Is artificial intelligence already taking over? Many New Yorkers riding the subway lately might tell you it feels that way. The city’s underground has been blanketed by an extensive ad campaign for Friend.com, a startup offering a wearable AI pendant that promises to listen, respond, and be your companion for $129.
Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Friend, proudly described securing such a massive advertising presence across all five boroughs as "addicting" and "almost illegal," having spent less than a million dollars to dominate one of the world’s busiest transit systems.
The sheer ubiquity of the campaign, coupled with broader societal unease surrounding AI’s rapid intrusion into personal spheres, has made it one of the most talked-about subway marketing efforts in recent memory. The ads, characterized by simple black text on a white background, sometimes featuring a close-up of the pendant, playfully highlight the perceived drawbacks of human relationships. However, messages like "I’ll never bail on our dinner plans" seemed to touch a raw nerve with many New Yorkers, quickly triggering a wave of backlash.
Across the city, these advertisements have been heavily defaced. Graffiti ranged from hostile declarations like "A.I. is burning the world around you" to heartfelt pleas such as "make a real friend." The company faced accusations of capitalizing on the loneliness epidemic and contributing to capitalist surveillance, with some posters even being torn down entirely.
As the campaign expanded to Los Angeles, social media platforms like X and Reddit became hubs for users sharing photos of the ads, whether pristine, defaced, or destroyed. An online museum was even created to showcase the more ingenious acts of Friend ad defacement, while another platform allowed users to virtually vandalize a digital version of the infamous ad with spray paint.
Remarkably, it took a full month for Schiffmann to publicly acknowledge the controversy. His post on X on September 25, claiming his subway campaign was the largest in New York’s history, garnered over 25 million views. Yet, the intense public reaction, effectively turning his ads into an analog form of "rage-bait," has not deterred him. "I kind of view it as a side effect of doing big things," he remarked. "People don’t vandalize an irrelevant ad, right?"
He might have anticipated this. When Friend released a somewhat unsettling launch video in 2024, the comments section was quickly filled with dystopian references and comparisons to episodes of the streaming series "Black Mirror." Schiffmann is no stranger to online attention, though his past experiences were generally more positive. At 18, he developed a tracker that presented early COVID-19 data from Chinese health departments. In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he built a platform to connect refugees with hosts worldwide.
Despite the recent backlash, Schiffmann views his latest project as aligned with his earlier humanitarian efforts. However, challenging deeply held perceptions in a charged discussion, even with good intentions, proves difficult. "I think the name is a huge part of its problem," commented Adam Alter, a marketing professor at New York University. "To pretend that an A.I. version of friendship is just as good as or maybe better than the real thing contradicts the sense that genuine friendship can’t be simulated by nonhuman agents."
Schiffmann, however, believes this is a common misunderstanding. "I don’t view this as dystopian," he asserted. For him, the AI friend represents a new category of companionship, one that can comfortably coexist alongside traditional friendships rather than replacing them. "We have a cat and a dog and a child and an adult in the same room," he mused. "Why not an A.I.?"
Leading up to the campaign’s August 25 launch in New York, Schiffmann intentionally disconnected at Burning Man, aiming to simultaneously achieve "the coolest thing I could possibly do and the biggest thing I could possibly do" in the spirit of "life-maxing." The idea for the campaign itself had been brewing for a while. Living in San Francisco, Schiffmann often observed bus-side advertisements for pet adoption from his porch in the Lower Haight neighborhood. "They were kind of selling you a companion," he recalled, wondering if a similar concept could work for Friend. After the AI pendant began shipping in July, Schiffmann personally crafted the campaign. He mentioned that one proposed blurb, "Your friend group isn’t diverse enough," was rejected by the MTA.
Victoria Mottesheard, a vice president at Outfront Media, which manages MTA advertising, attributed the Friend campaign’s almost instant fame, even without an initial online push, partly to "the sheer topic." She noted that AI "is the conversation of 2025," but declined to comment on the vandalism.
Marc Mueller, creator of the virtual vandalization website, which accumulated nearly 6,000 submissions within a week, echoed this sentiment. "I think we’ll sit at the dinner table in five years and think of this as a moment," Mueller said. "It’s a materialization of the anxiety about this transformation." He added that initial responses to his site, predominantly from the tech community, were evenly split between positive and negative. However, as the site gained broader online traction, pessimism towards Friend and AI soon became dominant.
Mueller also noted a third group: those who appreciated the campaign as a form of performance art. "I was thinking to myself that Andy Warhol would be in awe with this whole rollout and the graffiti," he mused. Coincidentally, Schiffmann himself drew artistic inspiration from "The Gates," Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 project that filled Central Park with saffron-colored gates. Regarding his own campaign, Schiffmann boldly stated, "The mayor should come and appreciate what we’ve done, because it really is a modern day art exhibit."
However, widespread attention doesn’t always guarantee sales. As of this writing, only around 3,100 pendants have been sold, though Schiffmann anticipates a rapid increase once the product reaches retailers like Walmart next year. The ad campaign continues its rollout in Los Angeles, with Chicago next on the list.
Schiffmann expresses hope that AI companions will "raise the average emotional intelligence significantly." Nevertheless, he conceded that society might not yet be fully prepared for AI companionship on such a large scale. The core objective of the campaign, he concluded, was to "redefine what a friend is and have you think about that." In that regard, he appears to have undeniably succeeded.