An AI startup spent greater than $1 million to promote on New York Metropolis’s subways — and New Yorkers merely aren’t having it.
Posters for Good friend, a necklace type system that listens to your total day and sends you push notifications, have been defaced with warnings concerning the risks of AI.
Vandals took sharpies to the adverts, which went up late final month, scrawling messages like, “AI wouldn’t care when you lived or died” overtop utopian slogans.
Our tech overlords would possibly need to intrude even deeper into our lives, however is wearable AI the place individuals lastly say sufficient is sufficient? Maybe — and hopefully — so.
The West 4th Road station was nearly completely taken over by the corporate’s adverts, which spanned 11,000 subway vehicles, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 city panels throughout the town — making it the biggest subway advert marketing campaign ever based on Good friend CEO Avi Schiffmann.
The Good friend system seems to be a bit like an AirTag necklace. It’s purported to be on-hand to reply questions at any time. It additionally listens to what goes on round it and sends push notifications to your telephone, offering opinions about conversations you simply had, all powered by Claude.
“Good friend [noun] somebody who listens, responds, and helps you,” a poster for the system reads. However New Yorkers produce other opinions.
“BE A LUDDITE,” one graffiti says. Different posters have been defaced with, “AI will promote suicide when prompted,” and, “Go make actual mates, that is surveillance.”
Regardless of the nasty reception, different corporations try to drag off comparable wearable tech stunts.
Meta want to intrude upon your eyeballs with AI glasses, made in collaboration with Oakley and RayBan. As a result of what might be extra dystopian than reminders being pinged into your line of imaginative and prescient, or with the ability to file all the pieces you see?
There are additionally very obscure reviews of an OpenAI system within the making. Firms in Silicon Valley need to actually bodily connect themselves to us, supposedly to enhance our lives — however actually they simply need as a lot information as potential.
These types of gadgets are a pure escalation in tech innovation, however they’re coming at a somewhat inopportune second by way of public notion. After years of tech habit and doom scrolling, individuals are lastly rejecting this imposition into their lives.
On a regular basis individuals are turning into way more conscious of their display time. About half of teenagers — probably the most notoriously on-line demographic — say that they spend an excessive amount of time on social media, up from a 3rd in 2022.
In the meantime, dad and mom are implementing phone-free childhoods. Increasingly more faculties are banning gadgets from lecture rooms and hallways.
Jonathan Haidt’s e-book about Gen Z’s tech habit, “The Anxious Era,” has been a New York Instances bestseller for greater than a yr and topped the checklist 5 occasions in 2024, advising dad and mom to maintain their youngsters off social media effectively into highschool.
In the meantime, People are much more involved concerning the rise of AI. They’re twice as more likely to say AI can have a destructive impact on society than a optimistic one.
Folks have already put their foot down on comparable tech, and the response to Good friend is a suggestion they are going to solely proceed to do the identical.
Google Glass, launched in 2013, failed spectacularly. The corporate realized the onerous approach that folks didn’t need to connect Google to their face, and the mission shut down by 2015.
And Mark Zuckerberg’s try to get us all to start out residing parallel lives within the Metaverse was a laughable flop.
Although we’ve fallen prey to algorithms, maybe “Good friend” is the place we are saying sufficient is sufficient. A wearable AI spy just isn’t your “pal.”
One poster vandal is correct: “AI fuels isolation! Attain out into the true world!” It’s time to reconnect with our actual mates, and to understand Large Tech just isn’t our pal, however our enemy.
