In a review as humorous as it was dystopian, The Verge‘s Victoria Song described what it was like to wear Bee, an inexpensive new AI wearable pin, for a month — and how it sometimes spat out “fanfiction” about her life as it listened to everything she said and did.
Billed as an AI “memory” device alongside an iOS app and chatbot, the Bee “Pioneer band” costs a piddling $50 and looks, as Song wrote, “like a 2015-era Fitbit.” With such a low overhead, there are bound to be quirks — but as the columnist suggested, those quirks seem to outweigh Bee’s value proposition of remembering things its wearer forgets.
Because it’s AI, one of Bee’s more interesting aspects is its daily fact-checking sessions. Every evening at 8 pm, the app asks users to confirm or deny various things it overheard and inferred, some of which were creepy and a lot of which were straight-up incorrect.
During a bus ride Song took, for instance, the app became convinced that she had a patient in Louisiana who was going to cause harm to someone else — despite the fact that she is a NYC area-based journalist, not a medical professional. Later, the app suggested the writer follow up with said patient.
That debacle illustrates one of Bee’s biggest failures: its inability to differentiate between speakers. Whether it’s listening to the wearer, whoever they’re talking to, a character on TV, or a Kendrick Lamar song, Bee seems to think that all the speech that happens around it is useful and actionable. (In an interview with The Verge, however, Bee cofounder and CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo insisted the company is working on a “liveness detection” that will stop the pin from thinking broadcasts are real conversations).
After wearing the AI pin for a few days, Song noticed something odd: she started to realize it was listening to her during extremely private moments. After committing “bathroom crimes,” the writer remarked aloud: “Shit! This thing is listening to me!” Later, the Bee app suggested she re-up on Lactaid.
Though she attempted to “mute” the pin around other people to protect their privacy, Song admitted that aspects of conversations that had occurred when it was supposed to be off seemed to start cropping into its daily summaries — which had, by the end of week two, become an obsession for the writer.
Soon after, that obsession turned into paranoia as Song began interrogating the litany of “memories” Bee spat out that didn’t line up with her own.
Though some of Bee’s summaries were helpful, the pin’s perennial recording was overall quite intrusive. The writer’s spouse said they hated it, and that it was “not useful enough given how much it violates my privacy.”
“Having lived with Bee, I’m not sold on AI doubling as your memory,” Song wrote. “Sure, it was convenient to get summaries of work meetings. That felt appropriate. But it’s the other moments in life — the sensitive and fraught ones — where using Bee felt more like voyeurism.”
More on AI fanfiction: If You Ask AI Who You’re Married To, You May Spit Out Your Coffee
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