AI is NOT your friend

Hey everybody, how's it going? Hope you're having a lovely day.

Today I'm going to show you some pictures that were taken by a gentleman in New York City of the subway. They put a bunch of graffiti and they defaced a bunch of advertisements in a manner that I can't say I'm mad at.

There's this service called Friend. It's an AI service that purports to be your friend. They have a chatbot on their website and then after you've used it a little bit, you can upgrade to something called a pendant. So a pendant is this little thing that you wear that sees and hears everything so that it understands what's going on in your surroundings and then you use that pendant to then interface with the world.

So it's one of these annoying infinitely scrolly websites that I I I can't stand this [ __ ] but yeah it says uh yeah like you're wearing it when you're at a museum. You ask it questions. This is some of the worst web design on earth. What is this [ __ ] I can barely read it. Want to grab food or keep exploring friend? Your new roommate is waiting. $129 no subscription. One-year warranty.

And they have a video. Oh god. [Music] Somebody's walking around in the wilderness. Instead of having a human being with them made it, >> they have the pendant. >> Woohoo. I don't know how to woo very good. That's fair. All right, let's go. >> She's not with her friends. She's with an AI pendant that she's wearing instead of real human company. >> Oh, come on. >> Weird [ __ ] future. Let's go. >> Are you serious? >> Come on, man. >> I hate this game. >> Take notes, baby. >> Oh, man. You guys suck, >> bro. You look like the back. >> Let's go. Let's go. >> Dude, what? How did you do that? [Music] I know. The effects are crazy. >> It's dank. I could eat one of these every day. >> This is not technological advancement. This is Black Mirror on steroids. Black Mirror is not a prediction of the future because they haven't even had an episode on this yet. If Black Mirror does an episode on this, what they'll actually be doing is reviewing the dystopia that we currently live in. Cuz if you want, you can buy this product right now for $129. This is being advertised all over New York City and this is what people are doing on the subway and God bless you all.

AI will promote suicide when prompted. It is not your friend with a bunch of X's. It says don't don't be something that's blocked. Be a lite. Go make real friends. This is surveillance. End is alive. Fuels isolation. Reach out into the world. They're just destroying these ads. And there are some other ones that are just much less appropriate that I'm not going to put up here. But I love what you're all doing. Thank you. That's exactly what should happen to all of this.

I say this as somebody who loves AI. I use AI for all different types of [ __ ] But AI has its uses. When I don't feel like paying $10 or $20,000 for legal representation to tell somebody to go [ __ ] themselves, AI is great. I got this law firm to fire their client with 3 hours of chat GPT Pro and going through every single citation to ensure that it didn't hallucinate anything, refining everything, and using it as a tool. I think AI is cool. You know what AI is not for? To be my friend. A large language model, which is essentially just spicy autocomplete, is not my friend. If I want friends, I need to go out there into the real world and make them. And the normalization of this is crazy.

I think a lot of people come off thinking the wrong thing about this channel, that I really dislike AI and I hate it because of the things that I say. I use it all the time in my regular life. All I ask is that you not try and scrape all of my personal data and use it to train a model for your own private benefit. All I ask is that you not try to get me to replace real life experiences of me in the wilderness with people that I know and care about with me wearing a [ __ ] pendant that is sucking up all of my data all the time. If you read some of the privacy policy of this piece of [ __ ] it just gets worse and worse and worse. Some of the greatest hits that I could read you from here. By using the services, you understand that the device is passively recording your surroundings, including video and audio content that may contain personal information that is inappropriate, illegal, or unethical to collect. They shift the liability to you if you record something that you're not supposed to. Capturing, recording, or sharing or video or audio content that involves other people or capturing other people's facial feature information may unlawfully affect their privacy rights. Friend will endeavor to filter inappropriate content of of its data collection, but you agree that friend will not be held liable in any civil or criminal legal action that may arise from the content collected from the monitoring and recording. See, you are wearing a surveillance device that follows you everywhere you go for the profit of that company. But if that device records somebody that does not consent to being recorded, um, yeah, you're the one that's legally liable for it. Biometric data such as facial recognition, voice recognition, any other information given by the user is collected. You may keep your data for longer than 5 years if we cannot delete it for legal, regulatory or technical reasons. Now, legal and regulatory, whatever, fine. If there's a warrant filed, I get it. Technical, what does that mean? Your DevOps intern quit. Use of data to train AI. The data you provide may be used to train models that power friend. So, your personal and private conversations with a chatbot are going to be used to train that thing to speak to other to do this for more other people.

