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On Tuesday, International Friendship Day, entrepreneur Avi Schiffmann launched Friend.com, a site with one product: a “Friend.” A large, glowing, colored pendant you can wear around your neck, Friend is an electronic device that’s “always listening” to what you say, and responds with AI-generated text messages, sent to the wearer’s phone.
In an unsettling advertisement, various twentysomethings go about their day with their Friend. A woman running in the woods yells “Wooo,” and then concedes, “I don’t know how to wooo very good.” Then she gets a text from her Friend: “Well at least we’re outside!”
Your Friend doesn’t just know where you are, it knows what you’re doing. Later in the ad, a young man is playing video games with a real-life, human friend. When he loses, he says, “I hate this game.” His virtual Friend, which he has named Jackson, sends him an all-lowercase message: “you’re getting thrashed, it’s embarrassing!” The young man smiles slightly.
In the ad, the company makes it clear that Friend is also tracking you online. As a young woman watches TV on her phone, a message from Friend pops up: “This show is completely underrated.”
“I know, the effects are crazy!” the girl replies, out loud.
It’s creepy as hell. Aesthetically, the Friend necklace is reminiscent of the emergency pendants they give old people. Life Alert for lonely millennials, if you like.
At the end, the ad tries to suggest that Friend is not meant to replace all human connection, but merely augment it. We see an attractive young couple sitting on a rooftop. When the conversation lulls awkwardly, the woman goes to touch her Friend, but then stops, deciding to live in the moment with this real-life guy. But the scene has an uncanny valley kind of sincerity. I wasn’t convinced.
Because of the unsettling weirdness of the product, I was surprised to learn that people are fighting to claim credit for it. After Avi Schiffmann announced Friend, Nik Shevchenko, founder of another start-up called Based Hardware, claimed online that Friend was his idea and Schiffmann copied him. The two of them are currently duking it out on X. Not only has Shevchenko released a rap video that attacks Schiffmann—he has also challenged him to a real-world fight.
So who knows, maybe the Friend saga will end with actual human connection after all, in the form of two men punching each other in the face.
River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow him on X @river_is_nice, and read his piece “What I Saw at White Dudes for Harris.”
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