Billboards for an AI pendant vandalized in New York | Press review n°27
I selected important news on artificial intelligence during the week of October 6 to 12, 2025.
Welcome to the 27th press review of Artificial reality. This week I focused on the Friend pendant, on the rise of military AI in the United States, and on the political radicalisation of Silicon Valley. Have a good read!
📰 Read
Billboards for an AI pendant vandalized in New York
At the end of August, the U.S. startup Friend launched a vast two-month advertising campaign in the New York subway to promote an AI pendant with the same name. The reaction of travelers has been very negative, The New York Times reports.
Friend is a round-shaped pendant which looks like an Apple AirTag and whose function is to be an artificial “friend.” Equipped with an always-on microphone, it uses Google’s artificial intelligence Gemini to respond to the users in writing in a dedicated app or with push notifications. The pendant also sends spontaneous commentaries from time to time throughout the day. It is sold for $129 and is available only in the United States and Canada.
Friend Reveal Trailer (Friend Media Channel)
To launch his product, Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann spent around $1 million to buy 11,000 car cards in the NYC subway, as well as over 1,000 platform posters and 130 urban panels. The advertising campaign also takes place in San Francisco, with Chicago up next.
The billboards are simple: a short black text on a white background, sometimes with a photo of the pendant. Some posters show a definition of the word Friend (“Someone who listens, responds, and supports you”) or slogans praising the benefits of having this “friend” constantly by one’s side (“I’ll binge the entire series with you” or “I’ll never bail on our dinner plans”).
“AI is not your friend”
The subway users took advantage of the large white spaces on the billboards to write down all the bad things they think about this pendant and about artificial intelligence in general. Here are some of the messages:
“AI is not your friend”
“This is surveillance!”
“Surveillance capitalism”
“I spy on you!”
“Mutual aid > fake AI convo”
“AI fuels isolation”
“AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died”
“The climate cost of AI will burn down the planet our children inherit”
“AI is burning the planet down around you”
“Freely giving your personal info to Big Tech won’t heal your wounds”
“Water-guzzling, air polluting, billionaire-owned idiot machines will never be your ‘friend’”
Some commuters also gave advice to passersby who could be tempted to buy this pendant:
“Make real friends”
“Reach into the world”
“Human connection is sacred”
“Go outside & talk to a real person”
“Do mutual aid or volunteer for a community garden - you will meet cool people!”
“We don’t have to accept this future”
“We don’t need AI, we need each other”
Websites collecting photos of the vandalized and ripped down posters have been created: nyc-friends.vercel.app and boycottai.noblogs.org.
It is even possible to virtually vandalize a Friend on the website www.vandalizefriend.com. Its creator, Marc Mueller, already received around 6,000 submissions. According to him, the negative reactions against this advertising campaign are “a materialization of the anxiety” about artificial intelligence.
“Genuine friendship can’t be simulated”
“I think the name is a huge part of its problem,” said Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at New York University. “To pretend that an AI 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.”
The CEO of Friend doesn’t view his pendant “as dystopian.” To him, AI friends are a new category of companions that can coexist alongside traditional friends. “We have a cat and a dog and a child and an adult in the same room. Why not an AI?,” he said to The New York Times.
Also read: With a Friend like this, who needs enemies? (The Verge)
This advertising campaign has been the subject of much discussion, including in the media with articles in The Atlantic, Futurism and Adweek, but it didn’t translate into a significant increase in sales. Early last week, the total number of Friends sold was around 3,100. However, Avi Schiffmann hopes that the pendant adoption will grow once the product hits retailers like Walmart sometime next year.
Seven important news this week
AI won’t just take jobs. It will topple governments. (The Hill)
OpenAI wasn’t expecting Sora’s copyright drama (The Verge)
A.I. Video Generators Are Now So Good You Can No Longer Trust Your Eyes (The New York Times)
OpenAI allegedly sent police to an AI regulation advocate’s door (The Verge)
Florida Teen Arrested After Asking ChatGPT How to Kill His Friend (Vice)
The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World (The New York Times)
Meta Tells Workers Building Metaverse to Use AI to ‘Go 5x Faster’ (404 Media)
🎥 Watch
The rise of military AI
Second Thought published an excellent video on the rapid rise of military artificial intelligence in the United States.
Since last year, the Pentagon signed contracts with the biggest AI companies of Silicon Valley: Meta (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), xAI (Grok), and Anthropic (Claude). The data analysis company Palantir also plays a predominant role within the military-technological complex and the surveillance industry.
“Protesters are arrested and fired, people are detained and shipped abroad to torture cells, men, women, and children are followed home and bombed. And behind it all, an entire architecture of surveillance and analysis is being built by the most technically capable engineers on million dollar contracts, working for billion dollar companies, backed by a trillion dollar government [military] budget.”
- Second Thought
The AI Manhattan Project (Second Thought)
Seven important videos this week
Digital ID is essential for the United Nation’s ‘push for a global surveillance state’ (Sky News Australia)
ICE Can Now See Where You Are At All Times (Taylor Lorenz)
Tristan Harris – The Dangers of Unregulated AI on Humanity & the Workforce (The Daily Show)
AI Was Supposed to Cure Cancer - We Got This Instead (Vanessa Wingårdh)
AI Is Getting Scary | The Kyle Kulinski Show (Secular Talk)
They Fought Amazon’s $3.6B AI Data Center (Breaking Points)
We Just Defeated EU Mass Surveillance (Here’s How) (Techlore)
🔈 Listen
The political radicalisation of Silicon Valley
In the new episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, Paris Marx interviews journalist and author Jacob Silverman about his new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the radicalisation of Silicon Valley.
They revisit the history of the U.S. technology capital and analyze the recent alliance between tech billionaires and the far-right.
Listen to Tech Won’t Save Us on Youtube Music
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Have a good week,
Arnaud
