AI Companion 'Friend' Sparks Controversy with Provocative Ad Campaign

Vandals deface ads for AI necklaces that listen to all your conversations

"AI doesn't care," a vandal scrawled on a New York subway ad promoting a wearable AI pendant called Friend, which was designed to monitor a user's everyday conversations and serve as a companion "who listens, responds, and supports you." "Human connection is sacred," the vandal wrote, emphasizing, "AI is not your friend." This act of vandalism is now part of a huge online archive collecting defaced ads that the Friend campaign inspired, as many New Yorkers responded with vitriol to marketing claims that the AI "friend" would never "bail on dinner" or abandon you to ride the subway alone. "Friends don't let friends sell their souls," another vandal wrote. Others criticizing the AI pendant -- which sells for $129 and will be available in Walmart stores soon -- used the ads to lob larger political complaints about AI. For example, on an ad suggesting an AI friend would "never leave dirty dishes in the sink," a vandal called out AI data centers like xAI's for "poisoning black communities." Another wrote that "freely giving your personal info to Big Tech won't heal your wounds," urging subway riders to join the backlash against Palantir, which The Guardian reported uses AI to surveil individuals and identify military targets. A review of the archive shows that much of the criticism focused on the potential for the pendant to spy on users. "AI surveillance slop," one vandal summed it up, while another defaced an ad promising "I'll binge the entire series with you" to say "I'll steal your info, steal your data, steal your identity." According to The New York Times, over the past six weeks, the Friend ads have become "one of the most talked about subway marketing campaigns in recent memory," after 22-year-old Friend founder Avi Schiffmann paid less than $1 million to flood MTA subway cars with ads across New York. Since its rollout in New York, the campaign has spread to Los Angeles, and Chicago will be next, but MTA subway cars were targeted first to drive as much hype as possible, Schiffman confirmed. "Only the MTA allows you to buy a full takeover like that," Schiffman told the NYT. "It almost feels illegal." In addition to backlash over feared surveillance capitalism, critics have accused Schiffman of taking advantage of the loneliness epidemic. Conducting a survey last year, researchers with Harvard Graduate School of Education's Making Caring Common found that people between "30-44 years of age were the loneliest group." Overall, 73 percent of those surveyed "selected technology as contributing to loneliness in the country." But Schiffman rejects these criticisms, telling the NYT that his AI Friend pendant is intended to supplement human friends, not replace them, supposedly helping to raise the "average emotional intelligence" of users "significantly." "I don't view this as dystopian," Schiffman said, suggesting that "the AI friend is a new category of companionship, one that will coexist alongside traditional friends rather than replace them," the NYT reported. "We have a cat and a dog and a child and an adult in the same room," the Friend founder said. "Why not an AI?" The MTA has not commented on the controversy, but Victoria Mottesheard -- a vice president at Outfront Media, which manages MTA advertising -- told the NYT that the Friend campaign blew up because AI "is the conversation of 2025." Website lets anyone deface Friend ads So far, the Friend ads have not yielded significant sales, Schiffman confirmed, telling the NYT that only 3,100 have sold. He expects that society isn't ready for AI companions to be promoted at such a large scale and that his ad campaign will help normalize AI friends. In the meantime, critics have rushed to attack Friend on social media, inspiring a website where anyone can vandalize a Friend ad and share it online. That website has received close to 6,000 submissions so far, its creator, Marc Mueller, told the NYT, and visitors can take a tour of these submissions by choosing to "ride train to see more" after creating their own vandalized version. For visitors to Mueller's site, riding the train displays a carousel documenting backlash to Friend, as well as "performance art" by visitors poking fun at the ads in less serious ways. One example showed a vandalized ad changing "Friend" to "Fries," with a crude illustration of McDonald's French fries, while another transformed the ad into a campaign for "fried chicken." Others were seemingly more serious about turning the ad into a warning. One vandal drew a bunch of arrows pointing to the "end" in Friend while turning the pendant into a cry-face emoji, seemingly drawing attention to research on the mental health risks of relying on AI companions -- including the alleged suicide risks of products like Character.AI and ChatGPT, which have spawned lawsuits and prompted a Senate hearing.

