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Tag: meta

  • Snap’s AR Spectacles Aren’t as Fancy as Meta’s Orion—but at Least You Can Get Them

    Snap’s AR Spectacles Aren’t as Fancy as Meta’s Orion—but at Least You Can Get Them

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    At a demo, one game developer showed me a game his company built for the Spectacles. It tracks how far you walk and overlays a gamified grid over the top of your surroundings. As you walk, you collect coins that add up over your route. RPG-style enemies will pop up occasionally too, which you can then fight off with an AR sword that you wield by waving your hand around in real life. You have to hold the sword out directly in front of you in order to keep it within the confines of that narrow field of view, though, so that means walking with a stiff, outstretched arm. The pitch is that you can play this game while walking, which seems to me like a good way to accidentally whack somebody else walking on the sidewalk or get hurt when you chase a coin into traffic.

    Snap encourages wearers to avoid using AR that blocks their vision at times when they shouldn’t be distracted, and to pay attention to their surroundings. But there are no procedures in place on the Spectacles now that send a pop up warning when something is in the way, or prevent people from using the glasses while driving or operating heavy machinery.

    People have been grievously injured while distractedly playing Pokémon Go, but Snap says this is a different use case. Holding your phone directly in front of you to catch a rare Snorlax is a problem because then you’re blocking your vision with a device. The Spectacles let you see the real world at all times, even through the augmented images in front of you. That said, I found that having a hologram in the middle of my vision can definitely be a distraction. When I tried out the walking game, my eyes focused more on the little cartoon collectibles floating around than the actual ground ahead of me.

    This might not be a problem while the Specs are solely at the hands of a few developers. But Snap is moving quickly, and also wants to appeal to a wider array of buyers, likely in an effort to build up its tech before its rivals can run away with the AR prize.

    After all, Meta’s AR efforts seem to be further along than Snap—lighter frames, more robust AI on the backend, and ever-so-slightly less of an off putting look. But there are some key differences between how the companies are trying to push their burgeoning tech forward. Meta’s Orion glasses are actually controlled by three devices—the glasses on your face, a gesture sensing wristband, and a large puck—about the size of a portable charger—that does the bulk of the processing for all the software features. Unlike Meta’s glasses, Snap’s Spectacles are all packed into a single device. That means they are bigger and heavier than the Meta glasses, but also that users won’t have to carry around extra pieces of equipment when they finally make their way into the real world.

    “We think it’s interesting that one of the biggest players in virtual reality agrees with us that the future is wearable, see-through, immersive AR,” Myers says. “Spectacles are quite different from the Orion prototype. They’re unique in that they are real immersive AR glasses that are available now, and Lens Studio developers are already building amazing experiences. Spectacles are completely standalone, with no extra puck or other devices required, and are built on a foundation of proven, commercialized technology that can be produced at scale.”

    Snap’s goal is to make its Spectacles intuitive, easy to use, and easy to wear. It’s going to take a while to get them there, but they’re well on that path to those three points. All they have to do is shave off some weight. Maybe add some color. And keep people from wandering into traffic.

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  • Meta Finally Breaks Its Silence on Pig Butchering

    Meta Finally Breaks Its Silence on Pig Butchering

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    Since roughly 2020, when the earliest pig butchering scams started to emerge, more than 200,000 people have been trafficked and held in compounds—mostly in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos—where they are forced to play the role of an online scammer. If they refuse, the criminals who own the scam compounds, which are typically connected to Chinese organized crime, often beat or torture them. People have been trafficked from more than 60 countries around the world—often after seeing online ads promising them jobs that are too good to be true.

    The forced scammers are compelled to send thousands of online messages to potential victims around the world on a daily basis. They are tasked with building relationships, often with the lure of friendship or romance, and eventually persuade their victims to send them money as part of lucrative “investment opportunities.” Individually, victims have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the pig butchering criminal enterprises have collectively conned people out of around $75 billion in recent years.

    “These scams can start on dating apps, text message, email, social media, or messaging apps, then ultimately move to scammer-controlled accounts on crypto apps or scam websites masquerading as investment platforms,” Meta writes in its report. “In addition to disrupting scam centers, teams across Meta are constantly rolling out new product features to help protect people on our apps from known scam tactics at scale.”

