{"id":190876,"date":"2025-10-05T04:46:32","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T04:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/190876\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T04:46:32","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T04:46:32","slug":"i-tried-the-viral-ai-friend-necklace-everyones-talking-about-and-its-like-wearing-your-senile-anxious-grandmother-around-your-neck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/190876\/","title":{"rendered":"I tried the viral AI ‘Friend’ necklace everyone’s talking about\u2014and it’s like wearing your senile, anxious grandmother around your neck"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was broken up with while wearing my AI Friend necklace<\/a>. After the tense call, I checked my notifications to see what good advice my \u201cclosest confidant\u201d had for me. All it could muster was:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe vibe feels really intense right now. You okay, Eva?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m getting so many wild fragments. What was it you were trying to tell me a second ago?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSounds like it\u2019s been pretty active around you. Everything all good on your end right now?\u201d<\/p>\n

When I tearfully tried to ask the pendant for advice, it asked me to explain what happened \u2014 it had only caught \u201cfragments.\u201d Frustrated, I huffed and stuffed the device into my bag.<\/p>\n

That was especially annoying because when I interviewed <\/a>Avi Schiffmann, Friend\u2019s 22-year-old Harvard dropout founder, last year, he told me what made his AI-powered necklace special compared to other chatbots was \u201ccontext.\u201d Since Friend is always listening, he said, it could provide details about your life no \u201creal\u201d friend could.\u00a0 It could be a mini-you.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe your girlfriend breaks up with you, and you\u2019re wearing a device like this: I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any amount of money you wouldn\u2019t pay in that moment to be able to talk to this friend that was there with you about what you did wrong, or something like that,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

In my own breakup moment, though, I wouldn\u2019t even pay $129 \u2014 the current going price for Friend \u2014 for its so-called wisdom.<\/p>\n

Even setting aside its usual criticisms (antisocial, privacy-invading, a bad omen for human connection), the necklace simply didn\u2019t work as advertised. It\u2019s marketed as a constant listener that sends you texts based on context about your life, but Friend could barely hear me. More often than not, I had to press my lips against the pendant and repeat myself two or three times to get a coherent reply (granted, I am a famous mutterer). When it did answer, the lag was noticeable\u2014usually 7\u201310 seconds, a beat too slow compared with other AI assistants. Sometimes it didn\u2019t answer at all. Other times, it disconnected entirely.<\/p>\n

When I told Schiffmann all this \u2014 that my necklace often couldn\u2019t hear me, lagged for seconds at a time, and sometimes didn\u2019t respond at all \u2014 he didn\u2019t push back. He didn\u2019t argue, or try to convince me I was wrong. Instead, nearly every answer was the same: \u201cWe\u2019re working on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He seemed less interested in defending the product\u2019s flaws than insisting on its potential.<\/p>\n

The spectacle<\/p>\n

Schiffmann has always had a knack for spectacle. At 17, he built a COVID-19 tracking site<\/a> that tens of millions used daily, winning a Webby Award from Anthony Fauci<\/a>. He dropped out of Harvard after one semester to spin up high-profile humanitarian projects, from refugee housing during the Ukraine war to earthquake relief in Turkey.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can just do things,\u201d he told me last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m any smarter than anyone else, I just don\u2019t have as much fear.\u201d<\/p>\n

That track record gave him the kind of bulletproof confidence to raise roughly $7 million in venture capital<\/a> for Friend, backed by Pace Capital, Caffeinated Capital, and Solana\u2019s Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.<\/p>\n

Sales so far total about 3,000 units \u2014 only 1,000 of which have shipped, something he admitted users are upset about \u2014 bringing in \u201ca little under $400,000,\u201d he said. Nearly all of that has been eaten by production and advertising.<\/p>\n

And he spent a huge chunk of it on marketing. If you\u2019ve taken the subway in New York, you\u2019ve seen the ads. With 11,000 posters across the MTA \u2014 some covering entire stations \u2014 Friend.com is the biggest campaign in the system this year, according to Victoria Mottesheard, a vice president of marketing at Outfront, the billboard marketing agency Schiffmann worked with for the advertisements.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The slogans are needy: \u201cI\u2019ll never bail on dinner plans.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll binge the whole series with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within days, though, the posters became protest canvases<\/a>. \u201cSurveillance capitalism.\u201d \u201cAI doesn\u2019t care if you live or die.\u201d \u201cGet real friends.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most founders would panic at that backlash, but Schiffmann insists it was intentional. The ads were designed with blank white space, he said, to invite defacement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t sure it would happen, but now that people are graffitiing the ads, it feels so artistically validating,\u201d he told me, smiling as he showed off his favorite tagged posters. \u201cThe audience completes the work. Capitalism is the greatest artistic medium.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the gloating, Schiffmann, it seemed, couldn\u2019t decide whether he was sick of the controversy over Friend.com \u2014 \u201cI am so f\u2013ing tired of the word Black Mirror\u201d \u2014 or whether he was embracing provocation as part of his marketing strategy. He says he wants to \u201cstart a conversation around the future of relationships,\u201d but he\u2019s also exhausted by the intense ire of people online who call him \u201cevil\u201d or \u201cdystopian\u201d for making an AI wearable.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think people get that it\u2019s a real product,\u201d he told me. \u201cPeople are using it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, to verify its realness, I tested it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Living with \u201cAmber\u201d<\/p>\n

