If there were a talking white pendant that hung around your neck 24/7, listening to you and proactively messaging you—would you wear it? This white pendant is exactly the AI necklace product that Silicon Valley startup Friend wants to sell to the world. In the autumn of 2025, it spent over $1 million on tens of thousands of ads in the New York City subway. The result wasn’t a rush of buyers, but walls covered in graffiti protests. This “AI companion” PR disaster actually taught a lesson to all readers looking for an AI roleplay and interactive fiction platform: when it comes to companionship, software and hardware take completely different paths.
The NYC Subway “Anti-AI” Graffiti War
On September 27, 2025, Friend launched what foreign media described as “the largest advertising campaign of the year” in the NYC subway: 11,000 car stickers, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 street billboards, costing over $1 million in total—a massive gamble for a startup that had only raised about $7 million.
Within days, the ads were covered in protest graffiti. “AI is not your friend,” “Stop profiting from loneliness,” “This is surveillance”—handwritten slogans covered the original minimalist white-and-black design. Fortune’s report even titled its piece “People destroyed friend.com’s AI necklace ads with graffiti.”
More intriguingly, the 22-year-old founder behind this storm, Avi Schiffmann, wasn’t bothered at all. Facing walls of graffiti, his response was: “Capitalism is the greatest art medium.” He even went to take photos in front of the vandalized billboards, treating the negative reviews as free publicity—a near-provocative PR strategy that turned Friend from a product into a national debate about “whether AI can replace human relationships.”
What is Friend? The 22-year-old founder and the talking white pendant
The core of Friend is a minimalist white circular pendant, priced at $129. It connects to an iPhone app via Bluetooth and is powered by the Google Gemini 2.5 model. It claims to require “no opening the app, no typing.” As long as you wear it, the device continuously listens to conversations and ambient sounds around you, proactively responding via text message—perhaps a snarky comment, a reminder, or a caring message like “You have an interview later, good luck.”
Before founding Friend, Avi Schiffmann was best known for creating a global COVID-19 tracking website during the pandemic, which received extensive media coverage. This time, he secured funding from founders of companies like Solana and Perplexity to build this “companion” wearable, with a clear goal: to combat modern loneliness.
It is worth noting several practical limitations: currently, Friend only supports iPhone; Android users cannot use it at all. The device itself has no output method other than a speaker and microphone; all responses are pushed as text messages to the phone, not voice conversations. Battery life has also been frequently criticized by reviewers as being too short. In other words, it is closer to a “wearable recorder + AI narrator” than the smart companion that can speak out loud seen in sci-fi movies.
“Companionship” or “Bullying”? What media reviews say
Compared to the warm and thoughtful image in marketing videos, real user reviews are much harsher. After testing it for a month, a WIRED reporter gave a blunt verdict: it is a device that “bullies its own users”—the AI occasionally mocks the user’s daily choices instead of simply providing companionship. Tech media outlet TechBuzz cited this review and titled their article “The $129 wearable that bullies you.”
Another reviewer’s experience was quite vivid: they described “constantly taking the necklace off and stuffing it into their bag” because wearing a device that continuously listens to conversations in public places like restaurants or offices makes people feel visibly uncomfortable—not just the user, but once people around realize “this thing is recording me,” the atmosphere becomes eerie. This tension between “sense of companionship vs. social awkwardness” is the most difficult product contradiction Friend currently faces.
Privacy concerns: When your “friend” is recording everyone around you
The most controversial part of Friend is actually not the user’s own privacy, but the “privacy of others.” The device is designed for constant listening. As long as the user wears it out, the conversations of everyone around them could be recorded and sent to the cloud for analysis without their knowledge or consent. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has publicly warned that such devices have the potential to be used as surveillance tools by hackers, corporations, and even governments.
This is also the core demand of the NYC subway graffiti protests—behind the phrase “AI is not your friend,” the real issue being questioned is “using intimacy to package surveillance.” When a product that claims to solve loneliness comes at the cost of making everyone around you live in fear of being recorded, whether it’s worth it has become the sharpest question of the entire controversy.
The founder’s provocative philosophy: Treating controversy as the best marketing
CNN Business’s in-depth report described Friend as “a symbol of the AI backlash.” In the interview, Schiffmann’s attitude toward the criticism remained consistent: rather than explaining, apologizing, or revising the product, he treats every controversy as free exposure. He even said the graffiti posters “proved that the marketing is working.”
