YouTuber Marques Brownlee has come under fire for his review of the Humane AI Pin which people have called “unethical.”
Brownlee, who also goes by MKBHD, is a hugely influential technology reviewer with over 18 million subscribers on YouTube and yesterday he posted his review for the much-hyped AI pin which he titled “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now.”
The 25-minute-long review is an in-depth look at the revolutionary device in which Brownlee says the pin is “bad at almost everything it does basically all the time.” The video’s title also came in for criticism.
“I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have 18 million subscribers,” writes Daniel Vassallo on X (formerly Twitter).
“Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project reeks of carelessness. First, do no harm.”
To which Brownlee replied: “We disagree on what my job is.”
Another X user, Stanley Ezinna, also questions whether Brownlee’s review was ethical.
“What’s the line between review and defamation,” he writes. “Marques Brownlee is massively influential, his reviews mean so much.”
Others drew comparisons with Brownlee’s review of the EV Fisker which he called “the worst car I’ve ever reviewed.”
Marques Brownlee singlehandedly destroying startups pic.twitter.com/MIaCkDbCc3
— Wordsmith (@OlePundit) April 16, 2024
If I had money, I would create start-ups to invent increasingly stupid tech products and send them to Marques Brownlee for review so I can bait him into titling a video “OK, this is seriously now the worst product I’ve reviewed, it can’t get worse” and I send him something worse
— derek guy (@dieworkwear) April 15, 2024
However, many on X defended Brownlee. “It’s a genuinely terrible product,” writes a user called Stuart. “Doesn’t matter if it’s early tech. He praised it for build quality but that doesn’t matter if it’s a bad product. In the end, we need honest reviews.”
Brownlee Was Not the Only Reviewer Who Gave the AI Pin a Bad Rating
The Verge describes the AI Pin as an “interesting idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken is so many unacceptable ways.”
The main complaints from reviewers are that the device simply doesn’t work. Robbed of a screen, the pin is mostly used via voice (it also has a laser projection system), and as anyone who has ever had a frustrating conversation with Siri or Alexa knows, they often don’t cooperate.
Writers bemoan that the Pin took too long to reply when asked to do something. The Pin has a camera with a Vision feature meaning the lens can analyze what is in front of it but the reviewers reported that most of the time the Pin didn’t respond or said the wrong answer.
Image credits: Header image by Marques Brownlee.
