The public messaging surrounding Meta’s flashy smart glasses hasn’t exactly gone in the company’s favor.
The camera-equipped devices have garnered a reputation for allowing shady individuals to record strangers without their consent, garnering them the memorable pejorative of “pervert glasses.”
So when Wired revealed in June that Meta had silently added facial recognition code to the smart glasses — stoking fears that the creepy glasses could be used to identify people on the street based on biometric data — that simmering distaste grew into a major PR disaster for the company.
Meta has ever since vehemently denied that it was planning on ever releasing the tech, a feature dubbed “NameTag.” That’s despite its CTO Andrew Bosworth happily describing those plans in excruciating detail in public and arguing it would be a “great feature” — mere days after calling Wired‘s bombshell reporting “absolutely dishonest.”
Now, the company is facing a proposed class action lawsuit over the ordeal, as Wired reports, with a set of families in Illinois and California accusing the company of illegally scraping their Facebook and Instagram photos to build a massive facial recognition system for “NameTag.”
The news comes just days after a mother in Utah accused Meta of using its AI to scour Instagram and Facebook posts to reveal invasive information about her young daughters.
Meta told Wired in a statement that the latest “lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work.”
“We’ve been transparent about how we use people’s information to build and improve our AI products,” the a spokesperson told Wired. “As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”
The proposed class action accuses Meta of extracting biometric signatures from publicly available social media profiles. As Wired first noted in June, these “faceprints” appeared in the code for the AI companion app of its smart glasses.
A patent described the software as matching these signatures to profile photos. An AI image generator Meta released called Emu was also trained on a vast swath of user-uploaded images and text. The complainants accuse Meta of using this AI system to harvest biometric data.
Meta has already been caught with its pants down after allowing users to generate images inspired by public Instagram accounts, admitting that it had “missed the mark” with the feature.
The company has a long history of mishandling sensitive user data, settling a class action lawsuit in 2020 over an entirely separate facial recognition system for $650 million. In 2024, it agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle yet another facial recognition data lawsuit in Texas.
More on Meta’s glasses: Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters
The post Meta Is Using Instagram Users’ Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System for Its Hated Smart Glasses, Class Action Lawsuit Claims appeared first on Futurism.
Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.
Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.
As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.
One of the most recent discussions took place on Wednesday in Colorado, during an annual meeting hosted by the Edison Electric Institute. Dominating the agenda, Politico notes, were discussions on electrical grid security, evidently spurred by the OpenAI-Hugging Face debacle, in which rogue AI agents allegedly broke free of their research environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another AI company.
Though the incident spawned plenty of commentary around the pace of AI development and the advanced state of OpenAI’s models, the flow of information has been decidedly one-sided, with most of the details coming from OpenAI itself. As the New York Times reported, third-party safety researchers investigating the incident after the fact were only given a few days to access the reams of data generated by the hack, severely limiting their findings.
That said, OpenAI has an obvious incentive to play up its own AI’s supposedly terrifying capabilities, while suppressing or ignoring evidence that contradicts its own narrative: that of rogue AI agents capable of threatening the US energy grid.
To give just one example, OpenAI’s narration of the Hugging Face incident relies almost entirely on its agents’ “chains-of-thought,” where an AI model essentially generates statements explaining how it rationalized certain decisions. That sounds fine in theory, but researchers have found plenty of evidence showing that chains-of-thought aren’t reliable at narrating the actual moves made by natural language processors.
Despite the unanswered question around chain-of-thought reasoning, OpenAI is using the incident to lobby for regulatory safeguards that would cement its role as the authority around AI development.
This being the case, the timing of OpenAI’s energy security meetings is hard to overlook. As Politico notes in its reporting on these meetings, Altman has been hawking his company’s own cybersecurity services to top utility executives — conveniently riding the hype of the Hugging Face incident to secure a seat at one of the most important tables in the country.
More on Altman: Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Sam Altman
The post Sam Altman Now Trying to Gain Control of Electric Grid appeared first on Futurism.
Months after China’s Intermediate People’s Court ruled against a company using AI to liquidate an employee’s position, the country’s highest judicial body has come out with another whopper: a massive crackdown on AI deepfakes.
