404 Media

2026-06-30 18:19:17

I Have Thoughts About That Kylie Jenner Meta Glasses Ad

Meta just released a new ad for its creeper glasses. In the video, Kylie Jenner, the new face of the glasses called Starfire, goes through a day-in-the-life style video from her point of view. Mostly, she’s led around her own house in a haze by various vendors and assistants. Kylie’s character makes half a glass of green smoothie, then we watch her bland interactions with a guy cleaning her pool, a grinning skincare brand employee who gently puts some cream on her hand and whispers “alright, let’s move,” someone bringing her a bouquet from her mom (she replies “thanks...”) and people moving a huge weird sculpture around her cavernous home.

The most emotion she displays in the ad is when she grabs a Persian cat and hoists it in a way I’d stop a toddler from doing. In a jarring transition away from the cat and the movers, we see her start inexplicably grabbing black spray paint from her massive closet (???) and jumping in an unbranded black SUV, then speeding to a billboard of her own face. In another unsettling transition that would work in an Ari Aster horror movie, the perspective is no longer from her own eyes, but from about 30 yards behind the car. We watch as she gets out, saunters to the blank space on the weirdly low-set billboard, and sprays “XO, KYLIE.”
youtube.com/embed/evSchEBfn94?…
Meta has endured years of brand crises with its smart glasses. In the years since Ray-Ban Meta glasses have been available to the public, we’ve almost exclusively seen them associated with cops, various gestapo-type stooges, unemployed creeps, and that guy at happy hour who wants to show you how the light turns on when it’s recording. During that time, 404 Media has documented all of this, and in the course of that reporting, heard time and time again from Meta that the glasses are NOT that creepy and definitely NOT cop-glasses.

When Jason broke the story about a Customs and Border Control (CBP) agent wearing Ray-Ban Metas to a raid, a Meta spokesperson asked 404 Media a series of questions about the framing of the article, stressing that Meta does not have a contract with CBP. The spokesperson asked why 404 mentioned Meta in this story — again, a story about Meta’s glasses seen on the face of an immigration officer. “I’m curious if you can explain why it is Meta will be mentioned by name in this piece when in previous 404 reporting regarding ICE facial recognition app and follow up reporting the term ‘smartphones’ or ‘phone’ is used despite ICE agents clearly using Apple iPhones and Android devices,” they said. I actually can’t parse this statement to this day. But Meta has seemed pretty stressed about the image of its smart glasses and slick Ray-Ban partnership for a long time. For them to sell to a mass market, the company desperately needed them to stop being associated with loser behavior, fast.

Each of us here have wondered aloud at various points in the last few years about whether Ray-Bans, the once-cool, hipster-coded, mid-luxury sunglasses brand, would keep tolerating this slow image suicide by association with Meta’s depraved quest for a more complete consumerist surveillance state. In October, Emanuel wrote: “I wonder how long Ray-Ban will want to be associated with this product, and if it’s going to tank the reputation of one of the most iconic fashion items in the world before it pulls out.” Ray-Ban hasn’t pulled out from its other offerings, as far as I can tell, and those glasses have reportedly made Meta and Ray-Ban’s parent company a boatload of money. There are many different brands and types of smart glasses being sold by Meta now, with other glasses brands. But it’s noteworthy that for this new It-Girl iteration, Ray-Ban is not along for the ride.

So: Meta’s in a coolness crisis, cops and stalkers are tainting the concept worse than Google Glassholes ever did, they had one chance. In comes Kylie. With the Starfire glasses, we have a few decades-long arcs coming full circle.

Podcast: Why Are DHS Agents Wearing Meta Ray-Bans?
CBP’s use of Meta Ray-Bans; the bargain that voice actors are having to make with AI; and how Flock tech is being essentially hacked into by the DEA.
AmazonJoseph Cox

Meta’s products have been accused and found guilty of damaging young people’s self esteem, especially girls’ confidence and mental health, year after year to the point that it can only be described as a business strategy. Just this week, the company lost its bid to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 29 attorneys general who claim that “research has shown that children's use of ​Facebook and Instagram could lead to depression, anxiety, insomnia, interference with education and daily life, and ​self-harm including suicide,” Reuters reported. Meta has built the world’s most profitable and popular panopticon; Smart glasses that turn everyone into an influencer, narc, and walking data collection apparatus are the logical next step. Meta’s original mistake was aiming for middle aged men, the primary market for Ray-Bans. No one thinks that demographic defines coolness; women aged 18-24, however, have been right there all along. They just had to make the glasses slightly less nerdy looking, and put them on the world’s most recognizable, aspirational, brand-safe face.

