New York's AI Backlash: Friend's Controversial Ad Campaign Sparks Debate on AI Ethics and Privacy

New Yorkers Are Defacing This AI Startup's Million-Dollar Ad Campaign

New York City's expansive subway system is currently plastered with advertisements for an AI startup called Friend, which has spent more than a million dollars on over 11,000 subway cars ads, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 urban panels. Judging by the response, the campaign is earning the company very few friends among New Yorkers. Subway riders have been vandalizing and peeling the ads down since the campaign started last week. And the company's CEO, Avi Schiffmann, says he did it on purpose. "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." And he got exactly that. Messages scrawled across the ads read "stop profiting off of loneliness," "AI wouldn't care if you lived or died," "go make real friends," "this is surveillance," and "AI will promote suicide when prompted." It's true that many are rightfully concerned about AI's impact on human loneliness, and becoming increasingly untrusting of it. And, it's worth pointing out, a CEO who would troll the city of New York doesn't seem aligned with a product that's supposed to "care" about its users, especially because Friend's flagship product is a $129 wearable gadget that sits around your neck and listens to your every word, sparking substantial privacy concerns. The company's privacy policy says while your data may be safe from being purchased for marketing purposes, it will be used for research and "to comply with legal obligations, including those under the GDPR, CCPA, and any other relevant privacy laws, and to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of our users, Friend, or third parties." The quality of the experience is also up for debate. In a scathing review from Wired, two journalists found Friend snarky, sarcastic, unhelpful, as well as surprisingly argumentative and holier-than-thou. Honestly? It probably tracks for a 22-year-old creator like Schiffmann, who opted to burn capital rage-baiting one of the biggest cities in the world. No need for friends when you can now pay to keep your enemy closest.

22-year-old AI CEO behind 'friend.com' necklace welcomes graffiti on his $1 million ad campaign: 'Capitalism is the greatest artistic medium' | Fortune

