Chips & Hardware
Lorde tells festival crowd to skip Meta's AI glasses
Pop star Lorde publicly denounced Meta's AI glasses on stage at Madrid's Mad Cool Festival, telling the crowd "not sexy" even as sales for the category keep climbing.
While Kylie Jenner has served as a highly visible face for Meta’s AI glasses, Lorde wants no part of it. During her set at the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid last week, she broke from the music to weigh in on the devices directly, telling the crowd that it’s getting harder and harder to know what’s real — pointing to the difficulty of telling whether someone nearby is wearing ordinary sunglasses or Meta’s camera-equipped AI glasses, a technology many security experts have called a privacy nightmare. Her verdict was blunt: “Don’t get the glasses. Not sexy.” She added that living in the here and now, by contrast, is what’s actually sexy.
The timing of her comments wasn’t incidental. Ray-Ban, a sponsor of the festival, partners with Meta to make the glasses, and Lorde performed immediately before singer Jennie, who serves as an ambassador for the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses line. It isn’t the first time Lorde has pushed back against always-on technology — she has previously written about throwing her own phone into the ocean, but this public rebuke went further.
Lorde isn’t alone in raising alarms. Smart glasses, which pair cameras with AI features, have been used as tools for harassment and extortion. Meta, the category’s most popular maker, is facing numerous investigations and lawsuits alleging privacy violations. One lawsuit alleges that Kenyan contract workers were made to watch graphic videos obtained with the glasses to help train Meta’s AI; Meta hasn’t publicly detailed its response to that specific claim. The company has said it takes privacy seriously and has built in safeguards, including a visible recording light.
None of that scrutiny has slowed sales. EssilorLuxottica, which makes the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, said it sold more than 7 million units in 2025 — more than triple the roughly 2 million units it sold across 2023 and 2024 combined. That momentum has emboldened Meta to keep expanding its smart-glasses lineup even as the privacy debate Lorde voiced on stage continues to build.
Why it matters
Celebrity backlash hasn’t dented demand for AI glasses, suggesting the category’s growth is currently driven more by hardware appeal than by privacy trust — a gap the mounting lawsuits could eventually test.