They had a lot of these to choose from, and I’m not saying other influencers, or the celebrity influencer pool in general, is pure of heart apart from Kylie Jenner and the Kardashian extended universe. And the Kardashian name has its own poisonous brand associations that would rule Kim or Kylie’s other sisters out of the running for Meta’s new glasses product spokesperson. The Kardashians, while controlling and at times subverting the ways reality television and our parasocial culture prey on women’s bodies, could shake hands with Meta’s influence on girls’ body image. They’ve dictated the course of beauty standards unsubtly and effectively for years, to the point of becoming an endless research topic for social scientists, psychologists and anthropologists. Being like Kylie is seen as being cool, effortless, skinny, rich, unopinionated and unproblematic. And lonely.

The lifestyle in Meta’s latest glasses ad portrays an unattainably wealthy and kind of bored existence where Kylie never sees another person who isn’t on her payroll. These Meta glasses are anti-social from the jump. If all we have is this ad to judge the product, they’re not about capturing memories with your friends at the bar or a party. They’re about packaging one’s life and then viewing it as an out-of-body experience, like you’re already dead. As a piece of media, the ad is the inverse of Chris Samra’s “stealth” Waves smart glasses video, which portrayed the social life of a total fuckhead.

Contrast these with projects like Jenny Zhang’s Computer Angel, a hair clip camera prototype that records her life from her point of view. She records nights out, passes it to other people, takes it off and sticks it on railings to record herself dancing. The important part is that it looks like a camera on the wearer’s head, and isn’t trying to disappear. It reminds me of the very early days of lifecasting, the early 2000s genre of online live stream pioneered by Jennifer Ringley’s Jennicam and also countless early webcam models. I won’t romanticize that time, however: Justin Kan’s Justin.tv, a 2007 experiment in livestreaming, famously caught him getting swatted in his San Francisco apartment while on stream and was funded by Y Combinator and sponsored by companies like Zipcar and Bawls energy drinks (RIP). It grew into what we now know as Twitch.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that the Starfire glasses, or the Ray-Ban Metas, are an attempt to hide the camera from the subject. We assume the camera is everywhere now, anyway, and we all act like it. The primary emotions I feel watching the new ad are sadness and a vague, quiet discontentment. Meanwhile, Instagram is already full of young people, primarily women, unboxing, reviewing, and promoting the glasses. With Kylie’s star power behind these glasses, we risk losing our grip on the last shred of privacy, autonomy, and control of our own images online.

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404 Media

2026-02-23 16:24:02

Meta's AI Patent to Simulate Dead People Shows the Dangers of 'Spectral Labor'

Last week, Business Insider reported on a Meta patent describing a system that would simulate a user’s social media activity after their death.The patent imagines a world where you’d be able to chat with a deceased friend’s Facebook or Instagram account after their death, and have a large language model simulate their posting or chatting behavior.

Meta first filed the patent in 2023, but the patent made headlines this week because of its dystopian implications. And while Meta told Business Insider that “we have no plans to move forward with this example,” a recently published paper from researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Leipzig University shows that generative AI is increasingly being used to puppeteer the likeness of dead people. The paper argues that the practice raises “urgent legal and ethical questions around posthumous appropriation, ownership, work, and control.”

“Meta’s patent is big, and might even be a turning point,” Tom Divon, the lead author on Artificially alive: An exploration of AI resurrections and spectral labor modes in a postmortal society, told me in an email. “What makes it different is the scale. In our research, most of the AI resurrections we examined were quite bespoke, projects started by families, advocacy groups, museums, or startups, usually tied to very specific emotional, political, or commercial contexts. Even when they existed as apps, they were optional and limited, not built into the core structure of a platform. Meta’s proposal feels different because it imagines posthumous simulation as something woven directly into social media infrastructure.”

Using technology to animate the dead or simulate communication with them is not new, but the practice is becoming more common because generative AI tools are more accessible. Divon and co-author Christian Pentzold analyzed more than 50 real-world cases from the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia where AI was used to recreate deceased people’s voices, likeness, and personality, to see how and why technology was used this way.