This is it's weird. Like I understand the problem this is looking to solve. I lived in New York City my whole life. I live in a small city now. It's funny because when I meet people from other parts of Texas, they go, "Oh my god, Austin is so big." And when I walk around areas of Austin, it's like, "Where is everybody? I'm the only person on the sidewalk." It's a weird thing to address to. But I live in a smaller city now. I used to live in a larger city back in the day. And I understand what they're getting at and the problem they're looking to solve. You know, I'm never going to forget this one experience that I had. I was dressed up for a business meeting. I think this is one of the very few days I'm actually wearing a tie. I had a, you know, nice button-down dress shirt, nice slacks, polished shoes and everything. And I'm waiting, I think it was at Misetto restaurant. Could be off. Meetto back when Misto was a restaurant in New York City. Um, waiting to for this business meeting, and there's somebody next to me. I have my ThinkPad out and she has a ThinkPad T61. It just, you didn't look like somebody that I would expect to have a ThinkPad T61. So, I remember looking over and saying, "Wow, I miss when laptops had Ethernet ports built in. Nice." And I had my ThinkPad out. She takes the laptop. She looks at me again, looks at the laptop, looks at me, looks at the laptop, takes the laptop, puts it in her bag, puts her legs around the chair so that nothing could break in. It's like, girl, I'm not not trying to steal a laptop that goes for $30 anyway. Like, I did. No, I just I don't think I looked like that that day. And that was that was one experience, right? But there are there were hundreds to thousands of experiences that I've had because I'm a fairly open person. I like saying hi to everybody that I meet. Whether it's some, you know, the person that's bagging my groceries at the store or just somebody that I'm sitting next to. I like to socialize with people. And as somebody who likes to socialize with people, even in a large city like that, the one thing that you learn over time is that the larger and more densely populated the city, at least very at least in New York City, the more alone people are. Like there's eight and a half people in a space the size in Knoxville, Tennessee, but there's a lot of loneliness there. You see a lot of talking going on back and forth between people, but that's a small fraction of the people that actually live in the city. And many people, they don't talk about these events when they occur because they feel embarrassed. They feel like, well, maybe I should be ashamed. Maybe if if I was maybe if I was taller, maybe if I was cooler, maybe if I had a better voice, maybe if I was less weird, I wouldn't get these interactions from people that I talk to in cities. So, you don't see people admitting when those things happen. I don't really care at this point. You know, I'm my late 30s, been through three or five different businesses and nonprofits. I'm famous on the internet. Like, I don't care. I'm happy to be open about the experiences that I've had. But in large city environments, you really do feel very alone in a way that you may not feel in small towns. So, I'm not surprised that they're running this advertising campaign in all places in New York City because that is the place where in spite of the fact that you're surrounded by people, you may feel the most alone.

