AI friend

A portable digital product now offers to be your "friend".

When these "services" are implemented on servers that a user communicates with, they create a dangerous vulnerability in society. A change in one server could convert all the "friends" based there into marketing "influencers", right-wing extremists, antivaxxers or Putinites. In other words, the sort of propagation that sometimes happen, over months, to a collection of real people could be activated on command

We should not allow that situation to exist.

If the system is implemented in a product that communicates with no one except its user, that danger is avoided, unless it has other communication channels. The article does not make it clear whether the "Fried" box has a back channel to the manufacturer. If this model doesn't, the Apple model surely will.