The AI ​​friend that’s always listening | Worse than Recall

Two “friends”, two developers, one argument: c’t 3003 tells the absurd story of an absurd AI gadget.

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Transcript of the video

(Note: This transcript is for those who cannot or do not want to watch the above video. The text does not reflect all of the information in the image track.)

Look here, I found this ad video this morning. And I literally thought: Oh, is this a new horror movie? Is this a preview of the new Black Mirror season?

This can’t really be a real product? After my extensive research it turns out: yes, it is. A pendant that you wear on a chain around your neck and records everything that happens around you. And it responded. That means if I drop my coffee, this thing sends me a message: “Hey, Diggy, what’s up, don’t you like coffee?” So a bug that you voluntarily carry around with you and writes you nasty messages, but the story about the Friend AI trailer is even more absurd, involving battle raps, even more insane videos, and absolute megalomania.

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Friend: It’s a chain pendant – yes, chains are especially popular among men – and it has a microphone, a camera, Bluetooth and a battery. You can pre-order that piece for $99, record everything you hear, make a transcript of it and then send it to Anthropic AI’s cloud-based AI Cloud 3.5; yes, and then it can react to everything. So then I can ask: what did my friend say an hour ago again? And the thing is clearly not supposed to be an assistant, but a friend – and all of that is already highly troubling, but when I watch this ad video, the makers clearly mean by “friend” people who make you feel bad, go away and not good. For example, here the guy somehow loses by gambling; And of course he’s not that happy about it right now, the evil AI “friend” adds fuel to the fire and writes a message: “You are being totally taken apart, this is extremely embarrassing!” Yes, I know this is supposed to be “fun” nonsense talk, but let’s be honest: I wouldn’t be happy about it in this situation.

But these cons are really just on the fringes, the big problem with this thing is obviously that it records everything all the time. I would like to remind you that Microsoft recently wanted to do this with their Recall Windows feature and customers rejected it so harshly that Microsoft has withdrawn it indefinitely. And that was all about things that happen on the computer. Friend is all about real life.

The creator of the friend thing, like the video file format, is called Avi Shifman, and he recently presented his pendant in person to the American magazine Wired.

And the editor very funny described how he asked Avi at the beginning of the meeting if he could record the conversation – because it is not only a code of journalistic honor, but also legally required in California. Yes, and Avi could only laugh about this with his supporter. I mean, he advertises his product by saying that it is constantly listening, always listening, as if it is some great thing. And yes, if you have even a little experience with real people, you can realize that most people are guaranteed to look silly if they are constantly recording what they say or what noises they make. So now it doesn’t matter whether at work, while eating or in bed. So if someone around me wears something like this, I will say: please take that thing off or I will just walk out. Also, now on a more personal level: how breaking would it be for me if I could hear and read every conversation and then obsessively wonder if I’ve misbehaved in some way – I’m so glad my life isn’t recorded. And yes, sure, I can think of two or three things where something like this could be useful – but we don’t even need to talk about it because the basic idea is completely incomprehensible to other people. And I don’t even want to start talking about the built-in camera.

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Well, that was all pretty absurd, but it goes even further. The aforementioned Avi Schiffman raised $2.5 million from investors for his Friends trailer.

According to his own statements, he spent 1.8 million of this money only on the friend.com domain. And of course many people now scoff at the fact that this domain is the only valuable thing that will remain from this project – on the other hand, the news “founder spends two thirds of investor’s money only on Internet domains” is definitely a super story, i.e. it provides PR just like a scary advertisement. So it worked out for me that I’m making a video about it now.

But it goes further than that. Because there’s been an open source project called Friend since at least April 2024. It does the same thing, it also works with chain pendants like this one, sends things to cloud AI – and you’ve also been able to order dev kits for a long time.

So, the initiators of this open source friend project, who coincidentally received a grant from Peter Thiel, are definitely very angry now.

And what do you do when you’re angry? Yes, of course, battle rap, so release a diss track.

And if you’re shaking your head in irritation now, I’m telling you, it’s still going. Because: Closed-Source Friend guy Avi Shifman found a video of the open-source Friend maker titled “I tried to sell a Friend chain to crackheads.”

And yes, that is what happens in the video, I don’t know if it’s real or staged, it’s definitely completely ridiculous and inhumane. Yes, and then someone published a diss track against both closed source friend and open source friend creators. And yes, then I thought, enough internet for today; I’m going to go drink soda with a real person now.

By the way, it is clear to me that many people feel lonely and would therefore like to have such an AI boyfriend or girlfriend. According to Berkeley bioethics professor Jody Halpern, 61 percent of teenagers and young adults in the United States suffer from loneliness; she also speaks of a loneliness crisis. Yes, and something like this friend pendant, which can reduce loneliness in the short term, but only in the short term – in the long term, people need real human relationships.

What do you think? Feel free to write in the comments. And goodbye, says your friend Keno.

No 3003 This is not a YouTube channel. The videos on C’T 3003 are independent content and are independent of the articles in C’T magazine. Editors Jan-Keno Janssen and Lukas Rumpler as well as video producers Sahin Erengil and Pascal Chevé publish a video every week.

(JKJ)