    Pig butchering scams drive toward financial theft, but they start with either one-to-one cold communication between scammers and potential victims or contact that originates from social media groups or other communal forums. For example, Gary Warner, director of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm DarkTower, says that he tracks thousands of Facebook groups dedicated to luring people into cryptocurrency investment scams as well as groups that purport to be community dating resources where scammers are lurking.

    Online moderation of scammers is a difficult and longstanding issue for Big Tech. As is the case with many types of inauthentic content, some pig butchering activity can skirt tech company standards—even when they are doing a large number of account takedowns—because the content isn’t explicit enough to meet the criteria for removal.

    “So much of what is on platform is clearly the prelude to pig butchering, but Meta says it ‘doesn’t violate community standards,’” Warner says.

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  • The Best VR Headsets (2024), Tested and Reviewed

    The Best VR Headsets (2024), Tested and Reviewed

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    The Meta Quest 3 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a massive upgrade over its predecessor in almost every category. It has improved specs across the board—slightly higher resolution, a faster processor, more RAM, and the option for up to 512 GB of internal storage—but the biggest change is the mixed-reality upgrade. The previous model, the Quest 2, had external-facing cameras for orienting itself in the world and a pass-through feature that let you see the room you’re in to avoid obstacles. The Quest 3 takes it several steps further, making immersive augmented reality core to the experience.

    For starters, the pass-through cameras can now show you a color image instead of black and white. It’s also slightly higher resolution, so it’s easier to tell what you’re looking at. It still feels a bit like you’re looking at an early 2000s-era YouTube video of your living room, but it’s worlds better than not being able to see your surroundings at all. This tech enables some innovative new games and experiences. One of my favorites, PianoVision, is designed to help you learn the piano by overlaying helpful information and even piano rolls onto a video of your actual, physical keyboard. It turns practicing the instrument into a Guitar Hero–like experience, and it’s something that wouldn’t be possible with VR alone.

    The downside? The Meta Quest 3 is more expensive than the Quest 2 ever was (even after its midlife price hike). Starting at $500, it’s on par with buying whole game consoles, so it’s not quite an impulse buy, but if you’re looking for the best stand-alone VR headset with the widest library of games and apps that support both VR and mixed reality, the Quest 3 is the headset to beat. It’s worth noting that the company behind it all is Meta (aka Facebook). You might not like that, given Meta’s less-than-stellar history of managing user data (not to mention how that data is used). At least you don’t need a Facebook account anymore to use a Meta headset.

    Supports room-scale VR, pass-through mixed reality, can operate with or without a PC, and comes with two controllers.

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  • Meta Lobbyist Turned Regulator Says Europe’s Big Tech Rules Have Gone Too Far

    Meta Lobbyist Turned Regulator Says Europe’s Big Tech Rules Have Gone Too Far

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    According to Salla, Big Tech rules should be left to the new administration entering the White House. “Big Tech should be regulated by their home continent … That needs to be done in the US first and foremost.”

    President-elect Donald Trump has been vague about how he would regulate Big Tech, suggesting “something” should be done about Google but implied breaking the company apart may go too far.

    Salla’s critics are troubled by the way her arguments overlap with Meta’s. Bram Vranken, a researcher at Corporate Observatory Europe, a charity that tracks lobbying, points to an open letter, signed by 49 industry figures including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and hosted on a Meta website, which echoes Salla’s position that AI companies should be able to use Europeans’ data to innovate.

    “She has an agenda which is very, very close to her former employer,” he says. “It’s bad for trust in EU politics, when somebody who used to be a lobbyist goes to the Parliament to repeat the same talking points.” Salla maintains that her time at Meta did not change her views.“I was talking about digital regulation for a decade before I joined Meta,” she says. “I have absolutely no ties to that company … It’s a great company—and I don’t have any of their stocks.”

    Salla sits among more than 700 fellow MEPs. Yet past debates over tech policy show that just a few outspoken MEPs can shape laws, says Vranken. “So if she plays it right, she can also have quite an important influence on the political stance [her group] the EPP takes.” German MEP Andreas Schwab, an advocate for the Digital Markets Act who has been among the most prolific EPP members on Big Tech until now, told WIRED in March the new rules should prompt the European internet to “change for the better.”

