Kylie Jenner can’t redeem AI glasses

I have watched an ad for Meta’s new smart-glasses collaboration with Kylie Jenner at least 7 times today. It unfolds from Jenner’s POV, documenting a busy morning in the life of a young mogul. She touches up a manicure, rifles through her closet, blends a green juice. We see through her eyes an assistant dabbing moisturizer on her hand, art installers asking where she wants a large sculpture, a man cleaning her pool who greets her. The assistant tells her that her mother has sent flowers, which are presented for her inspection by another assistant. Jenner’s answers are brief and monotone: “Over there,” she tells the art installers. “Thank you,” she says to the flower assistant. Nothing for the pool guy. She scoops an unamused cat up in the air and, with the first sign of emotion, says, “I love you.”

Suddenly, Jenner goes rogue. The first assistant wants “to grab her for a second,” but instead, Jenner darts into a closet, plucks a can of spray paint from a shelf where it sits next to an expensive leather handbag and grabs her car keys. She throws a different leather handbag onto the passenger seat of her car, pulls on a pair of black leather driving gloves, and zooms off. When we see her next, it’s from a slight distance: pulling over to a roadside billboard emblazoned with her own face, peering sassily over a lowered pair of Starfire sunglasses. She sprays “XO Kylie” across the billboard, gets back in her car, and leaves.

What we learn from the ad is that Jenner is always in motion, hustled through her home by someone who works for her, passing other people who work for her. But sometimes she doesn’t want to be handled. Sometimes she wants the freedom to drive off and vandalize a billboard. What we learn about the glasses is that they are worn by Kylie Jenner. That’s it. None of the things the glasses are equipped to do — take photos and videos, play music, send hands-free texts, log workouts, and chat with an AI agent — are actually being done in this ad. And it’s possible that’s exactly the point.

Smart glasses developed by various companies in various ways over the last 15 years or so have all eventually hit the same roadblock: They’re creepy. Google Glass, the first to step forward and one of the company’s slate of “moonshot” projects, came out in 2013. It was pulled two years later because of “high cost, privacy concerns, and public confusion about its purpose” — a polite rewording of “I look like a dork and everyone thinks I’m awful.” As Rose Eveleth wrote in WIRED several years later in a piece on the importance of redefining privacy laws in the age of smart gadgets, “A reference to Google Glass is shorthand for hubris, foolishness, a tech company completely missing the mark on what regular human beings like.”

Meta’s smart glasses, in a partnership with Ray-Ban that’s tricked out the classic Wayfarers, among others, at least look better. Jenner’s Starfire Kylie Edition (designed not by Ray-Ban but by its parent company) is the same tech in a more aesthetically feminine form. Her specs do have a new feature, though: an AI agent voiced by Kylie herself. Otherwise, little has changed about the sales pitch for eyeglasses that record others without their permission, log what their wearers buy and ply them with ads for more things to buy, train Meta’s AI and represent the worst excesses of surveillance capitalism.

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Meta has tried to put a positive sheen on the ethical void around which its product is built — with, for instance, a few gormless warnings against using them in locker rooms or covering the light that indicates recording. (Surely those will halt the brisk online trade in products marketed specifically to keep others from knowing the light is on.) But consumers’ opinion of the glasses’ core utility hasn’t changed: Last December, one content creator posted a video of a young woman on the subway smashing his Meta Ray-Bans, assuming he would see vengeance. Instead, she was hoisted onto the shoulders of social media and showered with virtual applause.

Along with the AI features, Meta quietly started adding facial-recognition tools to its Ray-Bans, which has already made them popular in various branches of DHS. So it’s not, perhaps, the best time for Meta, whose frames have drawn comparisons to Cybertrucks as exemplars of self-satisfied ostentation, to debut Starfire Kylies. Whatever else they can be used for, smart glasses are best known for being weaponized against other people, women in particular. And that can’t even be called misuse: The glasses are designed in a way that privacy and consent violation are features, not bugs — just ask the data-annotation contractors in Nairobi, Kenya who have to watch the things the glasses record. And the frequency with which they’re deployed for creeping on, stalking, pranking, harassing and humiliating others in public makes Meta’s collaboration with Jenner both an insultingly transparent attempt at reputation laundering and a reminder of its extractive greed.

You can see the path of logic that might have led Mark Zuckerberg to view Jenner as the ideal pitchwoman for wearable panopticons: She’s one of the most successful members of a family in which public attention is valuable currency and shame just gets in the way of profit. Discussing the logic of the Kardashian economy in his 2025 book “Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century,” W. David Marx told Dust magazine that “the idea that being outrageous and shameless is the path to power, and [any] criticism is a form of disrespect to the fans . . . has become the defining archetype of the 21st century.” Making Jenner the face of its glasses is a way for Meta to position profit-seeking hypervisibility as aspirational and privacy as overrated. (Jenner’s boyfriend Timothée Chalamet already got the memo: As Inae Oh noted in Mother Jones, Chalamet attended the Starfire launch party but avoided the cameras.)

The Jenner-Kardashian clan doesn’t have the best track record when promoting products other than those bearing their names. In 2017, Kylie’s older sister, model Kendall Jenner, was paid $275K to create social-media posts hyping the Fyre Festival to her following of roughly 80 million Instagram followers, characterizing the pair of two-day music events as the ultimate in exclusive, ultra-luxe partying. And because Kendall didn’t disclose that she was paid to promote the ill-fated festival, she was ordered to pay $90K in restitution to the event’s duped investors.

Several months later, Kendall flamed out even more extravagantly with an ad for Pepsi in which she ditches a fashion shoot to join a street protest, pulling off a platinum wig in her enthusiasm to rally with multicultural peers agitating for . . . well, the protest signs read “Peace” and “Join the Conversation.” The ad’s closing image of Kendall handing a can of Pepsi to a cop — a clear reference to a defining image of the Black Lives Matter movement — ensured that it was swiftly roasted off the internet. (“If only Daddy would have known about Pepsi,” tweeted Bernice King alongside a photo of her father being shoved back by law enforcement during 1996’s deadly protest at the University of Mississippi.)

Kylie, who emerged as the family’s second-most ubiquitous member before leaving her teens, has had comparatively low-profile business fails, and enough success with her eponymous line of lip paint for Forbes to crown her, at 21, America’s youngest self-made billionaire. (She unseated Zuckerberg.) But as Oh wrote in her Mother Jones piece, “[Jenner] remains relevant, and a willingness to cozy up to the worst people in any given room appears to run in the family. But it’s Jenner’s ability to sell things—which is ostensibly the root goal of the Meta-Jenner partnership—that is far shakier in 2026.” Kylie Cosmetics peaked in the years before “billionaires shouldn’t exist” became a popularly held opinion, and Meta’s addition of AI could not fail harder at reading the room.

Smart glasses could be made more attractive to a mass audience if tech companies cared to. They already have useful applications in reading, translating and making signage easier to read, as well as offering hands-free audio and visual assistance to people with any level of vision or hearing loss. And if Meta really wanted to appeal to women, there are plenty of ways to do that. But it can’t change the message inherent in the technology: that your consent doesn’t matter, that other humans don’t deserve a baseline expectation of privacy. Even the most beautiful face can’t hide the profit motive of that malignance.