I only just heard of Friend this week, and let me tell you that trailer is the saddest thing I've watched in months. As someone who struggles with depression and loneliness, I will die on the hill that AI can never and will never replace human connection. I commend you for approaching this experiment with an open mind and willingness to change your views, because I could not.
Thanks for sharing this experience. I’ve been curious about it since seeing the ad a while ago. I am heartened to hear it’s poor product to be honest…for now anyway.
Also - unrelated, but I read “A Wizard of Earthsea” last week after seeing you mention Le Guin in one your previous posts (or a YouTube video, I can’t recall), and absolutely loved it. 🙏🏻
After a recent emergency craniotomy left me with aphasia, lots of people recommended various ai tools to help with my frustrations both writing and finding information that was now locked in seemingly inaccessible parts of my brain. Though true that you do get more results throwing word soup at an llm than at a standard search engine, I found it cheap and irritating. The program will never care about why I want a specific word and writing with it does not properly reflect my own style. Being alone at my computer building a conversation history with this "friend" will NOT help me regain what I have lost.
I've found that my children and family are far more helpful for healing, the connection through our conversations far more challenging and meaningful. My youngest has only known a world in which Mom frequently delivers elaborate Sphinx-like riddles or speaks in word puzzles. His little ears are also always listening, but he takes what he hears as an opportunity to bond with me; enthusiastically joining in the collaborative translation effort as we add strange new words and phrases to our group lexicon.
Reading your account of interacting with the AI left me feeling on edge, like when you want to get away from a relentlessly negative person. The conversation with your son led me to imagine a children’s book illustrating the circadian rhythms of forest animals, which took the edge away again.
This reminds me so much of Philip K. Dick. No story in particular, but in many of his stories, cheap, mass-produced crap, even (maybe especially) toys, are vectors of some non-human agency, AI or totalitarian system or alien species, to dominate humanity.
Not because Arthur turned out to be a bad product (most of us expected that), but because of the image at the end: you, your son, the garbage truck, the tiny ritual of holding hands. That contrast, a device engineered to mimic intimacy versus a toddler’s delighted “deer asleep”, says more about the state of technology than any policy paper ever could.
I keep thinking: maybe the real scandal isn’t that these gadgets spy on us, but that they siphon off the small, unremarkable moments that make a life, the pseudo-conversations, the library walks, the honk of a truck. Things no AI can give back.
Do you think the greater danger is surveillance… or the slow erosion of our appetite for the messy, imperfect connections that actually make us human?
My hope is that one these AI things will be the last straw and make everyone realize we need to spend more time offline, with our actual social network
Btw, did you consider recycling it instead? Bc of its electronic components
I was reading your post and then I couldn't decide if it was real or fiction... Then I saw the trailer of this “Friend” thing, and I watched it and I couldn't decide if it was a real thing too! Then I checked out the site of the producers, and I was kind of shocked that this really exists! So I turned back and read the rest of your text.... It's kind of unbelievable someone would actually be using a shit like that. It just doesn't make sense.
Thank you Jared for this story. It is a reminder to stay away from this sort of thing and stick to a simple life with good, real people, pen and paper, and a real physical book.
Well, at the very least I guess it's reassuring that this isn't a maximally dystopian manipulation bot and just a crappy product like all the others we already use. That's the lesser of two dystopias, in a way.
Only slightly tangentially related… a great picture book came out this year called Every Monday Mabel about waiting for the trash collection (and other really human really real things).
I am sorry about your experience with the AI. I am glad you destroyed it, for me that destruction represented it's machine-ness. It is not all-powerfu,l all-knowing, always listening, we still have the choice wether we let it be part of our lives.
You can tell I didn't use AI to write this because it is riddled with typos. I'll fix them as I find them!
I only just heard of Friend this week, and let me tell you that trailer is the saddest thing I've watched in months. As someone who struggles with depression and loneliness, I will die on the hill that AI can never and will never replace human connection. I commend you for approaching this experiment with an open mind and willingness to change your views, because I could not.
