AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died | Latest Tech 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 fashion gadget that listens to your total day and sends you push notifications, have been defaced with warnings about 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 adverts, which went up late last month, scrawling messages like, “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died” overtop utopian slogans.
Our tech overlords would possibly need 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 nearly completely taken over by the company’s adverts, which spanned 11,000 subway vehicles, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 city panels across town — making it the most important subway advert marketing campaign ever according to Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann.
One vandal urged comply with 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 also listens to what goes on around it and sends push notifications to your cellphone, offering opinions about conversations you just had, all powered by Claude.
“Friend [noun] someone who listens, responds, and supports you,” a poster for the gadget 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 firms are attempting to pull off comparable wearable tech stunts.
Companies like Meta are attempting their hand at wearable AI with glasses that combine the technology. AP
Meta would really like to intrude upon your eyeballs with AI glasses, made in collaboration with Oakley and RayBan. Because what may very well be more dystopian than reminders being pinged into your line of imaginative and prescient, or having the ability to report the whole lot you see?
There are also very obscure reviews of an OpenAI gadget in the making. Companies in Silicon Valley need to actually bodily connect themselves to us, supposedly to improve our lives — but actually they just need as a lot data as potential.
These types of devices are a natural escalation in tech innovation, but they’re coming at a quite inopportune second in phrases of public notion. After years of tech habit and doom scrolling, people are finally rejecting this imposition into their lives.
The Friend gadget is a wearable AI accent that reacts to your day and listens to the whole lot around you.
Everyday people have gotten far more conscious of their screen time. About half of teenagers — the most notoriously online demographic — say that they spend an excessive amount of time on social media, up from a third in 2022.
Meanwhile, dad and mom are implementing phone-free childhoods. More and more faculties are banning devices from lecture rooms and hallways.
Jonathan Haidt’s ebook about Gen Z’s tech habit, “The Anxious Generation,” has been a New York Times bestseller for more than a yr and topped the checklist 5 instances in 2024, advising dad and mom to keep their children off social media properly into high faculty.
Vandals graffitied posters for Friend with warnings about the risks posed by AI. @CryptoVonDoom/X
Meanwhile, Americans are even more involved about the rise of AI. They are twice as probably to say AI can have a destructive impact on society than a constructive one.
People have already put their foot down on comparable tech, and the response to Friend is a suggestion they are going to only continue to do the same.
Google Glass, launched in 2013, failed spectacularly. The company discovered the arduous method 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 via Getty Images
And Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to get us all to start dwelling parallel lives in the Metaverse was a laughable flop.
Though we’ve fallen prey to algorithms, maybe “Friend” is where we are saying enough is enough. A wearable AI spy will not be your “friend.”
One poster vandal is true: “AI fuels isolation! Reach out into the real world!” It’s time to reconnect with our real buddies, and to understand Big Tech will not be our buddy, but our enemy.
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