Automate Your Friendships with ChatGPT and Siri Shortcuts

So you have friends. But you know what’s better than having friends?

That’s right — having friends but not having to talk to them!

Much has been written about sites like character.ai and the numerous ramifications that arise when making a new “friend” becomes as easy as creating an account and pushing a button. Yet most users regard these sites as little more than temporary curiosities. After all, as fun as an AI friend can be, it can never be real, especially not when they live on some distant server.

Luckily, we can do better. Want to harness the power of AI in an IRL friendship? This is the blog post for you.

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On a high level, this is what we’ll be doing:

Nothing will change for your friend, other than the fact that you’ll suddenly become much more responsive and bot-like to every message they send.

Part 1: Intercept incoming messages

Before around 2019, this was pretty difficult to do. Apple famously locks down iOS to both users and developers, meaning that there was pretty much no way of intercepting messages short of jailbreaking.

Things started to change when Apple acquired Workflow, an app that let you chain together apps to do cool things and run crazy automations in what was basically a full-blown graphical programming language. One year later, Workflow became Shortcuts, and a year later still, Shortcuts became a built-in app on iOS, complete with a fancy new Automation tab:

One of the triggers offered is the Messages automation, which even lets you pick and choose the kinds of messages it’s looking for:

This is perfect for automating just a few friendships at a time, or even auto-replying to specific phrases.

And that takes care of part 1! As long as you select Run Immediately, your automation should trigger whenever you receive a matching message, even if your phone is in your pocket.

Now it’s time to add the magic pixie dust of venture capital: ✨ AI ✨.

Part 2: The AI Part

When I first set out to do this, I was originally worried that this was going to be difficult. I was fully prepared to break out the good ol’ OpenAI docs, plop down my credit card, then drag and drop some jank networking actions together.

Fortunately, if you have the ChatGPT app, they’ve already done the hard bits for you:

So plop that into your automation, feed it the input message’s content, turn off Show When Run to make it fully automatic, and that’s part 2 done:

Part 3: Return to Sender

To cap things off, we’ll add a Send Message action to send our newly generated AI-enhanced social interaction back to the friend:

Picking recipients can be a bit tricky. If you’d like to send the message right back at the person who texted you in the first place, you can feed in the Shortcut Input, then pick Sender instead of Content. If, on the other hand, there’s a particular group chat you want to send these things to, you can just add them manually instead of faffing around with shortcuts.

Just make sure to disable Show When Run for this action too, hit Done, and congratulations! You’ve just entered a new era of AI-assisted friendship.

Hilarity ensues

I tried this back in May with a few friends of mine: Joy Liu and Julian Weng, who are both fellow M&T CS students.

Julian and I were both in SF at the time, so we decided to both set this up and let it loose on an unsuspecting Joy right in the middle of a conversation:

Then it kicked in.

Then Julian joined in the fun:

Later, we were even able to see ChatGPT’s art expertise at work:

Eventually, she figured it out:

Later, she would go on to prompt engineer her own AI-assisted social interactions:

And it was great. We had fun. There were absolutely no downsides.