AI ‘Friends’ Are a Big Joke — At Our Expense

Most Americans think technology is making us lonelier. Big Tech’s solution? Be friends with your tech.

Screenshot from the Friend teaser video

By Sonali Kolhatkar

This fall, Avi Schiffman, founder of the AI startup Friend.com, boasted on X about his company’s new advertising blitz, claiming it was the “Largest NYC subway campaign ever.”

Since then, the large white billboards lining New York City’s train stations have not only sparked intense conversation, but also vandalism. An online “museum” is documenting graffiti by an enraged public that lambasts the Artificial Intelligence-driven product.

Messages include “AI is burning the planet down around you,” and, “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died.”

Schiffman’s splashy ads are touting a product aimed at tackling the epidemic of human loneliness. Users pay $129 to wear a plastic disc with recording technology around their neck that captures all their conversations and responds via text in the form of a virtual “friend.”

According to the ads, the product offers “someone who listens, responds, and supports you.” Notwithstanding the grammatical awkwardness of the sentence — one that’s indicative of the haphazard rush by tech companies to shove AI into every aspect of our lives — Friend.com claims to be an antidote to the same phenomenon such technology has created: isolation.

An extensive Harvard University study found significant levels of loneliness stemming from insecurity and mental health issues.

The biggest culprit was technology, with 73 percent of respondents agreeing that “people are so distracted by or used to technology that their in-person interactions are suffering.” Those surveyed also lamented that families were not spending enough time together, the nation was getting too individualistic, and people lacked relationship skills.

Walk into any public space — a bus, a restaurant, the line at a post office — and people are swiping their phones, consuming social media content rather than interacting with one another.

Schiffman’s antidote to this is to make money by pushing people even further away from one another. Even worse, he seems to not only be well-aware of the irony but banking on it — and selling the hype more aggressively than the product.

A teaser video released a year before Friend.com went to market is so bizarrely out of touch that it’s almost satire.

In it, a young woman takes a solo hike and shares a joke with her AI pendant about enjoying the outdoors. A young man loses a video game with his actual, human friend and his AI pendant responds by trash-talking — “you’re getting thrashed, it’s embarrassing!” Even the ad’s music is unsettlingly dystopian.

Schiffman seems in on the joke, explaining the relationship between a user and his product as akin to “talking to a god.” He brushed off the graffitiing of his ads in New York City subways, saying, “The mayor should come and appreciate what we’ve done… because it really is a modern day art exhibit.”

An early beta tester found that Friend.com’s AI companion started every relationship with a human by “trauma dumping” on them, and speculated that “it might be a publicity stunt” because “it was too obviously manipulative.”

Schiffman has only sold a few thousand units and admits that he doesn’t know how to make the AI pendant profitable. According to The Atlantic, his goal is “to have as many people as possible thinking about, hating on, and discussing his product,” to “jam into the zeitgeist the controversial notion that AI can be a ‘friend.’”

Not only will AI “friends” drive people further apart, but could seriously prey on people with mental health concerns. AI chatbots have been known to encourage suicidal thoughts and behavior, incite violence, and affirm harmful stereotypes.

And constantly running AI computer models has a huge climate impact, as the massive servers require constant cooling.

The whole enterprise reeks of ironic late-stage capitalism — an ugly joke that, with a wink and a nod, hopes we’ll play along even to our own detriment. Our challenge, as a species, is to not fall for it.

Sonali Kolhatkar is host and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, an independent, subscriber-based syndicated TV and radio show. She’s an award winning journalist and author of Talking About Abolition: A Police Free World is Possible, and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org