A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

Welcome back to What’s Next in Tech with MIT Technology Review. In this edition, uncover how private images taken by robot vacuums ended up on social media, despite the companies that make them saying your data is safe. Then, get a sneak peek at our list of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2023, and find out what it’s like to watch a dead artist perform in the metaverse… and whether it’s ethical.

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Robot vacuum companies say your images are safe, but a sprawling global supply chain for data from our devices creates risk.

In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including a particularly revealing shot of a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sitting on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.

The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum, the company which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label data used to train artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups. The images speak to the widespread, and growing, practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms. They also reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of. Read the story.

Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone?

It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with a new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps, or a corgi made of pizza. Now they just had to figure out what to do with it.

Nobody could have predicted just how big a splash this product was going to make. The rapid release of other generative models has inspired hundreds of newspaper headlines and magazine covers, filled social media with memes, kicked a hype machine into overdrive—and set off an intense backlash from creators.

The exciting truth is, we don’t really know what’s coming next. While creative industries will feel the impact first, this tech will give creative superpowers to everybody. In the longer term, it could be used to generate designs for almost anything. The problem is, these models still have no idea what they’re doing. Read the story.

This story is part of our upcoming 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023 series. Sign up for The Download and be among the first to see the full list in January.

What it was like to watch Biggie Smalls perform ‘live’ in the metaverse

For a moment last Friday night, Biggie Smalls was the only man on stage. A spotlight shone on him in his red velvet suit, and amid pre-recorded cheers, he rapped the lyrics to “Mo Money Mo Problems,” swiveling to the beat in his orange sneakers.

You wouldn’t be wrong to be confused. Smalls died in 1997, leaving an outsize musical and cultural legacy as one of the greatest rappers of all time. But he was in fine form on Meta’s Horizon Worlds: heaving between stanzas, pumping his fist rhythmically, and seeming very much alive.

But Smalls’s hyper-realistic avatar is not just an impressive technical feat. It is also a crucial test of two big questions we’ll soon face if metaverse platforms gain traction: whether people will pay to see an avatar of a dead artist perform, and whether that business is ethical. Read the story.

Get ahead with our most-discussed stories:

1. A stealth effort to bury wood for carbon removal has just raised millions — Kodama Systems has raised more than $6 million from Bill Gates’ climate fund and other investors, as it pursues new ways to reduce wildfire risks and lock away carbon in harvested trees.
2. We’re witnessing the brain death of Twitter — An analysis of Elon Musk’s tweets shows him at the center of conversations once kept on the fringes of Twitter.
3. Mind-altering substances are being overhyped as wonder drugs — Psychedelic drugs are being pursued as cure-alls for mental-health disorders… but the hype bubble could be about to burst.

Programming note: This is the last edition of What’s Next in Tech for 2022. We’ll be back in the new year on Tuesday, January 3.

Images: Erik Carter via DALL-E 2; Courtesy of Meta