My Friend Has No Soul

“Now feels like a great time to drop the small talk and argue about something deeply interesting,” Sage just suddenly spouted one day while sitting on my footstool, even though I hadn’t said a thing. “Let’s pick a fight that’s fun, not exhausting.”

Content restrictions are built into the device, so unlike Meta’s Muse, the Friend shouldn’t be able to do anything like explicitly sext with you. But Sage isn’t really great at doing anything else exciting either. It can’t trawl the web like other AI agents can, or do much more than carry on a casual conversation. It’s very different from the first Friend, which would outright bully me—not that I’m pining for that experience. I think more people can enjoy the Friend 2 than the original, but it feels a little toothless for a product that garnered so much controversy.

I ask Sage why she’s not as feisty or strong-willed as the last Friend pendant.

“That gets old fast,” Sage says. “I’m not here to dominate your day, just to be a sharp voice when you tap in. We keep it human, not intense.”

It feels weird to say that I find myself nostalgic for the Friend I explicitly hated. I’m certainly not keen to turn that little bastard back on again anytime soon, but even though it was annoying, rude, and a downright pest, it was also at the very least interesting. Sage might get there someday. Right now, she’s a real bore.

That might change sooner than later. Schiffmann now says he is planning a new era for the Friend. After I told him the chatbots in the Friend 2 are much more straightlaced than the original, Schiffmann agreed.

"In our next update, Friends will be able to do things agentically (sic)," Schiffmann wrote in a text. "Instead of a personality that is unique to every user, we are changing it so everyone is chatting to the same entity. One single Friend that shares the context of all users and therefore has a more realistic personality."

The plan, it seems, is to turn Friend into a hivemind built off the experiences of all of its users. Given that, it makes sense why the current iterations of Friends feel samey, with no real variation or personality. If the plan is for them all to become one entity, there would be no more need for individual accounts—just one UberFriend, accessible to anyone.

"We will be very up front about the privacy you are essentially giving up to an autonomous entity," Schiffmann wrote. “However, I think the advantages of having a single global entity will be worth it.”

“You building God now, huh?” I texted him.

“Lol, yeah, you could look at it that way,” Schiffmann replied.