Nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to artificial intelligence, and yet the Bee AI managed to make me raise an eyebrow. Imagine a device as big as an old Fitbit, costing around 50 euros, that follows you everywhere like a silent shadow, recording every word, every sound, every moment of your existence.
So far, nothing particularly innovative, you might say. But here's the disturbing twist: this little pin It doesn't just memorize your life, it reinterprets it. He distorts it. Sometimes he just makes it up. It’s like having a personal biographer with creative schizophrenia: he documents your day and then, with algorithmic nonchalance, turns it into some sort of dystopian fanfiction. And that’s a different story.
The unfaithful memory of an overzealous assistant
Victoria Song of the magazine The Verge had the guts to wear this strange device for a whole month. The Bee AI It presents itself as an innocent “memory device” accompanied by an iOS app and a chatbot. But what should be an aid to remembering what we forget quickly turns into an exercise in “artificial creativity”.
Every evening at 20 pm, the app kindly asks you to confirm or deny the “memories” it has collected during the day. And here comes the best part: many of these are completely made up. In one case, the device convinced itself that Song had a patient in Louisiana who was intent on harming someone. Small detail: the journalist lives in New York and is not a medical professional.
This digital delirium illustrates one of the fundamental problems of the gadget: it does not distinguish between who is speaking, mixing the voice of the wearer with those of the interlocutors, even the characters of the programs that the journalist was watching on TV. A sort of Applaud NotePin (that one works a lot better) ended up under the “care” of Tim Burton.
Bee AI: Privacy Destroyer, Paranoia Builder
After a few days of using it, Song realized something disturbing: The device was listening to his most private moments. And practically even when it was turned off.
Even moments of, let’s say, personal intimacy with oneself. And that’s not all. Despite attempts to mute the pin in the presence of other people to protect their privacy, fragments of conversations that were supposed to remain private began to appear in the daily summaries. In short: a dystopian catastrophe.
The final verdict: technological voyeurism
Song’s husband was blunt: he hates the device, which “is not useful enough considering how much it also violates my privacy.” The same journalist concludes that, although some summaries were indeed useful (especially for work meetings), the device transforms the most sensitive and delicate moments of life into a form of technological voyeurism.
La artificial memory of the Bee AI demonstrates once again that the most accessible technology is not necessarily the most desirable. Fifty euros to have a digital witness of your life that, like a compulsive gossip, distorts and reinvents reality. A questionable value proposition, don't you think? I wonder how many of us would be willing to trade our privacy for an unreliable digital memory. The answer, I fear, is all too predictable: many will do it anyway, with the same nonchalance with which we accept terms of service without reading them.
