‘AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died’

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.