    Over the next five years, Salla expects one of her greatest challenges to come from suggestions that the EU needs more tech regulation, to plug gaps in existing rules. “That worries me a lot,” she says. In Brussels, people are already proposing a digital fairness act as an answer to problems ranging from addictive phone design to dark patterns and influencer marketing. Salla, however, believes the EU should focus on enforcing existing regulation, not proposing new rules.

    “We need to have a stable investment environment for our companies,” she argues, “where we are not changing the rules and legislation all the time.”

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  • Meta Horizon Worlds Has Been Taken Over by Children

    Meta Horizon Worlds Has Been Taken Over by Children

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    “For the affordable Quest headset specifically, I think that they’ve kind of mirrored the adoption and usage journey of things like the Nintendo Wii,” Gebbie says. “That kind of affordable gadget that you buy as a family thing that you give to your kids.”

    Horizon still has adult fans, and in their eyes, the kids are not alright. You can find thread after thread on Reddit of people complaining about children ruining the vibes of virtual spaces like VR chat. Or hear horror stories about kids getting into sketchy situations—being exposed to bullying or harassment by other kids or, more worryingly, adults.

    Higgin says this friction is typical of social spaces that include a wide range of age groups, as kids just have a different way of relating and interacting with the world than adults do. “And in these spaces, that makes it hard for any adult to tolerate,” he says. “The whole crowding around, and everyone talking at once, and just shouting memes. Meta might not have a choice here. It might be the first, like, takeover by kids of a virtual digital space that I can think of.”

    In 2018, Bailenson coauthored a report with the children’s advocacy organization Common Sense Media that offers advice to parents who have concerns about what their kids experience in VR. It encourages keeping VR use sessions short, utilizing parental content controls, and, most importantly, participating or at least keeping an eye on what their kid is getting up to in their virtual world.

    “They’re anonymous, their parents can’t see what they’re doing like they can on a normal TV or video game, and there’s no physical consequences their actions might bring them in the real world,” says Bailenson. “That trifecta is what’s enabling a lot of this behavior.”

    Playground Rules

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    A VR classroom in Horizon Worlds.

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    The names of the kids’ avatars have been blurred to protect their privacy.

    Really though, the kids are doing kid things. Running around, playing with bubble guns and interactive objects, chatting with friends and making new ones. Many of the kids in Horizon Worlds are friendly, and they run right up to other users to wave or say hi. In offshoot rooms, they play games like tag or floor-is-lava. Lots of areas in the shared Horizon rooms just feels like a playground, reverberating with laughter, yelling, and the occasional shrieks of adolescent anger. Kid stuff!

    But the metaverse also has an underbelly. Spend enough time cruising around in Horizon, and while it may look like a cartoon wonderland, you’re bound to see the seedy side of humanity emerge. And experts have criticized the platform and Meta’s sometimes allegedly lax approach to policing its virtual spaces. After all, the company doesn’t have a great track record of protecting kids on Facebook or their privacy. Nor is Meta all that interested in cultivating its own transparency.

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  • The Election Was Even Weirder in VR

    The Election Was Even Weirder in VR

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    Technology has been at the forefront of this election cycle from the start. Generative AI has driven concerns about misinformation and eye-rolling propaganda. Even the campaigns themselves embraced new-ish spaces, like the Harris-Walz-themed map in Fortnite.

    The metaverse may not be quite ready for the campaign cycle, but perhaps the political system should be ready for it. For all the chaos and trolling in the room on election night, what soon becomes clear is that the vibe in VR reflects the outside world.

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    An avatar watches election returns.

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    Trump support was strong in VRChat.

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    The venue for the watch party.

    First off, the VR election rooms are overwhelmingly male, which will be unsurprising for anyone accustomed to the political manosphere in the US. Most of the people I encounter in both virtual realms seem to favor Trump, and that power imbalance only grows throughout the night as the red wave deepens and the former president’s reelection seems more and more likely.

