‘AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died’ – Latest News
An AI startup spent more than $1 million to promote on New York City’s subways — and New Yorkers merely aren’t having it.
Posters for Friend, a necklace model gadget that listens to your whole day and sends you push notifications, had been defaced with warnings in regards to the risks of AI.
AI startup Friend spent more than $1 million to plaster the subway system with posters. @AviSchiffmann/X
Vandals took sharpies to the advertisements, which went up late final month, scrawling messages like, “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died” overtop utopian slogans.
Our tech overlords may need to intrude even deeper into our lives, however is wearable AI the place people lastly say enough is enough? Perhaps — and hopefully — so.
The West 4th Street station was nearly completely taken over by the company’s advertisements, which spanned 11,000 subway vehicles, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 city panels throughout town — making it the most important subway advert marketing campaign ever in line with Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann.
When requested in regards to the detrimental response to the advertisements, Schiffmann advised The Post it was “all according to plan.” He additionally famous that Friend makes use of Google’s Gemini fashions, “which have safe guardrails that protect users against self harm.”
One vandal urged observe New Yorkers to “be a luddite.” @CryptoVonDoom/X
The Friend gadget appears to be like a little like an AirTag necklace. It is meant 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.
“Friend [noun] someone who listens, responds, and supports you,” a poster for the gadget reads. But New Yorkers produce 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, different corporations are attempting to tug off related wearable tech stunts.
Companies like Meta are attempting their hand at wearable AI with glasses that combine the technology. AP
Meta wish to intrude upon your eyeballs with AI glasses, made in collaboration with Oakley and RayBan. Because what might be more dystopian than reminders being pinged into your line of imaginative and prescient, or with the ability to report all the pieces you see?
There are additionally very obscure experiences of an OpenAI gadget within the making. Companies in Silicon Valley need to actually bodily connect themselves to us, supposedly to improve our lives — however actually they only need as a lot knowledge as attainable.
These types of gadgets are a natural escalation in tech innovation, however they’re coming at a somewhat inopportune second in phrases of public notion. After years of tech dependancy and doom scrolling, people are lastly rejecting this imposition into their lives.
The Friend gadget is a wearable AI accent that reacts to your day and listens to all the pieces round you.
Everyday people have gotten far more conscious of their screen time. About half of teenagers — probably the most notoriously online demographic — say that they spend an excessive amount of time on social media, up from a third in 2022.
Meanwhile, mother and father are implementing phone-free childhoods. More and more faculties are banning gadgets from lecture rooms and hallways.
Jonathan Haidt’s guide about Gen Z’s tech dependancy, “The Anxious Generation,” has been a New York Times bestseller for more than a 12 months and topped the checklist 5 instances in 2024, advising mother and father to keep their children off social media effectively into high faculty.
Vandals graffitied posters for Friend with warnings in regards to the risks posed by AI. @CryptoVonDoom/X
Meanwhile, Americans are even more involved in regards to the rise of AI. They are twice as more likely to say AI may have a detrimental impact on society than a optimistic one.
People have already put their foot down on related tech, and the response to Friend is a suggestion they may solely proceed to do the identical.
Google Glass, launched in 2013, failed spectacularly. The company realized the laborious means that people didn’t need to connect Google to their face, and the project shut down by 2015.
Google failed at implementing wearable tech early, with Google Glass in 2013. Bloomberg by way of Getty Images
And Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to get us all to begin residing parallel lives within the Metaverse was a laughable flop.
Though we’ve fallen prey to algorithms, maybe “Friend” is the place we are saying enough is enough. A wearable AI spy isn’t your “friend.”
One poster vandal is true: “AI fuels isolation! Reach out into the real world!” It’s time to reconnect with our actual associates, and to comprehend Big Tech isn’t our pal, however our enemy.
