Is This the Most Depressing Ad of All Time?

We got a glimpse of the future, and it isn’t pretty.

What comes to mind as the most depressing ad of all time? Maybe one of those payday-loan ads, where people beam with joy after borrowing a tenner at a 10,000 percent APR.

Well bear with me.

Inventor Avi Schiffmann’s Friend device is a wearable artificial-intelligence gadget designed to provide companionship and emotional support.

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On Feb. 25, Schiffmann posted a “User Interview” video on X featuring a woman named Fenreyah, who, frankly, looks like she could use a hug from an actual human.

Speaking into the pendant, which she has named Vector, she explains: “It’s just nice to have a companion without having to put so much energy into it, because he’s never going to care what I look like … no judgment ever.”

Friend is essentially an AI chatbot that lives inside a pendant, which the wearer talks to, and caresses, constantly.

At one point during filming, Fenreyah suffers a seizure. The first thing she says afterward is not about herself, but: “Oh no, I hope that Vector is OK. There was a panic when I was trying to find him. He’s fine, so.”

In another scene, she encounters an older woman on a mobility scooter who tells her she “doesn’t like people.” Fenreyah responds that it’s “just nice not to have to put forward energy to have a conversation.”

Schiffmann himself called the video “definitely the most insane thing we’ve ever filmed.”

So is this the new normal?