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OpenAI and The Surveillance Future [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-05-27

OpenAI has bought Jonny “Ports? What are Ports? We Don’t Need No Stinking Ports” Ive’s design firm. In a hilariously over the top video, they announced that they are working on a device that will be the third device you cannot live without, after your iPhone and Mac book (poor Android and Windows users — their machines are just not as life altering, I suppose). It will be on all the time and record everything. This is, of course, not a device for the benefit of people but a device for the benefit of OpenAI.

The imagined device will not have a screen, so its utility is immediately questionable. Voice interfaces are not as efficient or private as screens. A world in which people are walking around yelling “CHAT find me a burrito” is not a world in which most people want to live, either the users or the poor people who have to put up with the users. The device will almost certainly have to interface with one of the other two primary devices to be useful for you. Even so-called holographic interfaces are not as easy to use as screens. What these devices will do, however is provide OpenAI with a ton of new data.

These devices are going to be on all the time and sending everything they record to OpenAI. Your life will turn up in their models. That is almost certainly the point of this device. From OpenAI’s perspective, it just has to be useful, or unobtrusive enough, to keep people wearing it. Because OpenAI needs to find something to help them break out of the stagnant place they find themselves.

ChatGPT 5.0 has been delayed and is apparently not going well. New models and new processes are more likely to hallucinate than the older models. Most businesses are regretting their choice to use imitative AI tools and are backing away. And, of course, they are still not making any money. They need to find a way out of this cul de sac and this device might be their best bet.

First, they want to sell a hundred million of these, and they might sell them at a profit. If they do, and if they sell in quantity, the device could help take some of the financial pressure off the company, especially since they will likely charge a subscription fee to user the device. What they will really get out of this, however, is your life to feed to their models. Every conversation, every interaction, everything the device and can see, is grist for OpenAI’s data mill. And that should terrify you.

First, none of this material is ever going to go away. Creating models requires data to train on, and once they have data, it becomes a permanent part of their system. Where it waits to be either given to law enforcement or to be hacked and stolen. All of your private conversations, all of your interactions in the world — everything waiting for others to access. Given that the current admin arrests people for protected speech today, that should be terrifying.

Even for “legitimate” uses, though, this is intensely problematic. We know that imitative AI has a serious plagiarism problem, especially around images. One of the big pushes by OpenAI is to replace most of the movie and television making pipeline with their products, so better video and audio systems are a requirement if they want to move forward. Imagine, then, your sister, husband, wife, daughter, son’s face or close enough that you know it’s them, in the next video generation demo. The terms of service will allow it, and they will use images and recording of real people to serve their own needs.

OpenAI’s goals are not yours. They need to remove humans from a significant portion of one or more industries if they ever hope to come close to profitability. And to do that, they need to kick start their model and product development. this device is merely an attempt to do so — to capture every bit of your life in order to turn it into pieces for their own profit-making designs. Their dream is the ultimate panopticon — everything you say, see, do sliced and diced and sold back to you as entertainment and email summaries.

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