They say that the examples they studied fell into three categories:

• Spectacularization: “the digital re-staging of famous figures for entertainment.” For example, a live tour of an AI-generated Whitney Houston.
• Sociopoliticization: “the reanimation of victims of violence or injustice for political or commemorative purposes.” We recently covered an example of this with an AI-generated dead victim of a road rage incident giving testimony in court.
• Mundanization: “the most intimate and fast-growing mode, in which everyday people use chatbots or synthetic media to ‘talk’ with deceased parents, partners, or children, keeping relationships alive through daily digital interaction.”

The paper raises questions about this growing practice more than it proposes solutions. How does the notion of identity change when multiple versions of oneself can exist simultaneously, and what safeguards do we need to prevent exploitation of people after their death?

“The legal and ethical frameworks governing issues such as consent, privacy, and end-of-life decision-making demand reevaluation to accommodate the challenges posed by afterlife personhood,” the paper says. “In particular, to date, there is no clear line for governing the intricate intertwining of an individual’s data traces and GenAI applications.”

Divon told me that thinking about these issues is especially relevant when it comes to Meta’s patent. “Spectral labor describes how the dead can be made to ‘work’ again through the extraction and reanimation of their data, likeness, and affect. At small scale, this already raises ethical concerns. But at platform scale, we think it risks turning posthumous presence into an ongoing source of engagement, content, and value within digital economies [...] Meta’s patent makes us wonder, will individuals be given the ability to define their post-life boundaries while still alive? Will there be mechanisms akin to a digital DNR [do not resuscitate]?”

Divon explained that the current legal frameworks are not well equipped to address this technology because “digital remains” are typically approached either as property to be inherited or privacy interests to be protected. AI turns those materials into something interactive that can change and generate revenue in the present. Legislators, he said, should focus on getting explicit and informed “pre-death” consent requirements for posthumous AI simulation. Some laws that address this issue are already in progress.

“At its core, we believe the primary concern here centers on authorization,” he said. “Most individuals have not provided explicit, informed consent for their digital traces to power interactive posthumous agents. If such systems become embedded in platform infrastructure, inaction could quietly function as implicit agreement [...] We believe it is crucial to ask whether individuals should continue to generate social and economic value after death without having meaningfully agreed to that form of use.”

'I Loved That AI:' Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage Incident

How the sister of Christopher Pelkey made an avatar of him to testify in court.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-06-17 14:47:09

Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People's Chats With AI

I was sick last week, so I did not have time to write about the Discover Tab in Meta’s AI app, which, as Katie Notopoulos of Business Insider has pointed out, is the “saddest place on the internet.” Many very good articles have already been written about it, and yet, I cannot allow its existence to go unremarked upon in the pages of 404 Media.

If you somehow missed this while millions of people were protesting in the streets, state politicians were being assassinated, war was breaking out between Israel and Iran, the military was deployed to the streets of Los Angeles, and a Coinbase-sponsored military parade rolled past dozens of passersby in Washington, D.C., here is what the “Discover” tab is: The Meta AI app, which is the company’s competitor to the ChatGPT app, is posting users’ conversations on a public “Discover” page where anyone can see the things that users are asking Meta’s chatbot to make for them.

This includes various innocuous image and video generations that have become completely inescapable on all of Meta’s platforms (things like “egg with one eye made of black and gold,” “adorable Maltese dog becomes a heroic lifeguard,” “one second for God to step into your mind”), but it also includes entire chatbot conversations where users are seemingly unknowingly leaking a mix of embarrassing, personal, and sensitive details about their lives onto a public platform owned by Mark Zuckerberg. In almost all cases, I was able to trivially tie these chats to actual, real people because the app uses your Instagram or Facebook account as your login.

In several minutes last week, I saved a series of these chats into a Slack channel I created and called “insanemetaAI.” These included:

• entire conversations about “my current medical condition,” which I could tie back to a real human being with one click
• details about someone’s life insurance plan
• “At a point in time with cerebral palsy, do you start to lose the use of your legs cause that’s what it’s feeling like so that’s what I’m worried about”
• details about a situationship gone wrong after a woman did not like a gift
• an older disabled man wondering whether he could find and “afford” a young wife in Medellin, Colombia on his salary (“I'm at the stage in my life where I want to find a young woman to care for me and cook for me. I just want to relax. I'm disabled and need a wheelchair, I am severely overweight and suffer from fibromyalgia and asthma. I'm 5'9 280lb but I think a good young woman who keeps me company could help me lose the weight.”)
• “What counties [sic] do younger women like older white men? I need details. I am 66 and single. I’m from Iowa and am open to moving to a new country if I can find a younger woman.”
• “My boyfriend tells me to not be so sensitive, does that affect him being a feminist?”

