A debate about AI plays out on the subway walls

Summary

Marc Mueller, the creator of the virtual vandalization website, which went live less than a week ago and already has nearly 6,000 submissions, agreed. “I think we’ll sit at the dinner table in five years and think of this as a moment,” Mr. Mueller said. “It’s a materialization of the anxiety about this transformation.”The initial responses to his site, Mr. Mueller said, came mostly from the tech crowd and was split fairly evenly between positive and negative. Once the site started to get more attention online, though, pessimism toward Friend and A.I. soon dominated.There was also a third group, said Mr. Mueller: people who appreciated the campaign as a type of performance art. “I was thinking to myself that Andy Warhol would be in awe with this whole rollout and the graffiti,” he said.As it happens, Mr. Schiffmann, too, had some artistic inspiration: “The Gates,” the project by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude that filled Central Park with 7,500 saffron-colored gates and attracted tourists from around the world in 2005. How has his own campaign measured up? “The mayor should come and appreciate what we’ve done,” Mr. Schiffmann said, “because it really is a modern day art exhibit.”Hype, however, does not necessarily translate into sales. As of this writing, he has sold around 3,100 pendants — though he expects that will increase rapidly once the product hits retailers like Walmart sometime next year. The ad campaign is still rolling out in Los Angeles, with Chicago up next.Mr. Schiffmann hopes A.I. companions will “raise the average emotional intelligence significantly.” But he acknowledged that society, perhaps, was not quite ready for A.I. companionship on such a large scale.The real gist of the campaign was to “redefine what a friend is and have you think about that,” Mr. Schiffmann said. With that, he seems to have succeeded.