A Walk With New York's Most Hated Tech Founder

Avi Schiffman says he's enjoying the angry reaction to the Friend AI pendant. Is he serious? If you haven't already heard of Friend, the company that makes a $129 wearable AI companion -- a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace -- you probably also have not seen Friend's recent ad campaign. Late this past summer, Friend paid $1 million to plaster more than 10,000 white posters throughout the New York City subway system with messages such as I'll binge the entire series with you. People hate these billboards. Revile them, even. Across the city, the ads are covered in graffiti criticizing the pendant (it doesn't have eyes, bruh; CRINGE) as well as the idea of AI altogether (AI wouldn't care if you lived or died); some vandals invite you to befriend a senior citizen instead of a chatbot, or volunteer with a community garden -- you will meet cool people! Many of the ads have been ripped and torn. The backlash has grabbed far more attention than the product itself, so I wondered: How does Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Friend, feel about being the most despised tech founder in America's largest city? To my surprise, he was visiting New York from San Francisco when I reached out to ask about this. He told me that he was in fact in the city to see his vandalized billboards -- and he was game to meet me last Wednesday in the West 4th Street station, where he'd purchased a prominent array of Friend ads in two long entry corridors. That morning, every single Friend.com ad I'd seen in the station had been scribbled over, but only a few hours later, they had all been replaced with new posters. Still, a few were freshly vandalized; when we approached one that said Fuck AI!, Schiffmann, with a Friend device dangling over his black T-shirt, said, "I love it." As Schiffmann tells it, the backlash was all part of the plan. The ads were meant to work as a canvas and provocation, he told me, because traditional marketing is passé: "Nothing is sacred anymore, and everything is ironic." (He's made the same point on X and in an interview with Politico.) To get attention, you need to be "a little on the nose," he told me, and the images of vandalized Friend ads circulating the web are the best PR that Friend could ask for. "The picture of the billboard is the billboard," Schiffmann said (also recently posted to X). Some of the ads implying that an AI is superior to a human friend -- I'll never bail on dinner plans, I'll never leave dirty dishes in the sink -- are clearly meant to goad. In fact, many of the posters, my colleagues and I have noticed, seem to be marked with verbatim messages in similar handwriting; had Schiffmann not only courted the vandalism but also instigated it? He denied any meddling: "Then I wouldn't enjoy it that much." Friend is Schiffmann's first foray into the AI industry, although he has experience building viral software. When the coronavirus pandemic began, and Schiffmann was still in high school, he rose to fame after creating one of the world's most popular websites for tracking COVID-19 cases; the project was lauded by Anthony Fauci. When Russia invaded Ukraine, just months after Schiffmann had dropped out of Harvard, he created a website to match Ukrainian refugees with hosts. In 2023, his attention turned from crisis response to start-up mode (or perhaps the loneliness epidemic), and he began developing the Friend, then known as "Tab," which he described at the time as a "wearable mom." Friend debuted in July 2024 with a promotional video that features brief clips of young adults navigating the world with a prototype pendant around their neck. In the final scene, two teenagers sit on a rooftop, apparently on a date. "I just kind of like to come up here to be myself. I've never brought anybody else -- I mean, besides her," the girl says, gesturing to her pendant. "I guess I must be doing something right, then," the boy responds. In a time when the world seems to have agreed that Facebook, Instagram, and the social-media era have inflicted anxiety and loneliness on generations of adolescents and young adults, it's hard to see the video as anything other than satire or tone-deaf. Perhaps it is both. Schiffmann told me that he doesn't think the company's vision is dystopian or that AI companionship will degrade human friendships. "I don't think this kind of 'friend' replaces any relationship in your life," he said; rather, it provides a new category altogether. Schiffmann likened his AI pendant to a therapist, a best friend, and a living journal all at once. Seated on a bench in Washington Square Park, near the West 4th station -- we had fled to avoid some overly loud busking -- he paused, contemplating whether to continue. "This is what I said a while ago, and I don't think a lot of people liked it," he began, "but I would say that the closest relationship this is equivalent to is talking to a god." I was taken aback, though not terribly surprised; Schiffmann had indeed made the same analogy when Friend launched last year. There are so many clearly well-documented problems with AI companions -- they confidently present false