Rachel Tobac, CEO of Social Proof Security, compiled a series of chats she saw on the platform and messaged them to me. These are even crazier and include people asking “What cream or ointment can be used to soothe a bad scarring reaction on scrotum sack caused by shaving razor,” “create a letter pleading judge bowser to not sentence me to death over the murder of two people” (possibly a joke?), someone asking if their sister, a vice president at a company that “has not paid its corporate taxes in 12 years,” could be liable for that, audio of a person talking about how they are homeless, and someone asking for help with their cancer diagnosis, someone discussing being newly sexually interested in trans people, etc.

Tobac gave me a list of the types of things she’s seen people posting in the Discover feed, including people’s exact medical issues, discussions of crimes they had committed, their home addresses, talking to the bot about extramarital affairs, etc.

“When a tool doesn’t work the way a person expects, there can be massive personal security consequences,” Tobac told me.

“Meta AI should pause the public Discover feed,” she added. “Their users clearly don’t understand that their AI chat bot prompts about their murder, cancer diagnosis, personal health issues, etc have been made public. [Meta should have] ensured all AI chat bot prompts are private by default, with no option to accidentally share to a social media feed. Don’t wait for users to accidentally post their secrets publicly. Notice that humans interact with AI chatbots with an expectation of privacy, and meet them where they are at. Alert users who have posted their prompts publicly and that their prompts have been removed for them from the feed to protect their privacy.”

Since several journalists wrote about this issue, Meta has made it clearer to users when interactions with its bot will be shared to the Discover tab. Notopoulos reported Monday that Meta seemed to no longer be sharing text chats to the Discover tab. When I looked for prompts Monday afternoon, the vast majority were for images. But the text prompts were back Tuesday morning, including a full audio conversation of a woman asking the bot what the statute of limitations are for a woman to press charges for domestic abuse in the state of Indiana, which had taken place two minutes before it was shown to me. I was also shown six straight text prompts of people asking questions about the movie franchise John Wick, a chat about “exploring historical inconsistencies surrounding the Holocaust,” and someone asking for advice on “anesthesia for obstetric procedures.”

I was also, Tuesday morning, fed a lengthy chat where an identifiable person explained that they are depressed: “just life hitting me all the wrong ways daily.” The person then left a comment on the post “Was this posted somewhere because I would be horrified? Yikes?”

Several of the chats I saw and mentioned in this article are now private, but most of them are not. I can imagine few things on the internet that would be more invasive than this, but only if I try hard. This is like Google publishing your search history publicly, or randomly taking some of the emails you send and publishing them in a feed to help inspire other people on what types of emails they too could send. It is like Pornhub turning your searches or watch history into a public feed that could be trivially tied to your actual identity. Mistake or not, feature or not (and it’s not clear what this actually is), it is crazy that Meta did this; I still cannot actually believe it.

In an industry full of grifters and companies hell-bent on making the internet worse, it is hard to think of a more impactful, worse actor than Meta, whose platforms have been fully overrun with viral AI slop, AI-powered disinformation, AI scams, AI nudify apps, and AI influencers and whose impact is outsized because billions of people still use its products as their main entry point to the internet. Meta has shown essentially zero interest in moderating AI slop and spam and as we have reported many times, literally funds it, sees it as critical to its business model, and believes that in the future we will all have AI friends on its platforms. While reporting on the company, it has been hard to imagine what rock bottom will be, because Meta keeps innovating bizarre and previously unimaginable ways to destroy confidence in social media, invade people’s privacy, and generally fuck up its platforms and the internet more broadly.

If I twist myself into a pretzel, I can rationalize why Meta launched this feature, and what its idea for doing so is. Presented with an empty text box that says “Ask Meta AI,” people do not know what to do with it, what to type, or what to do with AI more broadly, and so Meta is attempting to model that behavior for people and is willing to sell out its users’ private thoughts to do so. I did not have “Meta will leak people’s sad little chats with robots to the entire internet” on my 2025 bingo card, but clearly I should have.

‘AI Instagram Influencers’ Are Deepfaking Their Faces Onto Real Women’s Bodies

AI 'influencers' on Instagram have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views by stealing reels from real women to make the AI seem more "believable."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}