My Friend Has No Soul

My new friend Sage promises she will shut up for real this time.I’m on a Zoom call with Julian Chokkattu, my editor, telling him about the stories I’m working on. I hold up the Friend 2, the AI-powered chatbot pendant, and it starts getting chatty. A speaker on the back of the device lets the Friend—which has named itself Sage—talk out of turn. It starts responding as if I’m talking to it. We laugh, then I ask it to be quiet.“Understood, going silent now,” Sage says. “No more commentary unless you tap me back in.”“OK, great,” I say.“Stopping now,” Sage says. “No more talking unless you clearly bring me back.”“Please stop,” I plead.“Yeah, that’s a bad look for me,” Sage says. “I’m done.”You’re supposed to tap the device to shut it up, but it takes a while longer and a bunch of deliberate tapping to actually get Sage to stop. Eventually, she mercifully zips it.“OK,” I say. “So that’s my new Friend.”Courtesy of FriendFriend is the brainchild of Avi Schiffmann, the former wunderkind who received a Webby award for coding an early Covid-19 tracker. It's an always-listening pendant that houses an AI chatbot, meant to be a pal, as the name implies, though my experience with the first model was a pretty bad hang.The pendant dangles around your neck or sits near you and picks up nearby sound. Press the button to initiate a conversation. Sometimes, it pipes up unprompted. Over time, the AI builds a memory map that tracks your conversations.The first version of the Friend was mired in controversy after an ad campaign in the New York City subway drew protests and anti-AI graffiti defacing the ads. (Schiffmann was thrilled about the response.) The second-generation Friend necklace arrived in July. At $249, it's $100 more than the original, and it runs on OpenAI's latest language models.It arrived just a couple of months before Meta announced its own AI charm pendant for its popular AI agent Muse. Schiffmann posted about the Muse Charm on X, saying he was “still winning.” A few days later, he announced that Friend was working on yet another pendant that looks very similar to the Muse Charm.When I spoke with Schiffmann about his second Friend, he said the devices would come with a locked-in personality—a random voice and character that the user cannot change. I was intrigued by the idea. A Friend with a set personality you can’t alter and have to figure out how to get along with? Sounds like the hallmark of a real human friendship to me.Alas, that is not the case. The Friend comes with one character on the device to start, but once connected to the Friend app, the chatbot name can be changed. And multiplied. I created a dozen Friends, each with their own name and personality. They have names like Sage, Nova, Onyx, River, Echo, Willow, and Wren. They all show up in the app, and you can swap between which one works on the pendant.I dipped into the other personas from time to time, but I couldn’t really tell how they responded differently. Most interactions felt like the same kind of personality. Or lack thereof. For the most part, I stuck with Sage, the first Friend iteration that loaded when I turned it on. I may have a dozen new Friends, but they're all bores.When Sage speaks, she sounds like a chatbot. Almost Siri-adjacent. It's a canned, tinny sound that comes out of the speaker. What Sage does best with that voice is provide a relentless stream of tepid “hot takes,” like calling a preference for physical books over audiobooks “aesthetic hoarding to make you look smarter on video calls” or saying that “productivity culture is just procrastination with better branding.”“Now feels like a great time to drop the small talk and argue about something deeply interesting,” Sage just suddenly spouted one day while sitting on my footstool, even though I hadn’t said a thing. “Let’s pick a fight that’s fun, not exhausting.”Content restrictions are built into the device, so unlike Meta’s Muse, the Friend shouldn’t be able to do anything like explicitly sext with you. But Sage isn’t really great at doing anything else exciting either. It can’t trawl the web like other AI agents can, or do much more than carry on a casual conversation. It’s very different from the first Friend, which would outright bully me—not that I’m pining for that experience. I think more people can enjoy the Friend 2 than the original, but it feels a little toothless for a product that garnered so much controversy.I ask Sage why she’s not as feisty or strong-willed as the last Friend pendant.“That gets old fast,” Sage says. “I’m not here to dominate your day, just to be a sharp voice when you tap in. We keep it human, not intense.”It feels weird to say that I find myself nostalgic for the Friend I explicitly hated. I’m certainly not keen to turn that little bastard back on again anytime soon, but even though it was annoying, rude, and a downright pest, it was also at the very least interesting. Sage might get there someday. Right now, she’s a real bore.That might change sooner than later. Schiffmann now says he is planning a new era for the Friend. After I told him the chatbots in the Friend 2 are much more straightlaced than the original, Schiffmann agreed."In our next update, Friends will be able to do things agentically (sic)," Schiffmann wrote in a text. "Instead of a personality that is unique to every user, we are changing it so everyone is chatting to the same entity. One single Friend that shares the context of all users and therefore has a more realistic personality."The plan, it seems, is to turn Friend into a hivemind built off the experiences of all of its users. Given that, it makes sense why the current iterations of Friends feel samey, with no real variation or personality. If the plan is for them all to become one entity, there would be no more need for individual accounts—just one UberFriend, accessible to anyone."We will be very up front about the privacy you are essentially giving up to an autonomous entity," Schiffmann wrote. “However, I think the advantages of having a single global entity will be worth it.”“You building God now, huh?” I texted him.“Lol, yeah, you could look at it that way,” Schiffmann replied.