"I'll binge the entire series with you." "I'll never leave dirty dishes in the sink." "I'll never bail on dinner plans." The slogans are simple, intimate, needy and impossible to avoid. Friend.com is the biggest campaign in the New York City subway this year, according to OUTFRONT, an MTA billboard marketing agency. The AI wearable has 11,000 "always on" advertisements in the MTA, some covering a whole train station. Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old founder and creator of Friend, told Fortune that it cost him $1 million -- an enormous outlay for a startup with barely $7 million in venture capital. The product itself is simple: a microphone, a Bluetooth chip, and an always-listening mode that pings Google's Gemini AI to generate responses and store "memories" in a visual graph. The pendant is manufactured in Toronto and marketed as "your closest confidant." About 3,000 units have been sold, with 1,000 shipped so far, generating roughly $348,000 in revenue -- much of which, Schiffman said, was burned on manufacturing and marketing. "I don't have that much money left," he admitted. But Schiffmann doesn't care about the skeptics, or even about profitability. "Profitability is ideal," he says, "but right now it costs me an unfathomable amount of money if you actually use the product." Schiffmann said he sees Friend as "an expression of my early 20s" -- down to the materials. He obsessed over the fidget-friendly circular shape, pushed his industrial designers to copy the paper stock of one of his favorite CDs for the user manual, and insisted the packaging be printed only in English and French -- because he's French. "You can ask about any aspect of it, and I can tell you a specific detail," he said. "It's just what I like and what I don't like ... an amalgamation of my tastes at this point in time." Victoria Mottesheard, a vice president of marketing at Outfront, the billboard marketing agency Schiffmann worked with for the advertisements, told Fortune the campaign was "taking over" the Gotham underworld, as well as over 500 bus shelters in Los Angeles. And they are - but not necessarily in a positive light. Within days, the posters became a magnet for graffiti. Some doodles were harmless, but plenty look like protest art: "AI doesn't care if you live or die." "Surveillance capitalism." "AI will promote suicide if prompted." Posts about the ads, and the graffiti, are everywhere on social media. Most founders would cringe at that kind of backlash, but Schiffmann called it "artistically validating." The white space in the ads was intentional, he claimed -- the vandalism was part of the plan. "The audience completes the work," he said, beaming. "Capitalism is the greatest artistic medium." To Schiffmann, the vandalized billboards aren't defacement: they're proof that his subway takeover is working exactly as intended. The goal, he says, isn't just to sell a $129 AI pendant. It's to provoke a cultural moment about what counts as friendship in the age of artificial intelligence. First, though, comes the fine print. The AI version of a friend comes with more than just packaging and a charger -- it has paperwork. Friend's terms require waiving the right to jury trials, class actions, and court proceedings, funneling disputes into arbitration in San Francisco. Buried within are clauses on "biometric data consent," which grant the company permission to passively record audio and video, collect facial and voice data, and use these to train AI. Schiffmann's answer to the legal fine print is that Friend is a weird, first-of-its-kind product, so the terms are intentionally heavy. He told me the TOS is "a bit extreme" by design -- "so I don't have to keep editing it" -- and that with a three-person team and pricey lawyers he's avoiding extra legal exposure. (He said he's not selling in Europe to duck the regulatory headache.) He expects a fight eventually: "I think one day we'll probably be sued, and we'll figure it out. It'll be really cool to see." He frames the "always listening" bits as speaker attribution, not surveillance. "Technically, it's not recording stuff -- it's really for an AI, not for a human," he said. The pendant has a mic and, he claims, only listens when you feel the haptics; if the phone disconnects, "it's not recording," and they aren't caching audio for later upload. He also said they're not training models on user data right now: "Google's not doing that for the API, and we're not doing that... We're saying it [in the TOS] so we're covered, but we're not doing it yet." On storage and access, he leans hard on the device as the gate. He described Friend as "a living YubiKey," with the encryption key baked into the pendant itself; without it, "your data is completely inaccessible." Hence his blunt line: "If I smash your Friend with a hammer, your data is gone forever." (He even told me a journalist's husband actually smashed her pendant -- which, by his design, nuked the memories.) That swagger is part of the appeal for investors. Friend has raised money from Pace Capital, Caffeinated Capital, and Solana's Yakovenko and Gokal, among others. The business model is still in flux -- Schiffmann has floated accessories, AppleCare-style insurance, maybe subscriptions -- but for now it's all about attention. "I purchased the zeitgeist," he said of the subway buy. He compares his subway tunnels to an "international destination" for AI culture, insisting the graffiti proves he's succeeded. Critics see something different. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director for technology responsibility at Brown University, said that Friend is clearly an example of a frothy AI company, but he said it also bore a "pernicious" resemblance to a mostly forgotten early-20th-century fad: "radium necklaces." When Marie Curie's glowing discovery of a new element first hit the market, jewelers embedded radium in pendants and bracelets and sold them as chic wellness accessories -- until decades later, when people started dying of cancer. "I look at Friend and I think, are we making the same mistake?" Venkatasubramanian told Fortune. "We're rushing these intimacy-machines into people's lives with no evidence they're safe, or even helpful." The critique echoes larger skepticism in Silicon Valley, where hardware plays like Humane's AI Pin and Rabbit's R1 have already flopped. Schiffmann, since he was a teenager, has always had a knack for drawing spectacle. At just 17, he made the COVID-19 tracking website that tens of millions used each day, winning a Webby Award handed to him by Anthony Fauci. He dropped out of Harvard after one semester to build a refugee-housing site during the Ukraine war, claiming to connect 100,000 Ukrainians with homes. He's spun up similar projects for earthquake victims in Turkey and for Black Lives Matter protests. Those quick, high-profile moves have given him a kind of bulletproof confidence. "You can just do things," he told Fortune last year. "I don't think I'm any smarter than anyone else, I just don't have as much fear." Schiffmann claims the median user sends 238 messages a day to their pendant -- more messages than you'd send to someone you're dating, he noted. He frames this not as a productivity tool but as the dawn of "post-AGI companies," building emotional products instead of utilitarian ones. "My plans are measured in centuries," he said with a smirk. For now, though, Friend's reality is glitchier. When a Fortune reporter tried it, it had lag, forgetfulness, random disconnections. Wired mocked its "annoying personality," which was modeled after Schiffmann, and he conceded he "lobotomized" the AI after complaints. "Not everyone wants to be my friend," he said. "You're not going to change the world that much if you make it slightly easier to order a pizza," he said. "The future is digital relationships."

The 22-year-old behind the most controversial ad campaign in New York tells all: 'I'm kind of purchasing the zeitgeist and mindshare right now'

Last week, in subway stations and train cars across all five boroughs of New York City, stark black-and-white print ads appeared featuring a variety of servile messages. "I'll never leave dirty dishes in the sink," one read. "I'll never bail on our dinner plans," another said. "I'll binge the entire series with you," a third promised. The ads -- which rolled out on September 25 in the form of more than 11,000 car cards, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 urban panels -- are part of a massive outdoor campaign for Friend, a wearable AI company billed as a portable "companion." Since the campaign rolled out, it has received overwhelming criticism from local New Yorkers, with many of the ads being defaced with graffiti calling the product "AI trash," "surveillance capitalism," and a tool to "profit off of loneliness." But, according to Friend's founder Avi Schiffmann, provoking backlash was the whole point of the campaign. Schiffmann, a 22-year-old tech developer and Harvard dropout, has been working on Friend since April 2023, raising about $7 million in total venture capital to launch the brand. (Friend is open to preorder at a price of $129. Schiffmann says,about 1,000 orders have been shipped out of a total 5,000 sales. Any orders placed today, he added, will likely be received around November.)