In a new ruling on Monday, China’s Supreme People’s Court — the top judicial organ in the country — issued new guidance on how judges in lower courts should handle civil issues arising from abuse of AI tools. As the South China Morning Post reports, the court’s opinion spans 24 articles, establishing official guidance on disputes around AI-generated video and audio, sexualized content, financial misconduct, digital privacy, and surveillance pricing.
One of the key platforms of the opinion revolves around deepfakes, which are lifelike images, video, and audio modeled after existing people — tech, as the ruling observes, that can easily be used to “bring the dead back to life.” This kind of content has exploded across the internet as sophisticated generative AI models become increasingly accessible to the general public, resulting in a staggering rise in scams, misinformation, and abusive content.
“In practice, many people express their strong concerns about AI deepfakes. AI face-swapping technology can indiscriminately harvest anyone’s likeness, making ordinary people potential targets of deepfakes,” Si Yanli, deputy head of the Supreme People’s Court’s research office, said in a statement. “AI voice cloning technology can also ‘steal’ voices at a very low cost, with results that can be convincingly realistic.”
Now, the SCMP notes that courts across the People’s Republic are being advised to view disputes around such content with an eye toward protecting individual identities, personal traits, and reputations.
Beyond abuses of AI, the new opinion also includes guidance on cases of doxing, or the practice of obtaining and spreading others’ personal information online.
“Doxing has emerged as a prominent form of cyberbullying, gravely violating victims’ privacy, disturbing their daily lives and eroding public security in cyberspace,” Si explained.
It’s worth noting that China uses a civil law system, so courts don’t follow the common-law principle of stare decisis. This means that, unlike the US, lower Chinese courts aren’t automatically bound by precedent set by other court rulings.
However, guidance issued by the Supreme People’s Court carries significant legal weight, with lower court bodies required to refer to such opinions in their own rulings — making the recent issuance a hefty rebuff against potential abuses of AI.
More on AI regulation: Dozens of Humanoid Robots Gather for a Protest, Marching and Waving Signs
The post Top Chinese Court Issues Sweeping Legal Crackdown on AI Deepfakes appeared first on Futurism.
Meta’s platforms are in a sorry state as grotesque AI slop continues to proliferate widely.
As a recent Futurism investigation found, many Facebook accounts have been flooding the platform with horrid videos depicting violent child abuse, and Meta appears to be woefully unprepared — and downright unwilling, judging by its ambiguously-phrased policies — to do anything meaningful about it.
At the same time, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is finding plenty of new ways to creep out its user base. As part of the CEO’s lagging efforts to turn Meta into a viable competitor in the ongoing AI race, Meta launched a new AI assistant called Muse this week, and it’s already turning out to be deeply unsettling.
According to Meta’s marketing, the assistant is designed to “take the busywork off your plate,” such as booking tickets, making appointments, or filling out forms.
To actually reap any benefits, however, users have to hand over a staggering amount of trust — which, considering Meta’s catastrophic track record when it comes to protecting its users’ privacy, could easily turn out to be an absolutely terrible idea. While Meta claims the service runs on a secure “dedicated virtual machine” and that it will store login credentials in a place that cannot be accessed by the AI agent, the company has a lot of work to do to gain its users’ trust.
Perfectly illustrating the problem, as The Verge‘s Emma Roth found in her testing, Muse uncovered an “unnerving amount of information it autonomously gleaned about me.”
As part of her investigation, Roth linked both her Gmail and Amazon accounts to Muse and was immediately put off by how much personal info Muse pieced together right off the bat. It figured out the state where she was visiting her family, for instance, admitting it “pulled” data from the “shipping address on my Amazon order.”
It also listed off her “very specific interests” at a level of specificity that goes far beyond the “ad topics” section in the Instagram settings menu, which shows why certain advertisers target your account.
The experience left Roth “with an uneasy feeling about letting Muse sort through personal emails and handle my credit card.”
Meta’s creepy new AI chatbot perfectly illustrates how tech companies are continuing to push the boundaries of how much personal information we’re willing to give up just so we don’t have to complete mundane tasks — an extremely lopsided value proposition.
These same companies have repeatedly proven that they cannot be trusted with our private data. AI chatbots, which are turning out to be a surveillance-led cybersecurity nightmare in their own right, don’t instill much more confidence, either.
The post Meta Releases Uber-Creepy AI Chatbot as Its Platforms Crumble Under Grotesque Child Abuse appeared first on Futurism.
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