Meta released its new Muse Spark AI model on Wednesday as part of a major overhaul of its AI efforts. It’s do-or-die time for Meta — the company cannot afford investing billions of dollars again into something that doesn’t pan out, like the metaverse. Well, maybe they literally can afford it, but it’d be pretty damaging, not to mention embarrassing.
Speaking of embarrassing: Imagine a bunch of your friends, family, and strangers you met once in college getting a notification that you use the Meta AI app. I have lived this humiliation, and I am here to warn you that it could happen to you, too.
Meta’s Muse Spark model might be new, but the Meta AI app is not. It came out last April, and at the time, I wrote an article about the app’s launch. As one does when reporting on an app, I downloaded the app. I used it.
At some point, Meta started sending people Instagram notifications about which of their friends were using the Meta AI app, presumably to encourage them to download it. It has been almost a year. I continue to get texts from my friends in which they alert me that Instagram told them I am on the Meta AI app. This is generally considered to be uncool behavior.
In its first month and a half in the App Store, only 6.5 million people had downloaded the app, market intelligence provider Appfigures told us at the time. That’s a lot of people, but not for a company that counts an estimated 42% of the entire world as daily users of at least one of its apps.
Perhaps that’s why in the early days of the Meta AI app, I stuck out on my friends’ Instagram notification feeds. (Yes, your friends will get a whole notification devoted to your use of the app, displayed as prominently as a new follower.)
Things are looking up for the Meta AI app, though. It is seeing a spike in downloads after releasing its revamped chatbot, now charting at No. 5 on the U.S. App Store, up from No. 57, per Appfigures. That’s also why I must warn you now about the horrors you may face if you use this app and Instagram tells your friends.
As much as I don’t want people to know I installed an app with an AI-generated “vibes” feed, this issue runs deeper. Meta’s apps are so interconnected that it’s hard to keep up with what data we’re sharing, where, and with whom. Why would I think that my Instagram mutuals would know I’m on the Meta AI app? (At least X didn’t tell people that I used Grok’s anime waifu — which was also for work.)
In order to access the Meta AI app, you have to log in with a Meta account — so, I joined using the same account I’ve had since I was a teenager, which connects to my Instagram and Facebook. Meta will continue to use whatever I do on Instagram, Facebook, and yes, now even the Meta AI app, to show me targeted ads. So, if I were to confide in Meta AI about an issue with my menstruation, Instagram might show me ads for period panties.
The Meta AI app never asked permission to notify people about my use of the app, nor has it asked if I want my AI chats to be used as advertising fodder. But it doesn’t have to, because I probably implicitly opted into it in some terms of service agreement that I never actually read. I mean, I also learned via Instagram that my brother was weirdly invested in Eurovision last year, since we can all see each other’s liked Reels. We all know too much about each other, and yet, Meta knows even more.
In a sense, I’m lucky that the only thing that people knew about my Meta AI usage was that I was on the app. Some users had unwittingly shared much more incriminating information about themselves: their AI chatlogs.
As a grizzled veteran of the Meta AI app, I can tell you that back in my day (over the summer), Meta experimented with a Discover feed on the app. Meta did not account for the fact that a lot of boomers use its app, and they are sometimes bad at using technology. Combine that with the fact that, since AI is not real, people will use chatbots to discuss things that they find too intimate or embarrassing to share with others. Then, you have a disaster on your hands.
Soon, people like a16z partner Justine Moore began to notice that the Meta AI discover feed was mostly filled with older users who didn’t realize that they were sharing their AI conversations with the world.
Sometimes, these shared conversations were benign: at the time, I encountered a man with a Southern accent who asked, “Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?” In other cases, we saw people share their personal home address, information about medical issues, and intimate concerns about their marriage.
To give Meta some credit, these users did have to manually press publish on these chats. But enough people seemed to accidentally share private information that, clearly, there was a design issue to address. (Meta has since removed this Discover feed.)
At least if using the Meta AI app turns out to be a hot new trend, I will get to rub it in my friends’ faces that I was there first. But I would not bet on that future. There is still that “Vibes” feed, after all.
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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.
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