Lorde says AI glasses are ‘not sexy’

Lorde didn’t mince words. Standing before a Madrid crowd at the Mad Cool Festival, she stripped away the glossy marketing that has turned Kylie Jenner into a human billboard for Meta’s smart eyewear and declared the product “f—ed up” and “not sexy.” The line landed harder than any press release because it came from an artist who has already thrown her phone into the ocean, a gesture that signaled a deeper discomfort with pervasive surveillance.

The festival’s sponsor, Ray‑Ban, partners with Meta to produce the glasses, and the singer who followed Lorde on stage, Jennie, serves as an ambassador for the same line. That commercial chain makes Lorde’s outburst feel less like a spontaneous rant and more like a deliberate puncture of a carefully staged promotional moment. When the event’s own backers are the ones pushing the hardware, a public rebuttal from the headliner carries weight that no privacy policy can absorb.

Privacy researchers have already turned the glasses into case studies for abuse. Hidden cameras feed real‑time video to AI models that can identify faces, read license plates, and map private spaces without consent. Victims report stalkers using the frames to track movements, while extortionists threaten to release footage captured in intimate settings. A lawsuit alleges that Kenyan contract workers were forced to watch graphic videos harvested by the glasses to train Meta’s algorithms — a claim the company has not publicly answered.

Meta insists it takes privacy seriously, pointing to a visible recording indicator and on‑device processing limits. Yet regulators in Europe and the United States have opened multiple investigations, and class‑action suits pile up faster than the firm can issue statements. The safeguards look like a compliance checklist rather than a design philosophy; the light can be covered, the firmware can be updated, and the data can still flow to servers the user never sees.

Sales figures tell a different story. EssilorLuxottica reported more than 7 million Meta‑Ray‑Ban units moved in 2025, triple the combined total of the two previous years. The momentum has emboldened Meta to expand the lineup with new frame styles, prescription lenses, and deeper integration into its metaverse ambitions. Commerce is voting with its wallet, and the numbers suggest the market still treats the glasses as a lifestyle accessory rather than a surveillance tool.

If privacy arguments cannot stall the adoption curve, vanity might. Lorde’s dismissal — “not sexy” — cuts through technical jargon and lands on the cultural register where fashion lives. The glasses look like ordinary sunglasses until the tiny camera glints; that ambiguity is exactly what makes them unsettling, but also what makes them easy to market as cool. A pop star declaring them uncool reframes the narrative faster than any regulatory fine.

The present moment, Lorde reminded the audience, is what’s sexy. Technology that demands we surrender the here‑and‑now for a data‑harvesting future will always clash with that instinct. Until the glasses earn a place in the culture on their own terms — not as a sponsor’s prop — they remain a gadget looking for a reason to exist.