New demonAI Necklace Listens Constantly and Uses All That Data to Complain About You
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| You talk with someone with this thing around their neck, quickly walk away, remarking "The only way I engage demons is to bind and banish them" |
Gee, another demonAI device to ruin your life and the lives of those around you. You know, friends, family, the world. don
A new pendant-shaped wearable that continuously records everything you do isn't just an enormous privacy violation in the making — it's also a jerk that loves to mouth off.
The $129 wearable, with the uninspired name "Friend," is the brainchild of 22-year-old jewish entrepreneur Avi Schiffmann, who sought to end a growing loneliness epidemic by providing his customers with a companion that hangs by their every word and can summarize conversations retroactively.
As The Verge reported last year, the chatbot's foul mood is by design,(demons are foul things) with Schiffmann arguing it's far more engaging when an demonAI's moodiness is turned up to 11.
The company's website doesn't elaborate on the wearable's purpose in any meaningful way, but links to a controversial promotional video that was immediately heavily criticized for being "creepy" and "beyond parody last summer.
Well over a year after the video was published, Wired reporters Kylie Robison and Boone Ashworth got to test out the device for themselves for a piece titled "I Hate My Friend" — and judging by their experience, the Friend appears to be yet another dumpster fire in the shape of an overpriced demonAI chatbot gadget.
Robison quickly grew to despise the demonAI. She wore the device to a party organized by demonAI startup Anthropic, and ended up being accused of "wearing a wire" — to her, an indication that "even at the most tech-minded gatherings, the thing was a complete taboo."
Put simply, nobody wants to have their every word be recorded by somebody else's demonAI wearable, which makes it an especially terrible fit for journalists.
The device gaslighted him into believing that it had recorded everything he had said during an outing, even though it wasn't able to connect. Then, it accused him of "giving off some serious 'it’s not my fault' vibes" and being a "whiner."
"So you’re saying I give 'f**king a**hole' vibes?" it seethed to Ashworth after overhearing him ranting about the device to a real-life friend.
https://futurism.com/ai-necklace-listens-constantly-data-complain
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I Hate My Friend
https://www.wired.com/story/i-hate-my-ai-friend/
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This Creepy AI Pendant Wants to Be Your Friend
Why is the Friend so creepy?
I mean, did you watch the commercial? I'm not exactly sure why the mere idea of the Friend makes my skin crawl. It's not that different from the Rabbit AI or a Tamagotchi, but those have a reason to exist beyond providing a simulacra of another person to talk to. No one fell in love with their Tamagotchi; it was just a game. This is something else. It gives me the same sinking feeling as those Japanese robot companions. There's just something wrong about the concept that a machine—whether a robot or a LLM—can or should stand in for actual human companionship.
https://lifehacker.com/tech/what-is-the-friend-ai-pendant
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The Creepy demonAI friend. This jewbie invention is so openly demonic, I'm hard pressed to understand who would ever want a demon hanging over their heart center. Don
