News: 0179680842

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Testing the Viral AI Necklace That Promises Companionship But Delivers Confusion (fortune.com)

(Monday October 06, 2025 @11:22AM (msmash) from the lobotomized-friendship dept.)


Fortune tested the AI Friend necklace for two weeks and found it [1]struggled to perform its basic function . The $129 pendant missed conversations entirely during the author's breakup call and could only offer vague questions about "fragments" when she tried to ask for advice. The device lagged seven to ten seconds behind her speech and frequently disconnected. The author had to press her lips against the pendant and repeat herself multiple times to get coherent replies. After a week and a half the necklace forgot her name and later misremembered her favorite color.

The startup has raised roughly seven million dollars in venture capital for the product and spent a large portion on eleven thousand subway posters across the MTA system. Sales reached three thousand units but only one thousand have shipped. The company brought in slightly under four hundred thousand dollars in revenue. The startup told Fortune he deliberately "lobotomized" the AI's personality after receiving complaints. The terms of service require arbitration in San Francisco and grant the company permission to collect audio and voice data for AI training.



[1] https://fortune.com/2025/10/03/friend-ai-necklace-review-avi-schiffmann/


I Hate It Here (Score:2)

by TwistedGreen ( 80055 )

Every day I feel more and more like I'm living in the world of Transmetropolitan.

That series has aged like a fine Mongolian kumis.

Re: (Score:2)

by TWX ( 665546 )

I was just going to compare it to Terry Gilliam's Brazil , where technology is developed to a barely minimal working standard and then augmented stupidly, like the teeny tiny CRT displays with fresnel lenses sitting in front of them, connected to typewriters repurposed into electronic data entry keyboards.

Unfortunately while as zany as Gilliam's movie, it's not nearly as hilarious.

Discworld (Score:2)

by TWX ( 665546 )

Anyone else getting vibes of the 'Dis-organizer' that Sam Vimes had in the Discworld novel Jingo , that would respond [Insert Name Here]?

Re: (Score:2)

by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 )

You are awfully correct. One of its messages was "Things to do today: die". And yes, LLMs have brought the same message.

Crash (Score:1)

by RobinH ( 124750 )

I was around for the dot-com crash in 2000, and the 2008 crash, and this has all the hallmarks. It's remarkable that the stock market hasn't really crashed since 2008, even though COVID caused a lot of instability and probably should have done it (but COVID was weird in so many ways). Cryptocurrency was the same kind of scam, but it seems most people didn't buy into it. But AI is something they've bought hook, line, and sinker.

If I made a million widgets, and sold one to my girlfriend for $1000, would yo

Re: (Score:2)

by TWX ( 665546 )

We value companies weirder than that.

We value companies for short-term gains based on what we perceive of a long-term potential. We want to see long term profit potential but we live by expecting strong numbers quarter-by-quarter, so company management ends up doing things for the short-term to make themselves look good at the expense of the long-term (like eliminating their research & development institutions) and then get mad later when those companies fade into relative irrelevance compared to their

More surveillance? (Score:2)

by CoachS ( 324092 )

I can't help but wonder what will happen the first time one of these is present at a crime scene, or when somebody subpoenas them for eDiscovery due to civil litigation.

Invasion of the Dancing Penguin

Those annoying, dancing cartoon characters embedded in software applications
are no longer confined to Microsoft programs. They have entered the realm
of Linux. A new Linux distribution under development, called LinTux,
promises to provide a more "user-friendly" environment through its "Dancing
Penguin" assistant.

Dancing Tux will "guide" users through the installation process and will be
a permanent fixture of the X root window. The LinTux staff demonstrated a
prototype version of the Dancing Tux program to this Humorix reporter. It
was certainly impressive, but, like the Dancing Paper Clip in Microsoft
Office, it becomes annoying very fast.

The one redeeming feature of LinTux is that, when the system is idle,
Dancing Tux becomes a make-shift screen saver. The animations included in
the prototype were quite amusing. For instance, in one scene, Tux chases
Bill Gates through an Antarctic backdrop. In another animation, Tux can be
seen drinking beers with his penguin pals and telling Microsoft jokes.