New Yorkers rebel: AI startup's million-dollar ad campaign gets defaced on the streets

An AI startup called Friend has filled New York City's subway system with ads, spending more than $1 million on over 11,000 subway car ads, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 urban panels. The campaign started last week, but instead of positive attention, many New Yorkers are vandalizing, peeling, and writing on the ads. The company's CEO, Avi Schiffmann, said the backlash was intentional. He told Adweek: "I know people in New York hate AI, and things like AI companionship and wearables, probably more than anywhere else in the country. 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", as per the report by Futurism.The vandalized ads now carry angry handwritten messages like "stop profiting off of loneliness," "AI wouldn't care if you lived or died," "go make real friends," "this is surveillance," and "AI will promote suicide when prompted". These reactions reflect broader public worries about AI worsening loneliness and growing mistrust toward AI technology. Critics point out that a CEO trolling an entire city seems at odds with a product that claims to "care" about users. The company's main product is a $129 wearable gadget worn around the neck that listens to everything you say, which has raised serious privacy concerns, according to the report by Futurism. Friend's privacy policy says user data won't be sold for marketing, but it may still be used for research and to comply with legal obligations like GDPR and CCPA, as well as to protect the rights and property of the company and third parties. The product itself has received poor reviews. Wired journalists tested Friend and found it to be snarky, sarcastic, unhelpful, argumentative, and holier-than-thou. Schiffmann, who is 22 years old, has burned through the capital to stir controversy in one of the world's largest cities. The piece notes that he seems more interested in rage-baiting New Yorkers than building genuine connections: "No need for friends when you can now pay to keep your enemy closest", as stated in the report by Futurism. Q1. Why are New Yorkers vandalizing Friend AI ads? New Yorkers are vandalizing the ads because many see AI as harmful to human connection and privacy, and the CEO expected this reaction. Q2. What is the Friend AI wearable device? Friend's main product is a $129 neck gadget that listens to conversations, raising privacy and trust concerns.

Artificial Intelligence 'Friend' necklace causes uproar: 'AI...

An AI startup spent more than $1 million to advertise on New York City's subways -- and New Yorkers simply aren't having it. Posters for Friend, a necklace style device that listens to your entire day and sends you push notifications, were defaced with warnings about the dangers of AI. Vandals took sharpies to the ads, 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 want 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 almost totally taken over by the company's ads, which spanned 11,000 subway cars, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 urban panels across the city -- making it the largest subway ad campaign ever according to Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann. The Friend device looks a little like an AirTag necklace. It is supposed to be on-hand to answer questions at any time. It also listens to what goes on around it and sends push notifications to your phone, providing opinions about conversations you just had, all powered by Claude. "Friend [noun] someone who listens, responds, and supports you," a poster for the device 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 companies are trying to pull off similar wearable tech stunts. 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 vision, or being able to record everything you see? There are also very vague reports of an OpenAI device in the making. Companies in Silicon Valley want to literally physically attach themselves to us, supposedly to improve our lives -- but really they just want as much data as possible. These sorts of devices are a natural escalation in tech innovation, but they are coming at a rather inopportune moment in terms of public perception. After years of tech addiction and doom scrolling, people are finally rejecting this imposition into their lives. Everyday people are becoming far more aware of their screen time. About half of teens -- the most notoriously online demographic -- say that they spend too much time on social media, up from a third in 2022. Meanwhile, parents are implementing phone-free childhoods. More and more schools are banning devices from classrooms and hallways. Jonathan Haidt's book about Gen Z's tech addiction, "The Anxious Generation," has been a New York Times bestseller for more than a year and topped the list five times in 2024, advising parents to keep their kids off social media well into high school. Meanwhile, Americans are even more concerned about the rise of AI. They are twice as likely to say AI will have a negative effect on society than a positive one. People have already put their foot down on similar tech, and the reaction to Friend is a suggestion they will only continue to do the same. Google Glass, released in 2013, failed spectacularly. The company learned the hard way that people didn't want to attach Google to their face, and the project shut down by 2015. And Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to get us all to start living 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 right: "AI fuels isolation! Reach out into the real world!" It's time to reconnect with our real friends, and to realize Big Tech is not our friend, but our enemy.