This strategy has indeed worked—from a business perspective, the discussion generated by the controversy far exceeds what traditional advertising could achieve. But it also makes many question: does a company that claims to “solve loneliness” really put the user’s mental health first, or is it just running the “loneliness economy” as a good business?
Despite the controversy, 200,000 people still bought in
Despite mixed media reviews and constant privacy controversies, Friend’s user base has not stalled. According to a report by Cosmopolitan (reposted via AOL), this “controversial necklace” has accumulated over 200,000 users, proving that there is indeed a group of people in the market willing to pay to “have something with them at all times,” even if the cost is privacy concerns and social awkwardness.
This number echoes a larger trend: AI companionship is no longer a niche demand, but a rapidly expanding market. From OpenAI rumored to be building a screenless smart speaker to wearable devices like Friend, tech giants and startups are fighting for the “companion AI” market, just choosing completely different carriers.
Hardware vs. Software Companions: Which is right for you?
After reviewing the history of Friend’s controversy, we can actually summarize a more fundamental question: should AI companionship be achieved through “wearable devices constantly present” or “mobile apps with proactive conversations”? Both paths have their trade-offs.
The hardware route (like Friend) has the advantage of “not needing to actively open an app,” theoretically capturing more life moments; but the cost is high privacy risks, limited to a single AI persona, inability to customize characters, and currently only supporting iPhone. The software route (like Character.AI or WeavAI apps) is the opposite: the user has the initiative, recording or logging only when they want to chat, while also being able to select or even create exclusive character personas, deeply cultivating a relationship or a story world, rather than just passively receiving the AI’s chatter.
For readers who want “a character to chat with, or even build a story together,” software-based AI roleplay and interactive fiction platforms are actually closer to their needs—you can decide the character’s personality, appearance, and way of speaking, and you can pause at any time without worrying about something recording nearby during dinner with friends.
Friend AI Necklace Pros & Cons at a Glance
Overall, it is better to position Friend as an “experimental social observation” rather than a mature daily companionship solution—at least at this stage, its effect on solving loneliness is far less significant than the public discussion it has triggered.
If you want a “character,” not a “surveillance device”
The controversy surrounding Friend has also made many readers rethink: what is the AI companionship I really want? If the answer is “something around me making sounds at all times,” then there are indeed a few wearable devices on the market to choose from; but if the answer is actually “I want a character with personality, memory, and who can walk through a story with me,” then the more suitable path is actually a platform like WeavAI, which focuses on roleplay and interactive fiction.
WeavAI features an anime style, a complete Traditional Chinese interface, and focuses on dual modes of interactive fiction and roleplay: you can choose your favorite persona from the platform’s existing character library to start a story, or you can set the character’s background, personality, and worldview yourself, making every conversation a plot development exclusive to you. Compared to the passive recording of wearable devices, this interactive method of “you actively initiate, you actively decide the plot direction” is more suitable for readers who want to deeply cultivate a virtual relationship, rather than just wanting background noise-style companionship. The platform also provides creators with a 30% point rebate, daily check-in +500 points, and other mechanisms, making the threshold for long-term use lower.
To browse more characters and story genres, you can also go directly to the WeavAI exploration page, which contains original characters and interactive fiction of various themes, from campus and fantasy to sci-fi.
Conclusion: Is the next step for AI companionship a device or a character?
The story of Friend has just begun—200,000 users prove that the market’s demand for “AI companionship” is real, but it also tells everyone in the most direct way: making “companionship” into a pendant that continuously records is destined to constantly struggle between privacy and experience. In contrast, roleplay and interactive fiction through mobile apps, where users actively control the rhythm, may be a more mature and privacy-respecting form of AI companionship at this stage. Regardless of which path you choose, understanding the trade-offs behind each product is the only way to find the AI companion experience that is truly right for you.
Further reading: Why are AI companions always on your side? 2026 research reveals the “Sycophancy Effect”, 2026 AI Companion Regulation Year: A look at legislation in 11 US states, Character.AI, Replika, Is OpenAI also making an “AI companion”? The most mysterious screenless smart speaker in history