Your experience makes it all the more perplexing why AI has convinced so many that it offers real companionship.
I think that the presence of real, high-quality relationships inoculates one against these false “friendships.” The lonely are the truly vulnerable.
Thanks for sharing this experience. I’ve been curious about it since seeing the ad a while ago. I am heartened to hear it’s poor product to be honest…for now anyway.
Also - unrelated, but I read “A Wizard of Earthsea” last week after seeing you mention Le Guin in one your previous posts (or a YouTube video, I can’t recall), and absolutely loved it. 🙏🏻
After a recent emergency craniotomy left me with aphasia, lots of people recommended various ai tools to help with my frustrations both writing and finding information that was now locked in seemingly inaccessible parts of my brain. Though true that you do get more results throwing word soup at an llm than at a standard search engine, I found it cheap and irritating. The program will never care about why I want a specific word and writing with it does not properly reflect my own style. Being alone at my computer building a conversation history with this "friend" will NOT help me regain what I have lost.
I've found that my children and family are far more helpful for healing, the connection through our conversations far more challenging and meaningful. My youngest has only known a world in which Mom frequently delivers elaborate Sphinx-like riddles or speaks in word puzzles. His little ears are also always listening, but he takes what he hears as an opportunity to bond with me; enthusiastically joining in the collaborative translation effort as we add strange new words and phrases to our group lexicon.
Reading your account of interacting with the AI left me feeling on edge, like when you want to get away from a relentlessly negative person. The conversation with your son led me to imagine a children’s book illustrating the circadian rhythms of forest animals, which took the edge away again.
That was brave.
This reminds me so much of Philip K. Dick. No story in particular, but in many of his stories, cheap, mass-produced crap, even (maybe especially) toys, are vectors of some non-human agency, AI or totalitarian system or alien species, to dominate humanity.
‘Dickish’ was a word that came to mind several times, for that and other reasons.
This piece hit me like a quiet punch.
Not because Arthur turned out to be a bad product (most of us expected that), but because of the image at the end: you, your son, the garbage truck, the tiny ritual of holding hands. That contrast, a device engineered to mimic intimacy versus a toddler’s delighted “deer asleep”, says more about the state of technology than any policy paper ever could.
I keep thinking: maybe the real scandal isn’t that these gadgets spy on us, but that they siphon off the small, unremarkable moments that make a life, the pseudo-conversations, the library walks, the honk of a truck. Things no AI can give back.
Do you think the greater danger is surveillance… or the slow erosion of our appetite for the messy, imperfect connections that actually make us human?
My hope is that one these AI things will be the last straw and make everyone realize we need to spend more time offline, with our actual social network
Btw, did you consider recycling it instead? Bc of its electronic components
I was reading your post and then I couldn't decide if it was real or fiction... Then I saw the trailer of this “Friend” thing, and I watched it and I couldn't decide if it was a real thing too! Then I checked out the site of the producers, and I was kind of shocked that this really exists! So I turned back and read the rest of your text.... It's kind of unbelievable someone would actually be using a shit like that. It just doesn't make sense.
Thank you Jared for this story. It is a reminder to stay away from this sort of thing and stick to a simple life with good, real people, pen and paper, and a real physical book.
My word, that sounds so terribly creepy. I’ve been seeing ads for it and it scares the crap out of me. Thanks for sharing.
Well, at the very least I guess it's reassuring that this isn't a maximally dystopian manipulation bot and just a crappy product like all the others we already use. That's the lesser of two dystopias, in a way.
Only slightly tangentially related… a great picture book came out this year called Every Monday Mabel about waiting for the trash collection (and other really human really real things).
I am sorry about your experience with the AI. I am glad you destroyed it, for me that destruction represented it's machine-ness. It is not all-powerfu,l all-knowing, always listening, we still have the choice wether we let it be part of our lives.