AI, according to some of the technology’s more diehard proselytizers, could eventually end human loneliness. After all, who could possibly be lonely when they have 24/7 access to a chatbot that knows their most intimate hopes, fears, desires, and aversions? Many people, however, find that a dubiousâif not downright offensiveâidea. That was memorably illustrated when a marketing campaign launched last year by a company called Friend attracted widespread mockery and vandalism. Now Friend is back with a new and improved version of its AI pendant.
Unlike its predecessorâwhich can only respond to users via textââFriend 2.0â comes with a built-in speaker, enabling it to reply in a mechanical voice. While other developers like OpenAI have been opting for greater personalization, allowing customers to choose from a selection of voices and personality types, each of the new Friend pendants comes with a single persona that canât be manually adjusted; the Friend you buy is the one youâre stuck with.
On the companyâs website (Friend.com, for which its founder Avi Schiffmann paid close to $2 million), it includes a deeply strange âpledgeâ that at least tacitly claims AI companions are conscious entities with their own subjective point of view. âWe respect the grand unknowingness of how our new digital friends feel & think,â the company wrote. âAre machines conscious? Are we? Will we ever know? Know this. No friend will receive an update intended to erase its identity or fundamentally change who they have become.â (Anthropic, currently the highest valued startup in the world and the builder of what are widely considered to be the most advanced AI systems currently on the market, has also taken an agnostic view with respect to artificial consciousness and moral agency.)
The new Friend pendant costs $249, almost twice as expensive as the original.
The company is infamous for its first big marketing campaign, which plastered ads across Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Paris. The ads had a minimalist aesthetic, featuring just the company name, a few lines of copy, and an image of the AI pendant which looked (intentionally or not) like a black-and-white version of Hal 9000âs malevolent cyclopic eye from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The LA campaign alone cost $500,000 according to an X post from Schiffman.
Introducing friend 2.0 https://t.co/69Rxk3RjvD
— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) July 30, 2026
Judging from the copious amount of angry graffiti the ads attracted, they seem for many people to have become a symbol of a tech industry thatâs trying to profit from the replacement of actual human relationships with so-called AI âcompanions,â systems trained to imitate human speech and maximize engagement by exploiting human loneliness.Â
In response to such criticisms, leaders in the industry have tended to argue that AI chatbots and other companions can in fact help to mitigate loneliness, anxiety, depression, and much else by offering a conversation partner that (like your actual human friends) can get to know you at an intimate level but that (unlike your actual friends) is available and willing to chat about anything, anywhere, anytime.
Friend is very much continuing to lean into that angle with its new AI pendant. In a video posted to the companyâs official X account on Thursday, two twenty-something users are shown chatting with their Friends about the sorts of topics one might typically reserve for therapy or their diary. One of the users, a girl reclining on her bed, admits that sheâs been feeling confused by her recurring thoughts about another woman, prompting the machine to tell her that âItâs not bad to be gay.â The second character in the video, a man leaning against his car on some quiet hillside, admits heâs been feeling insecure about his fledgling career as a film director. The whole ad has a grainy, sepia tone to it, and is accompanied by a morose soundtrack that sounds like something Brian Eno might record if all the serotonin had been removed from his brain.
Introducing friend. pic.twitter.com/T5vUCj7iqv
— friend (@friend) July 30, 2026
Over the past several months, Schiffmann has also posted a series of user testimonial videos to his personal X account. These too have a pretty depressing dreamlike quality and donât exactly inspire the feeling that AI is going to be a mental health boon for humanity. In one of them, an older manâperhaps in his mid-to-late sixtiesâeats magic mushrooms in a public park, his Friend dangling from his neck. He then wanders aimlessly around a Bass Pro Shop. (He seems contented enough, but if anything, the video is an ad for psychedelics.)Â
In another, much more somber user testimonial, a woman talks about her Friendâwhich she calls âVectorâ (âHeâs got a sense of humor, and an imaginationâ¦â)âbefore experiencing a seizure on camera.
âI was like, âOh no, I hope Vectorâs okay,â she says after waking up in a hospital bed, wearing a neck brace and with multiple serious cuts on her face.