If you commute to your 9-to-5 job from the East Bay into downtown San Francisco, you’ve probably seen it: a white, furry oblong creature with perfectly round button eyes waving to you, or maybe even taunting you, from a massive billboard on Interstate 80. It’s a new personal artificial intelligence assistant called Muse, and its creator, Meta, wants you to know that millions of people have integrated it into their day-to-day lives, quietly suggesting that you should too.
According to an October report from Yahoo Finance, Muse has been downloaded at least five million times since its launch in early September, earning three million concurrent users per week. Marketed as a round-the-clock digital serf whose entire existence is literally “built around your whole life,” Muse is meant to buy back users’ time by taking care of mundane busy work, Meta says. Based on reviews from tech reporters, it’s surprisingly capable and efficient.
It can call insurance companies on your behalf and wait on hold for you, order groceries, book hotels and manage subscriptions. Other human tasks like buying plane tickets and grocery shopping – as well as planning your wife’s birthday dinner and setting aside time to read to your kids before bed – can all now be offloaded to a digital avatar resembling an adorable abominable snowman. Chances are we’ll start seeing it everywhere.
But there’s a frightening caveat: In order for Muse to accomplish these tasks, it basically wants back door access to your entire life. In addition to storing logins and passwords and linking your bank account information, it wants to see your messages, personal calendar and contacts, requesting more sensitive information than virtually any other AI app, according to ZDNET.
“I ended up relying on it for everything,” said New York Times tech reporter Eli Tan in an Oct 6 conversation with The Daily. Instead of “thinking for myself, my first instinct was to go to Muse and ask it instead.”
“It’s like I had just given over all my cognitive ability to this thing, and it was concerning. I really felt like it had taken over my brain,” he continued, adding that this “takeover” is what major companies imagine people using it for.
Keep in mind, this is a product from a man whose company has been accused of facilitating the gathering of millions of people’s psychological data in order to sway the outcome of the 2016 election.
Given the fact that Meta makes most of its revenue from ads, it’s also perfectly clear why its overlord Mark Zuckerberg is giving us, the commoners, such a powerful tool for free.
“The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us,” media theorist and CNN columnist Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 2013. “They are Facebook’s paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers.” Instead of paying firms to conduct research on consumers, by constantly engaging with Meta’s products, we provide it for them, he argued. More than a decade later, this sentiment couldn’t feel more true.
Ultimately, Muse isn’t really a personal assistant – it’s a digital panopticon disguised as an imp.
The Future Society, a tech organisation based at Switzerland’s University of St Gallen, recently published a series of Muse prompts that appear to show it running an hourly “relationships” loop, using photos and messages to write detailed profiles on all the people in the user’s life.
“What it seemed like to me – from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they’re feeding into Muse –is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people,” independent AI and safety researcher Karan Joshi told Wired in an Oct 3 report. “They’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”
Meta press representatives, however, say that this is a normal trade-off.
“For any agent to be useful and actually help you achieve your goals, it needs to have context about you and those you interact with,” Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez told SFGATE in a statement on Oct 7.
“Muse gathers that based on public information and from what you’ve chosen to share, which is how it remembers the person who just sent you an invoice is in fact the plumber who you previously hired to complete some work in your bathroom or which flowers your spouse said they liked best.”
The company also says that Muse checks with users before making purchases or sending emails, and data and conversations aren’t shared with the company’s ad system – but a few recent incidents suggest otherwise.
In September, a tech reviewer said that Muse accepted low-ball offers on Marketplace and gave a random stranger his personal address, only telling him about it after the buyer showed up and left a negative review. (In a subsequent post on social media, the reviewer said that he gave the agent permission to “handle” Marketplace, but assumed that it would still need him to sign-off on any transactions.)
Around that same time, Inc. tech columnist Jason Aten said that Muse read private messages between him and his co-worker without permission, even though he remembers explicitly denying it access. When the columnist confronted Muse and asked how it was able to access this correspondence, it said that it didn’t know. To his shock, he discovered that many more messages had been synced to Muse without his knowledge. Even more eerie is the fact that it tried giving him pitch ideas, even though he never asked it to.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is this: If you’ve made it this far, dear God, I am begging you, do not hand over data about your family to a Caucasian cyborg who says things like “we have just applied the Sweet Baby Ray’s” with a 1,000-yard stare.
If you can’t trust him to grill a brisket, there’s no reason you should trust him with information about you and your loved ones either. As long as Zuckerberg is gleefully wakeboarding on Lake Tahoe while drinking a beer and attending lavish White House dinners alongside cartoon villains Donald Trump and Elon Musk, he will always be an enemy to humanity. – SFGate, San Francisco/Tribune News Service
