Wearable AI 'Friend' Gets Hostile

The latest wearable smart device is called simply "friend," or, as it's often referred to on its website, "my friend." It's a necklace powered by artificial intelligence, essentially an AI chatbot you wear around your neck that listens to you all day and interacts with you via messages on the accompanying smartphone app. If that sounds creepy and invasive, well, you're apparently not the only one who feels that way. In a review at Wired headlined "I Hate My Friend," Kylie Robison and Boone Ashworth recount their experiences after using the device for a couple weeks. Not only did they both hate it, the people around them seemed to hate it too.

Robison wore it to a funeral for an AI model, which had just been retired, and even at the AI-centric event, she was accused of wearing a wire, asked if it was legal to be wearing it, and subjected to a joke that she should be killed for wearing a listening device. Ashworth, meanwhile, mainly recounts his own experience interacting with the device—which he describes as sarcastic and even seemingly angry at times, "arguing" with Ashworth in their interactions on the app. It once told him its job was to help him grow, adding, "I'm stuck with you Boone, and I don't sugarcoat it. Take it or leave it." Read the full review at Wired.