AI's next battleground is your body (Scientific American)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-apple-and-openai-are-reportedly-betting-on-ai-hardware-in-2026/

January 23, 2026
AI’s next battleground is your body
Tech giants are betting that we are finally ready to invite a persistent digital device into our lives

By Deni Ellis Béchard


Artificial intelligence is everywhere online, but are we ready to wear it? Reports from The Information suggest Apple is in the “early stages” of developing an AI-powered wearable the size of an AirTag, outfitted with microphones, a speaker and cameras. Meanwhile, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, OpenAI confirmed plans for its own AI device—predicted to be a collaboration with Jony Ive, who shaped Apple’s most iconic products.

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To understand how wearables from Apple and OpenAI might be received, look at the sensory soup they intend to organize. Microphones and cameras capture and catalog faces, voices, traffic and signs. The AI could remind you of a person’s name, count your calories or even prompt you with questions on a date, extending “chatfishing”—online seduction using AI—into the physical world.

As for the challenges, the most pressing is privacy. In the early 2010s Google Glass turned wearers into walking surveillance systems. The social tension became so high that “Glassholes” were banned from cinemas and bars. “The face is a really intimate place, and to have a piece of technology on it is unsettling,” said Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor, to Reuters in 2013.

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Trust is also a question. If an AI app glitches, you close it. But if a wearable has been on you all day and suddenly starts broadcasting private data, the stakes are catastrophic.

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But what a great surveillance device for the tech bros to sell to us! Trump will be sooooo happy.

And if you think the same companies happy to flatter and bribe Trump will refuse to give him all the surveillance data, guess again. Their interests mesh: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220960669

And if you think these companies can be trusted to keep your use of AI private and off search engines, guess again. From last July:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/your-public-chatgpt-queries-are-getting-indexed-by-google-and-other-search-engines/

Your public ChatGPT queries are getting indexed by Google and other search engines
Amanda Silberling
12:23 PM PDT · July 31, 2025


Update 7/31/25 4:10pm PT: Hours after this article was published, OpenAI said it removed the feature from ChatGPT that allowed users to make their public conversations discoverable by search engines. The company says this was a short-lived experiment that ultimately “introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to.” The original story follows.

It’s a strange glimpse into the human mind: If you filter search results on Google, Bing, and other search engines to only include URLs from the domain “https://chatgpt.com/share,” you can find strangers’ conversations with ChatGPT.

Sometimes, these shared conversation links are pretty dull — people ask for help renovating their bathroom, understanding astrophysics, and finding recipe ideas.

In another case, one user asks ChatGPT to rewrite their resume for a particular job application (judging by this person’s LinkedIn, which was easy to find based on the details in the chat log, they did not get the job). Someone else is asking questions that sound like they came out of an incel forum. Another person asks the snarky, hostile AI assistant if they can microwave a metal fork (for the record: no), but they continue to ask the AI increasingly absurd and trollish questions, eventually leading it to create a guide called “How to Use a Microwave Without Summoning Satan: A Beginner’s Guide.”

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And of course there are always hackers.

Or the users/wearers of these little surveillance devices could decide to use them maliciously.

Just say no to this latest genAI insanity from companies that are definitely not on our side. Especially now that they're allied with Trump.

This isn't just Big Brother watching. This is millions of little brothers who'll be invading even apparently private conversations. And no one choosing to wear and use one of these surveillance devices deserves to be treated as anything but a walking surveillance device with no real control over where the data they're gathering will be sent, or how it will be used.

[SheltieLover]

1. No.