New York City subway ads for a new pendant by AI startup Friend were quickly defaced by droves of angry residents.
The company’s latest gizmo, a necklace designed to constantly listen to you via a microphone and send snarky AI slop texts to your smartphone, has proven immensely controversial, leading to an outpouring of criticism.
The more people learn about the $129 device, the more appalled they are.
“Befriend something alive,” reads one graffiti tag.
“AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died,” another vandal wrote.
“Nobody who has friends needs an AI companion to chat with while enhancing the capacity of the surveillance state to a degree that would make George Orwell drink a jar of room temperature mercury,” NYC-based standup comedian Josh Gondelman wrote in a tongue-in-cheek “pep talk” aimed at the device. “And anyone without existing human friends arguably needs you even less.”
Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a dire warning about the device.
“A reminder that anything recorded on a device like this AI ‘friend’ could be used against you — by hackers, private companies, or the government,” the nonprofit wrote in a social post.
Meanwhile, Friend’s 22-year-old CEO, Avi Schiffmann, made the eyebrow-raising claim that he was intentionally inviting all of the hate by leaving enough blank space on the ads for all of the graffiti.
“I know people in New York hate AI, and things like AI companionship and wearables, probably more than anywhere else in the country,” he told Adweek. “So I bought more ads than anyone has ever done with a lot of white space so that they would socially comment on the topic.”
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