Meta’s platforms are in a sorry state as grotesque AI slop continues to proliferate widely.
As a recent Futurism investigation found, many Facebook accounts have been flooding the platform with horrid videos depicting violent child abuse, and Meta appears to be woefully unprepared — and downright unwilling, judging by its ambiguously-phrased policies — to do anything meaningful about it.
At the same time, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is finding plenty of new ways to creep out its user base. As part of the CEO’s lagging efforts to turn Meta into a viable competitor in the ongoing AI race, Meta launched a new AI assistant called Muse this week, and it’s already turning out to be deeply unsettling.
According to Meta’s marketing, the assistant is designed to “take the busywork off your plate,” such as booking tickets, making appointments, or filling out forms.
To actually reap any benefits, however, users have to hand over a staggering amount of trust — which, considering Meta’s catastrophic track record when it comes to protecting its users’ privacy, could easily turn out to be an absolutely terrible idea. While Meta claims the service runs on a secure “dedicated virtual machine” and that it will store login credentials in a place that cannot be accessed by the AI agent, the company has a lot of work to do to gain its users’ trust.
Perfectly illustrating the problem, as The Verge‘s Emma Roth found in her testing, Muse uncovered an “unnerving amount of information it autonomously gleaned about me.”
As part of her investigation, Roth linked both her Gmail and Amazon accounts to Muse and was immediately put off by how much personal info Muse pieced together right off the bat. It figured out the state where she was visiting her family, for instance, admitting it “pulled” data from the “shipping address on my Amazon order.”
It also listed off her “very specific interests” at a level of specificity that goes far beyond the “ad topics” section in the Instagram settings menu, which shows why certain advertisers target your account.
The experience left Roth “with an uneasy feeling about letting Muse sort through personal emails and handle my credit card.”
Meta’s creepy new AI chatbot perfectly illustrates how tech companies are continuing to push the boundaries of how much personal information we’re willing to give up just so we don’t have to complete mundane tasks — an extremely lopsided value proposition.
These same companies have repeatedly proven that they cannot be trusted with our private data. AI chatbots, which are turning out to be a surveillance-led cybersecurity nightmare in their own right, don’t instill much more confidence, either.