Let’s Add “Earbuds with Cameras” to the List of AI Garbage No One Should Want

If you’re anything like me, you wake up most mornings thinking that although we’ve certainly made plenty of valuable progress in having every moment of our lives surveilled and pored over by artificial intelligence, it’s frustrating that there might remain a few tiny gaps in which we haven’t yet surrendered every scrap of privacy. Why, for instance, has no one invented an AI-powered shower caddy to peer at our nude bodies while bathing? Just think of the priceless anatomical data we could be harvesting, all of which will surely be useful to the machines once they finally begin their campaign of human extermination. In that vein, I’m happy to say that at least one major breakthrough has seemingly arrived: Earbuds with tiny cameras. Finally, I can loudly ask an AI companion what it is that I’m seeing in front of me, and it can helpfully reply “it’s a book, you dumbass.”

The prototype product in question is called VueBuds, and it was unveiled this week by researchers at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. It’s essentially a modification to existing, off-the-shelf wireless earbuds that adds a small camera the size of a grain of rice, and syncs over Bluetooth with a phone-based AI chatbot, allowing the user to have conversations with the AI about the visual data (also known as “what you’re seeing”) that the cameras are processing. The researchers tout the noble potential use cases of VueBuds, such as helping those with vision problems to read books in front of them, or being able to use the system as a real-time translator for written text in another language. Unsurprisingly, however, they also gloss over most of the readily apparent privacy and data issues such technology raises, pretending to address them as if we haven’t heard the same thing countless times regarding other products that ultimately proved to be nightmares for online privacy. Also–and I can’t stress this enough–the sheer, awkward dorkiness of having a loud, public conversation with your earbuds as seen in the demonstration video below is something I can’t wait to have surrounding me on a daily basis. How soon can you get these on the streets, so I can hear half the guys in a restaurant yelling “HEY VUEBUDS, CAN YOU SEE MY DINNER?”

The creators acknowledge that VueBuds are on some level a response to the relative commercial failure that smart glasses such as Google Glass have already experienced, while pretending that the primary reason for that failure was simply because the glasses were awkward or unwieldy, rather than painfully intrusive. As Shyam Gollakota, the senior author of the research paper announcing VueBuds put it: “We haven’t seen most people adopt smart glasses or VR headsets, in part because a lot of people don’t like wearing glasses, and they often come with privacy concerns, such as recording high-resolution video and processing it in the cloud. But almost everyone wears earbuds already, so we wanted to see if we could put visual intelligence into tiny, low-power earbuds, and also address privacy concerns in the process.”

These “privacy concerns” would supposedly be solved by having all of the processing happening on the user’s phone, and by giving users the ability to “immediately delete images,” not bothering to note that they could still be used to violate the privacy of others through their recordings, which was a major issue with smart glasses. Note, also, how it’s phrased that users “can” immediately delete images, rather than just making this the default. But even if that is the case, how prepared are you to believe such claims? Deleted data is a fantasy, one that we see punctured on a daily basis. Look at the national sensation surrounding the case of the still-missing Nancy Guthrie, and the way police were able to extract video and images from her doorbell camera … despite the fact that she wasn’t paying for the service, and it shouldn’t have been recording or saving footage at the time. Look at an incident where hackers in South Korea recently took over/stole footage from 120,000 home cameras simultaneously, and then tell me with a straight face that putting millions of tiny cameras on earbuds won’t present any opportunity for similar intrusion in ways that the average person can’t even yet conceive. It’s getting to the point where I’m finding it difficult to identify with any person who wants or accepts additional cameras or microphones anywhere in their vicinity on a daily basis: Knowing what we know, inviting these devices into your home means that you’re universally surrendering any expectation of privacy.

NEW: We’re joined by 75 organizations in calling on Meta to cancel plans to install facial recognition technology on their “smart” glasses.

This tech would allow anyone who wears the glasses to identify and spy on those around them.

Meta must stop this all-out assault on our privacy and safety.

— ACLU (@aclu.org) Apr 13, 2026 at 1:17 PM

And on top of those ethical concerns, even the technological capabilities of the product itself seem to leave much to be desired. The researchers boast, for instance, that the VueBuds achieved just over 80% accuracy “when translating or identifying objects” as if this is a mark to be proud of. Somehow, I think that rephrasing it as “these invasive earbuds will misidentify the object in front of you almost 20% of the time” would be a much less effective selling point for the tech-curious. Hell, the cameras on these earbuds can’t even see in color, rendering the AI completely unable to process any questions that would rely on determining color in an image.

Who is the person out there who is clamoring for this functionality, other than the most hopeless cog in the tech influencer machinery? This is the kind of use case that we cook up as a society when the “success” of AI as a technology has become unbreakably tethered to the fate of the entire national and global economy, to be embraced by those among us who have already given up on even the idea of living a life free from constant AI analysis. Sure, I expect there’s a niche out there for these little earbud cameras, particularly among the hopeless contingent of people in love with their chatbots, or about to delusionally break into a warehouse in search of a robot body for their AI companion to inhabit. But for the rest of us, just how many more cameras do you want to be wearing on a daily basis? Maybe you can put one in your wedding ring or your tennis shoes as well?