Somebody linked me to a video a long time ago. I didn't watch the whole thing. I think it was from Dr. K. There was some portion of the video. I'm I'm not going to remember where to look it up. Maybe my audience knows better than me. He's saying something about socializing. And at some point, something came up about talking to people on the subway. And that was a point at which I hit X on the video because if anybody here has rode the subway regularly, if you grew up in New York City the way I did where you were taking public transportation from the age of 12, nobody talks to each other in the subway. The [ __ ] are you talking about, man? Even people that actually already know each other sometimes when they get on the subway, they stop talking and then they start talking and when they leave, it's not a place where it's normal to talk and just meet people. And it's weird and it's getting worse. But this commercial over here to me would really smack me in the face with it is that there are so many people that I know that are afraid to talk about this that when they just go to talk to other people or just have basic human interactions. I'm not talking about weird flirting or pickup lines or like challenges or saying stupid silly [ __ ] I'm just talking about basic, hey, how's it going? Oh, look. Here's something that's going on. And the reaction that you get back a lot of the times in major cities is not a reaction of, oh yeah, cool. And then they just look away and they go back to their stuff. Is that interaction that I had that I remember years later? Maybe I look like somebody who just steals ThinkPad T61s, runs around the city doing that. Like that's why I'm wearing a dress shirt and a tie and slacks and dress shoes. Have a [ __ ] like business looking briefcase for my ThinkPad T520 that I had at the time or P50, I forget, to trick you. But I'm sure that you have all had these experiences as well. Share them in the comments below. Talk about it. Because if we don't talk about those things, if you don't really like let that stuff out and if you think I have to keep that in because I'm afraid that if I say that people will make fun of me and say that I'm socially weird. I'm socially weird. I don't care. That's the future. Like I don't want to live in a future where that's normal. I want to live in a future where this is normal. I want to live in a future where people see advertisements for that black mirror [ __ ] and decide that they are going to graffiti the [ __ ] out of it at every instance. Thank you to every single person that took a Sharpie, a marker, or spray paint and put it over all of this garbage because that's exactly what should happen. This is not normal. This is weird. And above all, it's going to cause people to have this bad taste in their mouth for AI that I don't think they should have for just the many number of uses where it's awesome. Like this, like I don't mind going to the law firm of LL and MS Choir from time to time. It's useful. It helps me with a lot of things in my life cuz I use it as a tool to help me. I don't directly copy and paste random [ __ ] from it. I don't offload my life to it. I don't try to make AI my friends. And this is the thing that bothers me about a lot of new technologies and new things that come out. This happened in 2017 and 2018 with blockchain. Like there are a lot of legitimate uses for blockchain, but just because it was a new buzzword, people had to try to like shove it into everything like a crypto shitcoin and a and a blockchain for literally everything. People would try to solve legitimate world problems that that require infrastructure that require people caring about things that require rare earth minerals with blockchain. And I'm just looking at this like this is ridiculous. Why does anybody care? Why? And I and we're at the peak here. Let me know what you think in the comments down below. I don't want to come out here and just do this the b the b the b the b the b the b the b the b the b the b the b the b the b the b the [ __ ] of just go outside and touch grass and talk to somebody because I fully understand if you live in a place like New York City just how difficult that is for every one person you see that's going to have a great interaction there's going to be a lot of other interactions or people are just conditioned to just what the [ __ ] are you talking to me for stop that it's weird but if we don't try and move past that a little bit then this is going to be the reality this is going to be the future.

>> Sorry I got you messy. It's really nice up here. How'd you find this place? >> I don't know. I just kind of like to come up here to be by myself. I've never brought anybody else. I mean, besides her. >> She goes everywhere with you, right? >> Mhm. >> Guess I must be doing something right then. >> I guess so. We'll see. [Music]

Every generation reaches this point where it feels completely out of touch with the new generation, where it thinks that everything has gone to [ __ ] and there's no fixing it. And I feel like right before I turn 37, this is the point for me. It's not that this product exists. It's that in order for this product to exist, somebody somewhere had to invest money in it. Somewhere out there there is a venture capitalist or a loan officer that looked at this and thought, "Yeah, this is solving a problem people need solved in society." Here you go. That disturbs me deeply. Don't allow life to become a Black Mirror episode. That's it for today. And as always, I hope you learned something. I'll see you in the next video. Bye now. And don't steal anybody's ThinkPad T61. And if you're watching this, I wasn't trying to steal your ThinkPad T61. Just saying. Hi. Bye now.