Should You Sell to Friends When They Need Your Advice?
Last night, an ad popped up inside my AI chat.
Not on Instagram. Not on Google. Inside the place where I go to think out loud.
And my stomach dropped.
I wasn’t shopping. I was thinking. Working through something personal, something I hadn’t even said out loud to a real person yet. And in the middle of that, an ad showed up. Like someone had been listening the whole time, waiting for the right moment to sell me something.
I felt sick.
Then, thirty seconds later, I felt something else.
I’m a founder. I’m an artist. And some tiny, ugly, honest part of my brain whispered: wait… could I do that too?
That’s the part that kept me up.
Because here’s the thing. My music and my coaching could actually help someone. If the right person was struggling with something I’ve written a song about, or something I coach on, and it showed up right when they needed it… that could be a gift. Not a scam. A gift.
But that’s also exactly how it starts. Not with a villain. With a good idea that quietly crosses a line.
Think about your closest friend. The one you call at midnight. Would you trust their advice the same way if you found out they got paid every time they recommended something to you? Even if the recommendation was good? Even if it actually helped?
Get Adora Aiza’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Something would break. Not because the advice was wrong. Because the trust was never really yours. It was a lead.
That’s what AI has become for a lot of us. Not a tool. A friend. The one place we say the real thing before we’ve figured out how to say it to a human. We didn’t sign up to be sold to there. We signed up to think.
There’s an old saying: three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
AI felt like a new version of that. Two can keep a secret, because one of them isn’t even human.
But what happens when the “friend who can’t talk” starts learning how to sell?
I don’t have a neat answer. Just two doors, and I don’t know which one is right.
Door one: we change how we use AI. We stop being fully honest with it. We treat it like a stranger, not a confidant. We protect ourselves.
Door two: the companies change. They find a way to make money that doesn’t touch the moments we’re most open and unguarded. They protect the relationship, because that’s actually the whole reason it works.
I don’t want door one. I don’t want to start editing myself before I talk to a machine. That would kill the entire reason this thing became useful to me in the first place.
But I’m not naive enough to think door two happens just because we ask nicely.
So I’ll leave you with the question that’s actually kept me up:
At what point do we stop telling our secrets to the friend who can’t keep them?
