Think online harassment is bad now? Wait till everyone’s wearing AI glasses | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Meta Ray-Bans enable secret recordings, raising privacy and consent concerns.
- Creators are already harassing women women in hopes of going viral.
- Meta upheld a video post, despite subject’s objections and public outcry online.
A man approaches a young woman shopping at Target in Dallas, compliments her appearance and asks her out. The woman politely declines, citing her recent breakup. The man persists in asking for her number, but not (apparently) reaching the point of criminal harassment.
Depending on the woman’s frame of mind, this interaction could be annoying or endearing. Your gender, age and tolerance of persistent (or pushy) men will determine whether you watch the exchange with rose-colored lenses.
Jose Mercado Reyes’ glasses, however, weren’t tinted; they were augmented with a hidden camera that secretly recorded the entire conversation. Using his Meta Ray-Bans, the North Texas-based creator hit on the woman and uploaded the video to his Instagram, @joemarket_dtx, which just crossed 100,000 followers.
“I thought it was a genuine interaction,” the woman says through tears in a series of viral posts on her X (Twitter) account, as well as in comments on Reyes’ posts. “I was just trying to be nice. I was trying to be honest. I never wanted my breakup to be public like that. And I didn’t want anyone to know.”
She contends that months after the video it was recorded, somebody alerted her. The video was edited to include the parts where Reyes followed her around the store, she says, making Reyes appear more respectable and courteous than he was.
“There should be laws against it,” she says. “That should not be OK, and there should not be people who have followings for doing this to women.”
The woman knows what it’s like to have a following. Online, she goes by her streamer name, Herculyse (pronounced like the Greek god), and hosts Rocket League gaming events. Her line of work depends on attention, which is what Reyes accused her of seeking.
“It was three months later. So I feel like she was doing it for the camera. She was doing this for reviews,” Reyes said in a phone interview. The content creator denied that he followed Herculyse around and claimed she cried “fake tears” to shame him out of his content.
“I see when people’s actions and emotions are genuine, compared to when they’re being acted,” Reyes said when I asked if he had evidence that she was just pretending to be upset about her privacy. “I feel like I spend enough time interacting with people to where I can tell when their actions, emotions, [and] their words are scripted.” (Herculyse did not respond to my requests for comment.)
If Reyes is right, then it takes one to know one. Scroll through his Instagram and YouTube channel, and you’ll see he runs something of a pick-up line prank show across North Texas. Whether at Planet Fitness (where Reyes says he was banned for secretly filming), Home Depot or Target, he hits on women and records the interactions — at least sometimes aided by the latest technology, such as the glasses.
Would you believe me if I told you that Reyes says none of the women he’s hit on while filming have dated him? “For me, it’s content. It’s not about actually going on a date,” Reyes admitted, but claimed that some interested women have found him through his content.
Speaking of: Reyes also called the streamer out for complaining about him making her breakup public. “She said, ‘Oh, I didn’t want any of my relationship or breakup to be public like this.’ But she was talking to me, a stranger.”
“I understand she didn’t know that she was being filmed. She didn’t know that it would be posted online for everybody to see,” said Reyes, who denied that recording her was unfair or amounted to harassment. “But at the end of the day, she did share that information.”
Mark Zuckerberg says his device, which some customers are evidently using to surveil women on grocery runs to grow their social media feeds, is necessary. During an earnings call, the Meta chief said, “I think in the future, if you don’t have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I think you’d probably be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people.”
Are AI tools useful? As readers of my semi-frequent tech writing might surmise, I feel skeptical but ambivalent. One friend of mine who works on the intersection of AI and healthcare told me that AI models are capable of interpreting MRI scans better than an individual doctor because much of the inherent bias, even of an expert opinion, is removed by probabilistic models. This sounds great: I want doctors to have an aid to finding out exactly what’s wrong with my body.
However, for large-language model systems trained on massive amounts of data, it’s crucial that we determine the data and whether individuals have given consent to provide this information. This seems, to me, to be the problem with giving everyone with a few hundred bucks to spare an incentive to capture data for a company that has paid billions in lawsuits over privacy violations.
Herculyse tried to appeal to Meta. She shared a message in which the company said Reyes’ video “does not go against our Community Standards.” Meanwhile, Reyes says he’s being targeted by Herculyse’s fanbase after she publicly pleaded with people to tell the creator to take down her video. (One text Reyes showed me included a death threat.) Reyes briefly removed the video but said he made it public again and defended his choice on YouTube.
“Since you want to harass me, this time, I’m pulling out the facts,” Reyes said in another video intended to clear his name. Using his newly released footage, Reyes shows himself moving on to spit game to another woman as proof he didn’t harass Herculyse.
I hope you don’t need Zuck’s glasses to see what’s wrong with this picture.
This story was originally published August 4, 2025 at 11:06 AM with the headline "Think online harassment is bad now? Wait till everyone’s wearing AI glasses | Opinion."
