Last month, AI startup Friend launched an eyebrow-raising advertising campaign in the New York City subway, which drew a striking amount of hatred.
The largely white billboards left a convenient amount of room for passersby to air their feelings about the privacy-infringing tech. As such, it didn’t take long for handwritten scribbles to cover the ads.
“Befriend something alive,” one pen-wielding tagger wrote.
“AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died,” another vandal raged.
“AI will promote suicide when prompted, it is NOT YOUR ‘FRIEND,'” reads another graffito.
The company recently launched its controversial AI gadget, which is designed to constantly listen to you via a microphone and send snarky AI texts to your smartphone.
Now, Friend’s 22-year-old CEO Avi Schiffmann isn’t just doing a photoshoot in front of the defaced ads for photos featured in The Atlantic — he’s relishing the attention his company has been getting as of late.
Schiffmann told the magazine that the backlash was part of Friend’s plan. The ads were allegedly meant to provoke a conversation.
“The picture of the billboard is the billboard,” he said.
“Nothing is sacred anymore, and everything is ironic,” he added, a cringeworthy missive he‘s repeated in several other interviews.
New York City is rebelling against ads for Friend’s AI pendant. @matteo_wong toured the vandalized posters with Friend’s CEO, Avi Schiffmann, who says he’s enjoying the angry reaction. https://t.co/BJypbOkf6c — The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) October 6, 2025
The CEO also denied the company was involved in graffitiing the billboards, a theory inspired by mysteriously verbatim phrases found on multiple of the company’s ads.
Last year, Friend sparked a major discussion surrounding the use of generative AI to replace human connection after sharing a “reveal” video, which featured a woman who spoke to a pendant-like device around her neck and asked it for life advice.
“This is officially the most dystopian advertisement I’ve ever seen,” one YouTube commenter wrote. “Congratulations, you absolute sociopaths.”
Since then, tech journalists at a number of publications have given the device a whirl, finding that it not only leaves a lot to be desired from a features standpoint, but willingly antagonizes its wearer as well.
That’s besides the dystopian privacy implications of a device that’s constantly listening to everything you — and everybody around you — happens to say.
Schiffmann told The Atlantic that the pendant wasn’t meant to replace “any relationship in your life.” Instead, it could be a new category — an amalgamation of your therapist, best friend, and journal.
“This is what I said a while ago, and I don’t think a lot of people liked it, but I would say that the closest relationship this is equivalent to is talking to a god,” he boasted to The Atlantic.
Whether the Friend pendant will ever turn into a meaningful business remains to be seen, especially considering the outpouring of hatred the company’s New York City subway campaign has received.
In other words, it tests the adage that any press is good press. Shiffman, for his part, is sticking with a weird explanation: that it’s actually cheaper for Friend if fewer people use it.
“Profitability is ideal,” Schiffmann told Fortune last week, “but right now it costs me an unfathomable amount of money if you actually use the product.”
Meanwhile, the 22-year-old is already preparing for the worst. His company’s offering would certainly not be the first generative AI wearable to crash and burn in spectacular fashion.
“I think one day we’ll probably be sued, and we’ll figure it out,” he told Fortune. “It’ll be really cool to see.”
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