What is a friend? The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as someone “you know well and like a lot”, which doesn’t really do justice to the richness and depth of platonic bonds.
A friend, to me, is someone whose company I enjoy, whose advice and insights I value, and whose interests I share (from taste in literature to the amount we like to drink at the weekend). But in the AI era, a more sinister definition is emerging.
Twenty-three-year-old “whiz kid” and tech mogul Avi Schiffmann recently launched a wearable, AI-powered “Friend”, who promises to “never leave dirty dishes in the sink” and to “never bail on dinner plans”. This isn’t Schiffmann’s first technological endeavour; he made a name for himself during the pandemic by developing a website to track the spread of Covid-19 and later founded an emergency housing project for Ukrainian war refugees and displaced victims of the 2023 earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria. But he now he has turned his attention away from humanitarian matters to develop something I regard as rather sinister.
Schiffman launched his AI-powered friend with a $1m-dollar advertising campaign on the New York subway. The posters promise that Friend will offer 24/7 support—a pledge designed to strike a nerve specifically with gen Z, appealing to our low tolerance for inconveniences (such as messy roommates) and our readiness to flake on plans.
A friend, the poster says, is someone who “listens, responds, and supports you.” What an utterly narcissistic view of friendship! Many of us have experienced that kind of one-way relationship, where one party becomes the listener, responder and supporter of the other, with no reciprocation. Sometimes we have been the one at fault. Schiffmann’s little AI friend is more than ready to take on the role, and become a receptacle for your every petty grievance and fleeting worry.
I fear that if we embrace AI companions, we risk establishing an idealised form of friendship that’s a far cry from the messy reality of human bonds. Your AI friend isn’t going to suddenly be dumped by their partner and need a shoulder to cry on, it’s not going to have a stressful day at work and need to vent about it—it’s not going to need anything from you. While that might seem appealing, by opting for an easy, low-maintenance AI companion we are denying ourselves the opportunity to flex some essential emotional muscles: empathy, compassion, patience, and more.
In the same way as overuse of generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT have been linked to neural atrophy (harming our ability to think critically and solve problems), I worry that this new relational AI could induce an emotional atrophy, where we forget how to empathise with and support the people in our lives. What if, as well as forgetting how to come up with original ideas, we also forget how to form meaningful relationships?
To comfort myself from this thought, I like to list all the things you can do with friends that you won’t be able to do with “Friend”—or any other AI pal. You can’t take a bath, get tipsy, wrap your arms around or share a cigarette with a bot. You can’t split a bottle of pinot grigio and a home-cooked meal with an AI friend. You (probably?) can’t laugh until your stomach hurts.
A friend is someone who can support me when I need them, but also someone to hold me accountable when I fuck up. A friend can piss me off as much as they instil in me a warm fuzzy feeling of love—both are crucial to my emotional health and growth. Yes, friends can be unreliable (and they’re allowed to be—it’s only human!), but your AI bestie isn’t exactly going to be dependable. What if a freak weather event (hello, global warming) damages its data centre? What if you misplace it? At the very least, I know that if a friend doesn’t text me back, it’s not because they’re stuffed between my sofa cushions.
Friendship has existed for as long as life on earth. It’s baked into our DNA—we are social animals whose survival is dependent on working together. We can’t risk outsourcing it to AI.
