Everyone hates ‘Friend,’ the AI necklace. But the AI isn’t the problem.
NEW YORK TIMES
That millions of people adore ChatGPT and Claude is perhaps a testament to how successful those products have been in imitating our own human brains, simulating our desires and feeding our intellectual fantasies.
Yet Friend, in concretizing A.I. companionship in a visible gizmo, reminds you constantly of the falseness of that substitution. Friend’s physicality — the thudding of that bulb against your chest — feels like a cruel practical joke. Deeply, achingly lonely? Here’s a plastic pacifier to suck on.
This might be why Friend, by Schiffmann’s admission, has sold only about 3,500 units so far, and why it has engendered such widespread revulsion even in people who only see pictures of the product.
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