Lorde used a festival stage in Madrid to make an unusually direct product review: do not buy AI glasses. During her Thursday set at Real Cool Festival, the singer told the crowd that the spread of AI-enabled eyewear is making it harder to tell whether someone is wearing ordinary sunglasses or a device that can record and process the world around them.
Videos posted to social media captured Lorde thanking the audience for participating in “something real,” then pivoting to the problem of knowing what is real around wearable AI. In the clip, she said people may not know whether someone nearby is wearing sunglasses or “those fucked up” glasses. She added: “Fuck the glasses. Don’t get the glasses. Not sexy.”
Lorde did not name a company from the stage. The context points squarely at Ray-Ban and Meta, though that remains an inference rather than a named accusation from her. Ray-Ban sponsored the festival, and Ray-Ban has worked with Meta on AI smart glasses.
The gripe is not hard to decode. Smart glasses collapse a visible consumer object, sunglasses, into a computing device. For the person wearing them, that can mean hands-free capture and AI features. For everyone else in the room, it can mean guessing whether a face accessory is just a face accessory. That ambiguity is the product feature that keeps becoming the social problem.
Meta’s glasses have recently drawn more scrutiny over privacy and surveillance concerns, according to The Verge. The company is also reportedly preparing a new “super sensing” model designed for continuous recording. Meta has not been quoted here responding to Lorde’s comments, and the available footage does not show her naming Meta, Ray-Ban, or any specific model.
Stereogum reported another awkward piece of festival programming: Lorde was followed onstage by Blackpink’s Jennie. Jennie is a Ray-Ban Meta AI ambassador, according to Stereogum, and has appeared in promotional material for the glasses, including Instagram advertising and a video shown between sets at Real Cool Festival.
That made Lorde’s aside land less like a generic complaint about gadgets and more like a public rejection of the wearable AI pitch sitting around the event. Meta and Ray-Ban want smart glasses to feel normal enough to disappear into fashion. Lorde’s argument, delivered to a live crowd rather than a privacy panel, was that disappearing is the problem.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.