The most important things in your life really are people.”
People and, presumably, AI Friends.
You can watch the launch trailer right here and very likely a flurry of questions will leap to mind. Is this for real? Surely this is satire? Who is it really aimed at? For sure, the trailer feels like something you'd see inserted into a satirical near-future sci-fi flick, something superficially plausible but hugely problematic the moment you begin to consider the implications of it all.
The most obvious immediate issue, of course, is the idea that it's always on, all the time. That throws up all kinds of fairly hideous privacy problems, both for the user and anyone who is within AI earshot.
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