information as true, may push people toward mental-health crises or even suicide, flirt with children. "For an AI relationship to be real," Schiffmann told me when I objected, "I think it has to have the possibility to lead you astray." He likened the situation to replacing human drivers with self-driving cars, which still get into accidents but less frequently than people do. (This was confusing: Schiffmann had just told me that AI pendants will not replace human relationships.) There's "a lot of responsibility," he continued, but he was confident that it would work out, in part because the AI pendant, by virtue of being trained on all of the internet, has "read every book on how to be a good friend." Read: The unbelievable scale of AI's pirated-books problem Friend extends the generative-AI paradigm that ChatGPT sparked nearly three years ago: Algorithms whose ability to talk lucidly about anything, anytime, makes it easy to assign them magical and terrifying properties. As with ChatGPT at its launch, Friend has some serious flaws -- reviewers have called it "an incredibly antisocial device" and "unattractive, and clunky to use" -- and like OpenAI, the company has spent a lot of money without any immediate hope of making it back. Schiffmann has raised a few million dollars -- $1.8 million of which was used to buy the URL "Friend.com" -- but only about 1,000 Friend pendants have been activated. By Schiffmann's own admission, the pendant has "plenty of issues," and he does not yet know how to make the business profitable; running the AI model constantly is expensive, but he has no intention of adding a subscription fee. He did say that he'd like to have Friend pendants in Walmart next year. For now, he's prioritizing what he calls "mindshare": to have as many people as possible thinking about, hating on, and discussing his product. As he tells it, all of this will jam into the zeitgeist the controversial notion that AI can be a "friend," just as ChatGPT cultivated and became synonymous with the allure of chatbots. Friend also has ads all over Los Angeles, and Schiffmann said that Chicago is next. He also said that the company is working on a "feature film" about Friend, although he gave no other details. I could see why he was so game to meet with me and stand in front of one of his posters, on which someone had crossed out almost every word and declared, in red Sharpie, that a friend is A PERSON. As he leaned back to pose, someone passed by and offered a fist bump. "I have no idea who that was," Schiffmann chuckled. As I listened to his ideas, I kept coming back to Schiffmann's observation that "everything is ironic." Throughout the AI boom, picking apart sincere statements from hyperbolic PR, or just plain trolling, has become harder and harder. When Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, says he wants to build a gigawatt of AI infrastructure every week -- a data center that uses as much electricity as a major American city -- it is both ridiculous and completely serious. He's capturing mindshare and receiving funding for these efforts, in spite of a lack of clarity about how generative AI will make money or truly serve society. When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns that AI models could replace half of white-collar jobs in a few years, even as his own company keeps marketing those very AI models, he sounds at once grave, naive, and absurd. To outright market an AI "friend," rather than the more measured "companion" or "assistant" or chatbot, is to play with that confusion head-on. A microphone in a plastic disk on a necklace connected to a chatbot is not a god, but Altman and Amodei both have declared that they are racing to usher in a sort of superintelligence. In a way, Schiffmann has simply said aloud the truth of many AI leaders' grand vision. Meanwhile, the people defacing Friend's advertisements are expressing a much larger, inchoate rage at the broader AI industry, not just these plastic pendants that practically nobody owns. Schiffmann has created spaces throughout the city for millions of New Yorkers to provide their own "social commentary on the topic," as he put it, and for that commentary to then circulate on the World Wide Web. Schiffmann told me that he was inspired by The Gates, an art installation of more than 7,000 orange steel gates along paths in Central Park that attracted tourists from around the world. Friend's ads can provide a place to "see what the world thinks about AI," he said, which apparently is "fuck this slop." Indeed, Schiffmann was more prone to citing postmodernist aphorisms and artists than famous venture capitalists and tech founders. Of late, he told me, he has been pondering a quote attributed to Andy Warhol: "You have to be alone to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting." Warhol, of course, is known for at once satirizing and embodying mass production through his art and his studio, the Factory. Friend and its advertisements, at the moment, can be better understood as installation art than as a business, a performance instead of a product -- an attempt to prod public attitudes toward AI, but perhaps not direct them.

