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Your Friend Is Not Your Friend

Ripley Stroud on the Friend.com necklace.

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Ripley Stroud
Oct 16, 2025
∙ Paid

If you live in New York, you’ve already seen the provocative ads on the subway for “Friend,” an AI-powered pendant that is meant to provide artificial friendship for our lonely age. If you don’t live in New York, you’ve likely already heard about the controversy behind those ads. That means they worked.

Today we are proud to publish, for the first time, …

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A guest post by
Ripley Stroud
research fellow at the aspen institute; PhD candidate in philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill
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