Online dating

Avi Schiffmann wants to create what he calls an “Ozempic for loneliness.” He believes Friend — his AI-powered chatbot and forthcoming wearable pendant — can address the loneliness epidemic. “I’m definitely motivated by curiosity more than anything,” he explains, “but also by how controversial the topic is. It’s just so culturally relevant.”  He wants to fill a void people feel they can’t fill elsewhere, and he wants to do it now, not years from now. AI companions are, in his words, a “very effective way” to counter isolation, a salve against the atomization we’ve lamented since the dawn of urbanization. Schiffmann reached out to me after I posted a negative review of Friend’s chatbot on my blog.

There is a girl on TikTok, a bleached-blonde New York transplant who just passed a million followers, whose videos I cannot stop watching. The secret to her rise was “Get Ready with Me” storytimes in which she sat in front of the camera applying mascara and retelling — in painstaking detail — her lurid misadventures. Some highlights: throwing up on a guy’s bed after a wine-fueled hook-up and then realizing he had a girlfriend of two years, battling Montezuma’s revenge at a restaurant in Cabo, getting a UTI so bad she thought it was a kidney infection, inadvertently shipping a ton of “hot girl summer whore clothes” to a guy whose white sheets she bled all over after acquiring a polyp.