    My colleague Kelly talks with a person dressed in a black Iron Man-esque suit of armor who says they are from Michigan. Ersatz Iron Man calls the state for Trump much earlier than it was officially reported. They say they know lots of people who support Trump, and for whom Elon Musk’s endorsement and posts on X were an important factor to helping Trump win more broadly.

    Lots of moments like this happen over the night. At first, the real-world results clash with the absurdity in the Horizon World rooms. People hiding within their brightly colored avatars, shouting over the top of each other, saying the most offensive things possibly to provoke a reaction. But then the room starts to split, a larger group on the Trump side—loud and excited. Then a smaller group on the Harris side, more somber and reflective. Some people congregate outside, talking in low voices and crunching the numbers about how many electoral votes are left.

    “We’ll never have a girl president,” I hear a child shout during my visit to MetDonalds, Horizon Worlds’ mockup of the fast-food chain with golden arches. “We’ve got to keep our American traditions!”

    “Let’s kill all the old white people in America that are around,” says somebody wearing an avatar that looks like a slinky dog from Toy Story. Then, to somebody else, “I guess if Trump wins you don’t have to worry about your school getting shot up as much I guess.”

    Later I watch somebody voraciously defend Trump’s policies while a different person in a knight avatar comes around behind him and starts miming rubbing his nipples while moaning loudly over the top of him. By the end of the night, it starts to feel like the virtual world is just as weird as the real one.

    Additional reporting by WIRED contributor Kelly Bourdet.

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  • Will Social Platforms Take Down a Premature Donald Trump Victory Post?

    Will Social Platforms Take Down a Premature Donald Trump Victory Post?

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    One of the big questions going into election night is whether former president Donald Trump will prematurely declare victory. That declaration would likely be accompanied by social media posts on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok—all of which will not confirm if they would remove the content.

    He’s done it before: Trump falsely declared himself the winner of the 2020 election when many battleground states were still too close to call. Counts were still ongoing in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A number of Republican lawmakers and pundits rebuked Trump’s claims. Ben Shapiro, cofounder of the Daily Wire, said “No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say that he has,” in an X post at the time. Trump’s own advisers are reportedly encouraging him to announce an early victory.

    “Premature claims of victory that are intended to intimidate people from voting or suppress voting may be evaluated under our Civic Integrity policy,” X spokesperson Michael Abboud tells WIRED. “ Community Notes are an effective way to add helpful context to Posts that may be misleading about voting results.”

    X authorizes users to flag and correct misinformation on its platforms through Community Notes. A recent Center for Countering Digital Hate study found that the crowdsourced fact-checking initiative does a poor job of correcting false election claims.

    X, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has already become a hotbed for election misinformation and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon. Last week, Musk’s America PAC launched an Election Integrity Community on X which has grown to nearly 50,000 members. The group says it will elevate “incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.

    In 2020, Meta said that it would add labels to early victory posts. This time around, Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson, shared a blog post with WIRED explaining that the company will remove misinformation related to the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting and voting-related calls for violence. Meta will also remove content containing false election results, according to the blog post, but Chambliss did not respond to whether that rule applied to Trump.

    “As with all of our policies we will continue to monitor what we’re seeing on-platform,” Chambliss told WIRED on Tuesday.

    Ads declaring a false outcome, however, are banned. Meta bans new election ads for the week before election day, and said it would extend that ban up until a few days after polls close, Axios reported on Monday.

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  • Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Set Off a Race to the Bottom

    Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Set Off a Race to the Bottom

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    But for years, public pressure from government officials, civil society, and the media pushed tech companies to invest in teams and tools that could at least somewhat address issues of hate speech or misinformation on their platforms, so they could say they were making a good faith effort to deal with the issue.

    Musk’s purchase of Twitter signaled a change, according to six former trust and safety employees from Twitter and Meta.

    When Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he quickly fired more than 50 percent of the company’s workers, including almost all of the company’s trust and safety and policy staff—the people tasked with creating and enforcing the platform’s policies around things like hate speech, violent content, conspiracy theories, and mis- and disinformation. Since then, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Discord have all made cuts to trust and safety staff.

    Shortly after Musk purged Twitter of its trust and safety teams, other companies began layoffs. In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, including many trust and safety employees. In January 2023, Google followed suit, axing 12,000 people. Earlier this year, Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, disbanded its Safety Advisory Council.