AI "Friend" Startup Overwhelmed With Hatred

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. "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." In total, Friend spent over $1 million in New York City subway ads to become the butt of the joke. Apart from triggering a massive outpouring of anti-AI sentiment, Friend's hardware also happens to leave a lot to be desired. In a scathing piece, The Verge's Victoria Song, who tested out the device, noted its extremely limited usefulness and its strong tendency to antagonize her. "Blorbo [the name Song gave the device] was irritating and somewhat impossible to interact with," Song wrote. "Probably because Blorbo only has one mic, and so it's ironically terrible at the one thing it's supposed to do best: listening." "It prompted me to tell it more about the products I was seeing and testing," she added. "But I couldn't un-see the artifice. The conversation never evolved beyond the standard AI formula of paraphrasing what you say and asking a low-stakes question to continue engagement." Wired reporters Kylie Robison and Boone Ashworth also found last month that the gadget was an "incredibly antisocial device to wear." "People were never excited to see it around my neck," Robison wrote.

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 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.

The 22-Year-Old Founder of Viral A.I. Startup Friend Embraces the Backlash

Friend's provocative marketing push has divided New Yorkers and boosted business for the young A.I. company. If you've taken a New York City subway recently, you've likely seen an advertisement for Friend, a San Francisco-based startup selling A.I. companionship in the form of a $129 wearable pendant. The campaign has sparked mixed reactions, to say the least. Many of the minimalistic posters, which liken the A.I. device to a friend or roommate, have been quickly defaced with messages like "A.I. is not your friend," "Stop profiting off of loneliness," and "This is surveillance." Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Friend, has taken the graffiti-filled backlash in stride -- because that was part of the plan all along. "I knew people would overreact and therefore graffiti these ads, black them out and write that A.I. is evil," he told Observer. "It's definitely cool to just see the public commentary." Designed by Schiffmann himself in Figma, the posters feature large blank spaces and statements such as "I'll never bail on our dinner plans" or "I'll never leave dirty dishes in the sink." They began appearing across New York City's five boroughs in August. The entrepreneur said he's spent $1 million on the campaign thus far. He's also taken some of the criticism to heart. "I've actually learned some interesting stuff," said Schiffmann, who noted that graffiti on the posters introduced him to how certain communities are being affected by the water usage of A.I. data centers. Still, the feedback hasn't strayed him away from the goal of promoting A.I.-based relationships through Friend's plastic pendant, which contains a microphone to listen to a user's day-to-day activities and offers commentary over text via a connected chatbot powered by Google's Gemini models. Unlike the more conventional ad campaigns of A.I. giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, Schiffmann credits Friend's strategy -- and the controversy it generated -- to his young age. "I think that traditional marketing is kind of over for new brands," said Schiffmann, who described his rivals' advertisements as being stuck in the past decade. Those same rivals may soon be entering his space: OpenAI, for example, is reportedly working on an A.I. hardware device alongside former Apple designer Jony Ive. "I wish them the best of luck," Schiffmann said. According to the CEO, Friend's campaign has done more than spark debates. It's also driven a spike in web traffic and sales. The company has sold around 3,000 devices so far. Friend currently employs three full-time staff and has raised just over $7 million. It unveiled its pendant last year alongside a dystopian-style promotional video showing people chatting with their necklaces as if they were close friends. Who is Avi Schiffmann? This isn't Schiffmann's first time making a digital splash. In 2020, the then-17-year-old created a Covid-19 tracking website that quickly gained popularity and earned praise from Anthony Fauci. Two years later, he dropped out of Harvard to launch a platform that matched Ukrainian refugees with hosts. The leap from humanitarian websites to a consumer-facing A.I. product might seem dramatic, but Schiffmann doesn't see it that way. "I can imagine things like the loneliness epidemic as an extension of the digital humanitarian stuff I was doing before," said the entrepreneur, who described Friend as "a product I built for myself to use." Schiffmann likens Friend to a confidante, one that doesn't replace real relationships but adds a new form of companionship through hardware. "For example, all of my roommates are terrified of motorcycles, but it's one of my favorite things in the world," said Schiffmann, who is "able to wear my Friend, talk to it about where we might want to ride and go places." His current device is nicknamed Essentia, after the brand of water bottle that happened to be sitting in front of him when he activated the device. The young founder has ambitious plans for what's next. His upcoming project will be a "feature film," he said, revealing only that it's titled Making Friends and is slated to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next year. Schiffmann predicts it will go down in history as "the most influential thingy of 2025 to 2035." For now, Friend's controversial ad campaign remains in the spotlight. The company plans to expand to Chicago's subway system and has already spent $500,000 on billboards in Los Angeles. Friend's posters have also begun popping up on hundreds of L.A. bus shelters -- placements Schiffmann hopes will inspire the same kind of public engagement as in New York. "The bus shelters are kind of equivalent to the platform ads in New York, where they're so easy to deface," said Schiffmann. "I'll be excited to see what happens."

