{"id":55309,"date":"2025-10-04T18:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T18:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/55309\/"},"modified":"2025-10-04T18:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T18:47:10","slug":"ai-friend-startup-overwhelmed-with-hatred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/55309\/","title":{"rendered":"AI “Friend” Startup Overwhelmed With Hatred"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York City subway ads for a new pendant by AI startup Friend were quickly defaced by droves of angry residents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s latest gizmo, a necklace designed to constantly listen to you via a microphone<\/a> and send snarky AI slop texts to your smartphone, has proven immensely controversial, leading to an outpouring of criticism.<\/p>\n

The more people learn about the $129 device, the more appalled they are.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefriend something alive,\u201d reads one graffiti tag<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI wouldn\u2019t care if you lived or died,\u201d another vandal wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody 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,\u201d NYC-based standup comedian Josh Gondelman wrote in a tongue-in-cheek \u201cpep talk\u201d aimed at the device<\/a>. \u201cAnd anyone without existing human friends arguably needs you even less.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a dire warning about the device.<\/p>\n

\u201cA reminder that anything recorded on a device like this AI \u2018friend\u2019 could be used against you \u2014 by hackers, private companies, or the government,\u201d the nonprofit wrote in a social post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Friend\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know people in New York hate AI, and things like AI companionship and wearables, probably more than anywhere else in the country,\u201d he\u00a0told\u00a0Adweek.<\/a>\u00a0\u201cSo I bought more ads than anyone has ever done with a lot of white space so that they would socially comment on the topic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In total, Friend spent over $1 million in New York City subway ads to become the butt of the joke.<\/p>\n

Apart from triggering a massive outpouring of anti-AI sentiment, Friend\u2019s hardware also happens to leave a lot to be desired. In a scathing piece<\/a>, The Verge\u2018s Victoria Song, who tested out the device, noted its extremely limited usefulness and its strong tendency to antagonize her.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlorbo [the name Song gave the device] was irritating and somewhat impossible to interact with,\u201d Song wrote. \u201cProbably because Blorbo only has one mic, and so it\u2019s ironically terrible at the one thing it\u2019s supposed to do best: listening.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt prompted me to tell it more about the products I was seeing and testing,\u201d she added. \u201cBut I couldn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wired\u00a0reporters Kylie Robison and Boone Ashworth also found last month<\/a> that the gadget was an \u201cincredibly antisocial device to wear.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were never excited to see it around my neck,\u201d Robison wrote.<\/p>\n

More on Friend: New Yorkers Are Defacing This AI Startup\u2019s Million-Dollar Ad Campaign<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York City subway ads for a new pendant by AI startup Friend were quickly defaced by droves…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-55309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}