A necklace pendant with an always-on microphone listens to the users wearing it, interpreting their interactions through generative AI and providing guidance and support via smartphone notifications. The pendant acts as a virtual friend who's always there for you and helps the user cope with life problems and relationships. 

That's not the synopsis of an episode of Black Mirror; that's the vision behind a new AI gadget called Friend, "a wearable Al friend designed to be a close confidant for everyday life." Basically, it's a plastic pendant with a dubious design that acts as a Bluetooth microphone connected to an iPhone app.

The company behind the product is MyTab AI (registered as MyTab AL), founded by Avi Schiffmann, a Harvard dropout who rose to fame in 2020 thanks to his global Covid-19 Dashboard. That story is wrapped in controversy, and so are every one of Schiffman's subsequent ventures, with Friend being the latest and most controversial so far.

Nik Schevchenko, the founder of a competing startup called Based Hardware, which is also developing an always-on AI necklace called "Friend," accuses Schiffmann of stealing the idea and marketing it with VC money. 

Schiffmann alleges that the opposite happened and that he had the idea before the open-source project was launched on Kickstarter. 
Regardless of who's right, both founders are fighting over one of the most tone-deaf AI gadgets we've seen so far.

Friend sums up everything wrong with the current trend of humanizing generative AI, from mimicking human-to-human interaction with a layer of fake empathy to creating a device to enable synthetic relationships for lonely and socially awkward people. The MyTab version of Friend also appears to be just a marketing shell for external AI services, considering it uses Anthropic's Claude 3.5 to generate live interactions.

And that's without even mentioning the privacy nightmare that arises from wearing an always-on Bluetooth microphone around other people.

Friend is just the latest in a series of gadgets that try to leverage generative AI to enable new forms of interactions with technology. While a new vision and framework for our interactions with intelligent tech in the age of AI is sorely needed, all these products have been trying to do is leverage a non-existent market need to extract and concentrate value. Friend, Rabbit, Ai Pin, or the Brilliant glasses are not an answer to the fundamental question we're facing about our future coexistence with AI, but rather early-stage grifting attempts at raising easy capital thanks to the AI hype. 

Their bluffs have been easily called the moment the actual product hit the market and the hands of the reviewers. We expect Friend to face exactly the same fate pretty soon.