    “I think that Elon really opened the floodgates,” says one former Meta employee. “So then other tech brands were like, ‘We can do that too, because we won’t be the black sheep for it.’”

    Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss tells WIRED that the company has “40,000 people globally working on safety and security—more than during the 2020 cycle, when we had a global team of 35,000 people working in this area,” though he did not address how many of those people are staff versus outsourced workers.

    Musk’s sudden firings made it so that “anybody else could come along and nicely fire their teams and give them severance and it was nicer. Better,” says a former Twitter employee who was fired by Musk.

    After Musk fired the trust and safety staff, experts warned that this cut, coupled with Musk’s “free speech absolutism,” would allow toxic content to flood the platform and ultimately cause an exodus of users and advertisers, leading to Twitter’s eventual demise. Hate speech and misinformation did increase and advertisers did pull their dollars. Last year, X fired members of what remained of its elections team. Around the same time, Musk posted on X, saying, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

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  • AI Will Understand Humans Better Than Humans Do

    AI Will Understand Humans Better Than Humans Do

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    Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited by the consequences of computer systems. His best-known projects involved analyzing the ways in which Facebook (now Meta) gained a shockingly deep understanding of its users from all the times they clicked “like” on the platform. Now he’s shifted to the study of surprising things that AI can do. He’s conducted experiments, for example, that indicate that computers could predict a person’s sexuality by analyzing a digital photo of their face.

    I’ve gotten to know Kosinski through my writing about Meta, and I reconnected with him to discuss his latest paper, published this week in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His conclusion is startling. Large language models like OpenAI’s, he claims, have crossed a border and are using techniques analogous to actual thought, once considered solely the realm of flesh-and-blood people (or at least mammals). Specifically, he tested OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to see if they had mastered what is known as “theory of mind.” This is the ability of humans, developed in the childhood years, to understand the thought processes of other humans. It’s an important skill. If a computer system can’t correctly interpret what people think, its world understanding will be impoverished and it will get lots of things wrong. If models do have theory of mind, they are one step closer to matching and exceeding human capabilities. Kosinski put LLMs to the test and now says his experiments show that in GPT-4 in particular, a theory of mind-like ability “may have emerged as an unintended by-product of LLMs’ improving language skills … They signify the advent of more powerful and socially skilled AI.”

    Kosinski sees his work in AI as a natural outgrowth of his earlier dive into Facebook Likes. “I was not really studying social networks, I was studying humans,” he says. When OpenAI and Google started building their latest generative AI models, he says, they thought they were training them to primarily handle language. “But they actually trained a human mind model, because you cannot predict what word I’m going to say next without modeling my mind.”

    Kosinski is careful not to claim that LLMs have utterly mastered theory of mind—yet. In his experiments he presented a few classic problems to the chatbots, some of which they handled very well. But even the most sophisticated model, GPT-4, failed a quarter of the time. The successes, he writes, put GPT-4 on a level with 6-year-old children. Not bad, given the early state of the field. “Observing AI’s rapid progress, many wonder whether and when AI could achieve ToM or consciousness,” he writes. Putting aside that radioactive c-word, that’s a lot to chew on.

    “If theory of mind emerged spontaneously in those models, it also suggests that other abilities can emerge next,” he tells me. “They can be better at educating, influencing, and manipulating us thanks to those abilities.” He’s concerned that we’re not really prepared for LLMs that understand the way humans think. Especially if they get to the point where they understand humans better than humans do.

    “We humans do not simulate personality—we have personality,” he says. “So I’m kind of stuck with my personality. These things model personality. There’s an advantage in that they can have any personality they want at any point of time.” When I mention to Kosinski that it sounds like he’s describing a sociopath, he lights up. “I use that in my talks!” he says. “A sociopath can put on a mask—they’re not really sad, but they can play a sad person.” This chameleon-like power could make AI a superior scammer. With zero remorse.

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  • Unpacking Mark Zuckerberg’s Midlife Crisis

    Unpacking Mark Zuckerberg’s Midlife Crisis

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    Is Mark Zuckerberg’s style transformation just a matter of a change in personal taste? Or is the infamous tech mogul trying to tell us something about Meta?

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