Meta’s AI Glasses Get Savaged in the Streets

Adario Strange
July 17, 2026

📺 Netflix’s AI House of Cards

1. I’ve been tracking Netflix’s internal experiments involving the use of AI for film and TV for over a year, and this week the company provided the evidence we need to call it the leading AI filmed content studio in Hollywood. During the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call this week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed just how many projects the streamer has used AI to enhance.

“Gen-AI workflows now have been used in roughly 300 of our titles, with the largest concentration to date on post-production. We’re leveraging Gen-AI for really complicated shots and sequences,” said Sarandos on the call. “[AI was used on] things like enhancing crowds or historical battle scenes. Keep in mind that in many of the cases, productions would have left out those key shots because they just wouldn’t have been able to afford them. They wouldn’t have been able to do them in the timeframes that they’re working on. Those sequences are saved by the availability and access to these Gen-AI tools.”

Despite the now wide use of AI at Netflix, primarily through its internal team, Eyeline, and the newly acquired Ben Affleck startup, Interpositive, Sarandos was careful to highlight the ongoing importance of human craft. “We believe it takes great artists to make something great, and AI is not changing that,” said Sarandos. “AI will give creatives better tools to bring their visions to life. Movies are being made by people who make movies. AI provides them with better tools to make them even better. Today, our talent leverages [AI] tools for things like set references, previs [pre-visualization], VFX, and sequence prep and shot planning. It all makes the production itself so much more smooth and efficient, and fast.”

The streaming boss also noted Netflix’s The American Experiment documentary series for using 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage. “The cost savings [of using AI] will likely be reinvested into more content on the service, which fuels high-quality engagement and that whole kind of revenue profit flywheel that’s going to come from that we’ve been talking about from day one,” Sarandos said.

Hollywood’s AI Green Light: Amid a lot of anti-AI discourse from actors and directors alike in Hollywood, the truth is that the industry has been waiting for one of the big players to normalize AI use in film and TV, and Netflix just did exactly that. And while there’s been a creeping move by some to politicize generative AI as a right-wing-adjacent tool of the tech broligarchy, Netflix’s strong left-leaning cultural track record mostly shields it from any easy connection to such negative framing. As a result, this revelation (300 titles using AI!) may very well be the green light Hollywood has been waiting for to go all in on AI filmmaking.

🎬 Nolan Resisting the Siren Song of AI

2. “The interesting thing with AI is I’ve never seen a technology that’s been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that the public has so thoroughly rejected. It’s just sort of an odd thing. Young people in particular, they coined this term ‘AI slop.’ There’s a sort of disdain for things AI…But I think the idea that it replaces human beings wholesale and human creativity, to me it’s a nonsense.”
—Christopher Nolan, director, The Odyssey, The Dark Knight
*Source: AFP

🕶️ Zuck’s Not-So-Smart Glasses Roasted via Sci-Fi

3. Meta’s AI glasses have had a rough time in recent months. What started out as cool Ray-Ban-branded smartglasses that allowed you to record video of your favorite moments while offering AI audio assistance has turned into a cultural third rail for privacy advocates. Echoing the growing public backlash against Meta smartglasses, UK-based activist group Everyone Hates Elon (EHE) has unleashed another subversive street anti-campaign against Meta’s smartglasses. But unlike previous efforts, this one relies on a well-known trope from John Carpenter’s 1988 science fiction classic film They Live. In the film, a special pair of glasses allows the wearer to see the mind control messages hidden in daily advertisements, as well as view the true faces of the hidden aliens invading Earth.

What EHE’s modified street advertisement does is show the normal Kylie Jenner (Meta’s new smartglasses endorser) wearing the glasses, and then, from another view, pedestrians can see the They Live face of Carpenter’s evil aliens wearing the glasses. The media hack is just down the street from Meta’s London headquarters.

Why This Is Happening: This rapid shift in the public perception of Meta glasses, moving from cool new tech to “creepy,” has largely been fueled by social media users surreptitiously filming people they’re talking to in public and then posting the embarrassing videos. This is exactly the kind of privacy-invading behavior people were worried about back in 2013 when Google released its Google Glass, whose wearers were eventually nicknamed “glassholes.” Adding to Meta’s smartglasses cool-factor-stumble is its chief spokesperson: Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO. The problem is that Zuckerberg is also the face of previous scandals involving user privacy and mental health issues at Facebook and Instagram.

So while Zuckerberg is rightfully proud to stand up as the leader of his company’s innovative entry into hardware, his decision to make himself the face of the product was probably ill-advised given his public profile. That profile will be further cratered in the upcoming film The Social Reckoning, where Jeremy Strong (Succession) delivers a brutal yet oddly accurate portrayal of Zuckerberg. That film will hit theaters in October.

🤖 The Father of Star Wars Isn’t Scared of AI

4. “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies. It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future… If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that. Humans can’t, we’re not that smart. The whole idea is you’re a human being, you’re responsible for what you say and what you do, and if you’re doing something that’s illegal you should be punished for that. Whatever you do, you should be recognized. It’s just like real life.”
—George Lucas, director, Star Wars
*Source: A Rabbit’s Foot
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