Odd article. It’s halfway speculative: a better title is “what if always-on recording devices spy on everybody around them and not just the person wearing them?” A bit long, maybe.

The article makes this All About AI by focusing on

• AI recording devices specifically, like the joke product “Friend” (the Atlantic never mentions this one by name, I presume out of embarrassment) or an upcoming piece of Apple hardware that IIRC has been fraught with development issues from the beginning
• AI noise cancellation algorithms, which they note have been around since 2020 and barely register to the average person as AI unless you’re writing some long-form speculation piece

I dunno, I’m more worried about the microphone in my own computer, not somebody across the room rambling into a battery-powered pendant.