Subway riders are finding themselves face-to-face with thousands of cryptic white posters bearing the word “Friend.”

Some ads define “Friend”: “Someone who listens, responds, and supports you.” Others imply frictionless companionship: “I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink.”

The ads, which have taken over entire stations and trains across the city, are for a wearable AI necklace that listens to all your interactions; it’s meant to offer advice or observations. As fast as the posters have gone up, they’ve been defaced. One online gallery documents more than 90 ads with what you might call user-generated contributions (the cops would call it vandalism), with messages like “SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM” or “GET REAL FRIENDS.”

“It’s giving ‘We’re replacing real human connection with AI,’” said commuter Tricia Hersey, who passed rows of Friend ads on her way out of the West Fourth Street station last week. “I’m all about real-life connection, and I think this is driving us deeper towards individualism, which is toxic; deeper towards decaying community. I hate it.”

The ads are designed with huge amounts of white space, which the company’s 22-year-old founder, Avi Schiffmann, said is meant to tempt viewers to comment with graffiti. Riders have obliged, marking some posters with phrases like “Go make real friends” and “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died.”

But Schiffmann was far less eager for real-life engagement. We asked him to meet us at the West Fourth Street station, where 53 of the more than 11,000 ads Friend has purchased around the city are plastered. As New Yorkers passed by, several paused to puzzle at the ads or take pictures. Gothamist took note and asked Schiffmann if he’d like to join us as we spoke to passers-by about the posters and his product.

But he repeatedly declined and asked that we not identify him to the onlookers. Schiffmann even turned down the chance to watch us talk to them.

“I’m just tired of talking to New Yorkers,” Schiffmann said. “It’s just such a ordeal, I just don’t want to do it.”

Schiffmann said he’d been talking to New Yorkers about the ads for days, which was “great” and “very entertaining,” but also said he couldn’t recount specifics from any of those conversations.

“I like [Friend] so much that I don’t need to keep yapping about it, and I just don’t want to keep convincing everyone here,” Schiffmann said.

A few yards away from Schiffmann, Finn Cervino of Queens was defacing a poster with a Sharpie. He included a web address for a website predicting the future of AI and wrote “This is not science fiction. This is reality.”

“We’re living in a world where you got friends that are computers — that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Cervino said. “They’re destroying the world for the dumbest invention I’ve ever seen in my life.”

During this interaction, Schiffmann went around the corner with his head in his phone, avoiding contact and asking not to be identified to Cervino.

“I’m curious what he said. Doesn’t mean I want to go talk to him,” Schiffmann said afterward.

“Smooth out the variance in people”

Schiffmann is no stranger to high-profile tech experiments. As a teenager, he built one of the most-visited COVID-19 trackers on the web. He later co-created UkraineTakeShelter, a website to connect refugees with hosts, which drew praise for its speed but also criticism from aid groups who warned that the platform could expose vulnerable people to predators.

Both projects cemented his reputation as someone willing to launch big, untested ideas into the public.

Friend, which counts Schiffmann among three total employees, introduced its AI necklace in July and has been shipping about 400 units a week, he said. The $129 device, which resembles a flattened AirPod case, contains a microphone and connects to an app. It listens continuously to its wearer’s surroundings, and users can tap the device to prompt a response in the accompanying app. It’s powered by Google’s Gemini AI model.

Schiffmann said the product is best understood as a “platonic life companion” rather than a work assistant. “It’s kind of like a living journal,” he said.

He argued that most AI adopters already use chatbots for this kind of casual companionship. Only a small percentage of AI use cases involve work tasks like coding, he said, citing a September research paper from OpenAI, while the largest share involves people asking for advice or discussing their life.

He also said that the device is encrypted and his company can’t access user data.

Users don’t pay for ongoing subscriptions, which means Schiffmann is eating the cost of the sizable AI computing power behind Friend. He said not much is left of the reportedly $7 million in venture capital he raised from firms like Pace Capital and Abstract Ventures.

The company also has ads in Los Angeles, where Schiffmann said Friend bought up every available bus shelter ad around UCLA. But he called New York “the capital of the world” and “the top domino,” and said he’d spent $1 million on subway ads. Outfront, which handles advertising in the subways, confirmed that Friend had bought more than 11,000 ads across subway stations and trains.

Defaced ads have been replaced with new clean ones, which get vandalized again almost immediately. An MTA spokesperson confirmed that the agency has been replacing the ads, adding that this is standard practice with any vandalized poster.

“Originally I hated it, because they were literally ripping it off the walls,” Schiffmann said. “But I’ve had to kind of cope and realize, sure, I guess it refreshes the canvas.”

Friend is part of a broader push by tech companies into wearable AI devices, like Meta’s smart glasses. Schiffmann insists that public discomfort with them is temporary.

“I think in the long run, people are going to look back on it not as dystopian, but more so as futuristic,” he said. He said every criticism of Friend he’d encountered was an example of thinking that would soon be outdated.

“If one of your five closest friends is an AI companion that is a great sounding board and a great therapist or coach, and everyone has that, I think that will raise the emotional intelligence of most people and really smooth out the variance in people,” Schiffmann said. “There’ll be a lot less weird, chaotic things.”

He also sees the ad campaign as a sort of art project.

“I want people to come to West Fourth specifically and see, like, a moment in time of what people think about artificial intelligence,” he said.

The ads will last until mid-November, Schiffmann said. Until then, if New Yorkers want to talk back to Friend’s creator, they’ll have to do it on the subway.

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Avi Schiffmann's name.