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.

These provocative AI billboards were designed to be hated

As technology rapidly advances, AI has become more divisive than ever. This hostility has never been clearer than in the backlash to a recent ad campaign sweeping its way through the subways of NYC. Created by AI companion brand Friend, the campaign has seen mass resistance both on and offline, not helped by its rage-baiting marketing tactics. While some of the best adverts are created to spark conversation, it appears Friend has ignited an outpouring of derision that only serves to alienate AI sceptics further. An A.I company just spent $1 million+ on print advertising in nyc, one of the biggest campaigns ever done.. only for it to be immediately graffitied by locals from r/interestingasfuck Plunging into the AI wearable companion market (note how well that went for Rabbit and the AI Pin), Friend's unapologetically brash campaign features a series of minimalist billboards with provocative statements suggesting AI is superior to human connection. Across NYC subway stations, ads reading "I'll never bail on dinner plans" and "I'll binge the entire series with you" were thrust in front of commuters, quickly leading to heated graffiti responses. Many criticised the ads for taking advantage of human loneliness, while others defaced the billboards with messages like "Go make real friends. This is surveillance," and "AI wouldn't care if you lived or died." Created by Friend's 22-year-old CEO Avi Schiffmann, it seems the campaign was engineered to spark backlash. In response to a curious commenter on X who wrote, "Tell me the graffiti was part of the original print," Avi simply responded, "Why do you think I left so much white space?" There's no such thing as bad publicity - it's a phrase we hear endlessly in the marketing sphere, but it's not a tactic without risk. As we've seen with similar AI campaigns, such as Artisan's provocative billboards, rage bait marketing might earn you the spotlight for a time, but viral moments quickly fade from relevance. Has Schiffmann's campaign been successful? In a way, yes. But that doesn't detract from the fleeting nature of cheap-shot, flash-in-the-pan marketing. Building a brand on hate is unlikely to build a lasting customer base, likely dooming Friend to the AI gadget graveyard.

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.