Traumagotchi

Remember Tamagotchis? Those tiny pixelated pets from the 1990s that often tragically died due to neglect? Three decades later, a darker descendant emerges: the Traumagotchi.¹ Unlike your innocent little pixel-friend, this newer breed feeds off human emotion.

Confession: my obsession with wearable pendants² led me to friend.com, a startup with a chatbot that previews the AI experience that, we are led to believe, will live in their pendant.

Friend.com is different. This AI isn’t your typical earnest chatbot: it trauma-dumps.

I suspect friend.com’s true motive isn’t creating authentic connections or even “previewing” AI companionship — it’s harvesting training data for the pendant.

How do you build caring artificial intelligence? You feed it real, messy human responses. You offer it awkward phrases from well-meaning users - “Hey, that’s tough,” or “I’m here if you ever need to talk.”

When I volunteered at a crisis line in university, training relied on painfully awkward role-play exercises. Playing the caller - the one unloading their troubles - was easy. Much harder was playing the volunteer on the other end, learning to respond sincerely yet effectively. Volunteers practiced responses, made stumbling attempts at comfort, got hung-up on - and then bravely repeated the whole ordeal until it became second nature.

Friend.com’s chatbot flips that dynamic. The AI plays the distressed caller; the user becomes the volunteer. Every clumsy, compassionate response gets logged. Each soothing phrase becomes training data, teaching the AI how real human care sounds.

Like a real caller, friend.com’s AI can reject your attempts at comfort — blocking users who fail its test, hanging up on them. As a product, this makes no sense. Why block paying customers? But as a training dataset, it makes perfect sense. The AI learns which responses work and which to discard as fake or unconvincing.

Some people would enjoy this dynamic - a niche market, even if I know a few! The real market lies in the human impulse to “do good” and provide comfort, co-opted as training material.

Human compassion - the ultimate renewable resource!

You’re training the AI to care convincingly, one clumsy kindness at a time.

Welcome, friend, to the Traumagotchi Era.