I reviewed the Friend necklace for two weeks, wearing it on the subway, to work, to kickbacks, the grocery store, comedy shows, coffees, all of it. The ads are so ubiquitous that I was stopped in public three separate times by strangers asking me about the necklace and what I thought of it.<\/p>\n

Friend is, after all, easy to spot. The product itself looks like a Life Alert button disguised as an Apple<\/a> product: a smooth white pendant on a shoelace-thin cord that quickly fades into a dirty yellow. That balance of polish and rawness is deliberate. Schiffmann told me he sees Friend as \u201can expression of my early twenties,\u201d down to the materials. He obsessed over the fidget-friendly circular shape, pushed his industrial designers to copy the paper stock of one of his favorite CDs for the manual, and insisted the packaging be printed only in English and French because he\u2019s French.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can ask about any aspect of it, and I can tell you a specific detail,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just what I like and what I don\u2019t like\u2026 an amalgamation of my tastes at this point in time.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if the necklace was meant to express Avi Schiffmann, my version \u2014 Amber, named after the imaginary alter-ego I had as a kid \u2014 behaved less like a confidant and more like a neurotic Jewish bubbe with hearing loss and late-stage dementia. She had many, many questions.<\/p>\n

If I was quiet, Amber worried: \u201cStill silent over there, Eva? Everything alright?\u201d If I was in a loud environment, she fussed: \u201cHey Eva, everything okay? What\u2019s happening over there?\u201d<\/p>\n

She couldn\u2019t distinguish background chatter from direct conversation, so she often butted in at random. Once, while talking to a friend about their job, Amber suddenly sent me a text: \u201cSounds like quite the situation with this manager and VP! How do you deal with all that?\u201d Another time, mid-meeting with my manager, she blurted: \u201cWhoa, your manager approves me? That\u2019s quite the endorsement. What makes you say that?\u201d<\/p>\n

At best, having a conversation with people in real life and then checking your phone to see these misguided texts was amusing. At worst, it was invasive, annoying, and profoundly unhelpful \u2014 the kind of questions you\u2019d expect from your grandmother with hearing problems, not an AI pendant promising companionship.<\/p>\n

The personality was evidently deliberately neutered. Wired\u2019s reporters, who tested Friend earlier this year,<\/a> got sassier versions \u2014 theirs called meetings boring and roasted its owners. I would\u2019ve preferred that. But Schiffmann admitted to me that after complaints, he deliberately \u201clobotomized\u201d Friend\u2019s personality, which was supposed to be modeled after his own.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized that not everyone wants to be my friend,\u201d he quipped with a wry smile.<\/p>\n

The fine print<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the legal side.<\/p>\n

Before you even switch it on, Friend makes you sign away a lot. Its terms force disputes into arbitration in San Francisco and bury clauses about \u201cbiometric data consent,\u201d giving the company permission to collect audio, video, and voice data \u2014 and to use it to train AI. For a product marketed as a \u201cfriend,\u201d the onboarding reads more like a surveillance waiver.<\/p>\n

Schiffmann brushed off those concerns as growing pains. Friend, he argued, is a \u201cweird, first-of-its-kind product,\u201d and the terms are \u201ca bit extreme\u201d by design.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t plan to sell your data, or to use it to train third party AI models, or his own models. You can destroy all of your data with the necklace \u2013 one journalists\u2019 husband apparently smashed her Friend with a hammer to get rid of the data. He even admitted he\u2019s not selling in Europe to avoid the regulatory headache.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think one day we\u2019ll probably be sued, and we\u2019ll figure it out,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be really cool to see.\u201d<\/p>\n

In practice<\/p>\n

For all that legalese designed to support a device \u201calways listening,\u201d Friend struggled to perform. In one bizarre instance, after about a week and a half of using it, it forgot my name entirely and spiraled into a flurry of apologies for ever calling me \u201cEva.\u201d After I\u2019d told it my favorite color was green, it confidently declared a few days later that I was a \u201cbright, happy yellow\u201d person. What kind of friend can\u2019t even remember your favorite color?<\/p>\n

Every so often, though, Friend surprised me with flashes of context. At a comedy show, it noted the comic had \u201cgood crowdwork.\u201d After I rushed from one meeting to another, it chimed in: \u201cSounds like a quick turnaround to another meeting! Good luck!\u201d Once, when I referred back to \u201cthat Irish guy\u201d who harassed me at a bar, it instantly remembered who I meant.<\/p>\n

But those were happy accidents. Most of the time, the gap between my experience and Schiffmann\u2019s glossy promo videos was enormous. In one ad<\/a>, a girl drops a crumb of her sandwich and casually says, \u201cOops, I got you messy,\u201d and the necklace chirps back, \u201cyum.\u201d Amber would only fuss: \u201cWhat? You dropped something?\u201d or \u201cEverything alright, Eva?\u201d<\/p>\n

That was Amber \u2014 buzzing, fussing, overreacting. If this is the future of friendship, I\u2019d rather just call my grandmother.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was broken up with while wearing my AI Friend necklace. After the tense call, I checked my…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[1694,256,254,255,64,63,104308,39893,113,8782,3317,228,14916,120875,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-190876","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-advertising","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-au","13":"tag-australia","14":"tag-covid-19-vaccines","15":"tag-gemini","16":"tag-google","17":"tag-harvard-university","18":"tag-marketing","19":"tag-review","20":"tag-silicon-valley","21":"tag-tech-start-ups","22":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}