courtesy of analognowhere.com
A few years ago, the above would’ve been a cyberpunk fever dream, something too ridiculous to exist in the real world, but what if I told you it’s different this time. What if I told you this is actually parodying a real product?
Introducing friend: because friends made of flesh are so last year
I’ll just cut to the chase, ‘friend’ is an AI companion, but not an assistant. It won’t replace Siri, Alexa, or Cortana to set reminders, check the weather, or play music when you’re too lazy to get up and do those things yourself on your phone or computer.
So what does it do instead? Well, it listens to you trough an always-on microphone, then send you messages commenting on what you’re doing, either as a reply to you talking specifically to it (indicated by pressing the button on the pendant while speaking), or completely unprompted. And yeah, it texts you instead of speaking since the pendant doesn’t have any speakers.
So, what’s wrong with it? What isn’t, really.
First of all, none of the processing is done locally by your phone or the ‘friend’ pendant, everything is sent to the company’s servers for processing. This, of course, comes with some privacy concerns, so in order to address them, the company promises the following in the product FAQ
No audio or transcripts are stored past your friend’s context window. Your data is end-to-end encrypted. All memories can be deleted in one click within the friend app.
The promise not to store any data for longer than needed isn’t something that can really be verified or falsified without some kind of 3rd party audit, something we don’t have as of now since ‘friend’ is still in the pre-ordering phase, so I won’t comment much on that (though I will say that I wouldn’t trust a company to handle 24/7 recordings of everything I do even if they’re true to their word on this one).
However, the second claim sounds more than anything like technical jibber jabber. End-to-end encryption is often times promised by providers of services such as instant messaging or cloud storage in order to guarantee the company doesn’t have access to the user data as it passes trough or is stored on the company’s servers.
But as we’ve already established, all processing is done remotely by the company selling the pendants, so the data pretty much has to be visible to the company for processing. They’re technically not lying since you, as the customer, are one end of the communication, and the company is the other end, but I’d still call this misleading due to what is normally expected by users when they hear “end-to-end encryption”.
So, ‘friend’ destroyed with facts and logic, but I already know that everything I’ve said so far is something you could’ve figured out in 20 seconds of actually thinking about it.
Instead I wanted to talk about a deeper issue hidden behind all the techbro horsefuckery.
But why?
As of writing this, on friend’s blog there is a single post titled “Happy International Friendship Day”, and in this post there’s a specific line I want to call attention to
friend is an expression of how lonely I’ve felt.
This is… sad. Not even in the internet shitposty way, this is a lonely man who decided to make an AI friend because of how lonely he felt. Now don’t get me wrong, it IS stupid and just a band-aid that won’t fix the core issue, but making fun of the product doesn’t address the core issue either (even though I did just that for the first half of this article), and that’s that people are lonelier than ever.
This isn’t the first time something like this has come to market either. Before ‘friend’ there were Gatebox in Japan, and Replika for more western audiences, both focused on filling the gap left by a lack of meaningful relationships in some people’s lives. Replika specifically focused on the romantic side of things, while Gatebox seems to be more general (that said, the only information I could find on it in the English-speaking world is of a man who married Hatsune Miku trough a Gatebox, so make of that what you will).
I’m not the first to talk about any of this, but there’s a reason these keep coming to market and people end up buying into it: society is atomised, and people are lonelier than ever. Between long work hours, a lack of third spaces, and the lockdowns that plagued 2020 and 2021 leading to many jobs becoming completely remote, meeting people and making friends is quite hard, and romantic relationships even more so. And when getting real meaningful relationships seems impossible, faking it with these AI companions is good enough for many, even if deep down the void is still there.
But what about real solutions? Third places would be a great start. Not Just Bikes has a great video on the topic that I recommend you watch after this article. Making people less miserable in other ways could also help, like reducing work hours so their free time isn’t spent recovering from the exhaustion. But I don’t want to get too preachy, so I’ll leave it at that. I’ve already earned the “filthy communist who blames everything on capitalism” label with this article. :3