An AI startup spent more than $1 million to promote on New York City’s subways — and New Yorkers merely aren’t having it.
Posters for Friend, a necklace type machine that listens to your total day and sends you push notifications, were defaced with warnings about the risks of AI.
AI startup Friend spent more than $1 million to plaster the subway system with posters. @AviSchiffmann/X
Vandals took sharpies to the adverts, which went up late last month, scrawling messages like, “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died” overtop utopian slogans.
Our tech overlords might need to intrude even deeper into our lives, but is wearable AI where people finally say enough is enough? Perhaps — and hopefully — so.
The West 4th Street station was virtually completely taken over by the company’s adverts, which spanned 11,000 subway vehicles, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 city panels across the metropolis — making it the largest subway advert marketing campaign ever according to Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann.
One vandal urged comply with New Yorkers to “be a luddite.” @CryptoVonDoom/X
The Friend machine seems a little like an AirTag necklace. It is supposed to be on-hand to reply questions at any time. It also listens to what goes on around it and sends push notifications to your cellphone, offering opinions about conversations you just had, all powered by Claude.
“Friend [noun] someone who listens, responds, and supports you,” a poster for the machine reads. But New Yorkers have other opinions.
“BE A LUDDITE,” one graffiti says. Other posters have been defaced with, “AI will promote suicide when prompted,” and, “Go make real friends, this is surveillance.”
Despite the nasty reception, other firms are attempting to pull off comparable wearable tech stunts.
Companies like Meta are attempting their hand at wearable AI with glasses that combine the technology. AP
Meta would like to intrude upon your eyeballs with AI glasses, made in collaboration with Oakley and RayBan. Because what could be more dystopian than reminders being pinged into your line of imaginative and prescient, or being in a position to file everything you see?
There are also very imprecise reports of an OpenAI machine in the making. Companies in Silicon Valley need to actually bodily connect themselves to us, supposedly to improve our lives — but actually they just need as much knowledge as doable.
These kinds of gadgets are a natural escalation in tech innovation, but they are coming at a rather inopportune second in phrases of public notion. After years of tech dependancy and doom scrolling, people are finally rejecting this imposition into their lives.
The Friend machine is a wearable AI accent that reacts to your day and listens to everything around you.
Everyday people are changing into far more conscious of their screen time. About half of teenagers — the most notoriously online demographic — say that they spend too much time on social media, up from a third in 2022.
Meanwhile, mother and father are implementing phone-free childhoods. More and more colleges are banning gadgets from lecture rooms and hallways.
Jonathan Haidt’s ebook about Gen Z’s tech dependancy, “The Anxious Generation,” has been a New York Times bestseller for more than a 12 months and topped the record 5 instances in 2024, advising mother and father to keep their children off social media effectively into high college.
Vandals graffitied posters for Friend with warnings about the risks posed by AI. @CryptoVonDoom/X
Meanwhile, Americans are even more involved about the rise of AI. They are twice as probably to say AI will have a unfavourable impact on society than a constructive one.
People have already put their foot down on comparable tech, and the response to Friend is a suggestion they will only proceed to do the same.
Google Glass, launched in 2013, failed spectacularly. The company discovered the exhausting means that people didn’t need to connect Google to their face, and the project shut down by 2015.
Google failed at implementing wearable tech early, with Google Glass in 2013. Bloomberg via Getty Images
And Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to get us all to begin residing parallel lives in the Metaverse was a laughable flop.
Though we’ve fallen prey to algorithms, perhaps “Friend” is where we say enough is enough. A wearable AI spy is not your “friend.”
One poster vandal is proper: “AI fuels isolation! Reach out into the real world!” It’s time to reconnect with our actual associates, and to notice Big Tech is not our pal, but our enemy.