In addition to backlash over feared surveillance capitalism, critics have accused Schiffman of taking advantage of the loneliness epidemic. Conducting a survey last year, researchers with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common found that people between “30-44 years of age were the loneliest group.” Overall, 73 percent of those surveyed “selected technology as contributing to loneliness in the country.”
But Schiffman rejects these criticisms, telling the NYT that his AI Friend pendant is intended to supplement human friends, not replace them, supposedly helping to raise the “average emotional intelligence” of users “significantly.”
“I don’t view this as dystopian,” Schiffman said, suggesting that “the AI friend is a new category of companionship, one that will coexist alongside traditional friends rather than replace them,” the NYT reported. “We have a cat and a dog and a child and an adult in the same room,” the Friend founder said. “Why not an AI?”
The MTA has not commented on the controversy, but Victoria Mottesheard—a vice president at Outfront Media, which manages MTA advertising—told the NYT that the Friend campaign blew up because AI “is the conversation of 2025.”
