🤖 Soon, Meta’s new AI Muse will own the gullible
Thomas Germain, on BBC.com: ‘Things may get ugly’: Meta’s new AI Muse is about to make the internet more annoying - excerpts:
Muse wants to help. It’s an AI agent, a tool that goes out into the world for unsupervised tasks. Using its own web browser, Muse can cancel your gym membership, haggle with customer service people, buy groceries, invite friends to parties, you name it. Soon it will make phone calls.
It’s the first free, full-featured agent from a big company. Millions downloaded Muse in its opening weeks, and OpenAI just announced its own new agent. More are coming. It’s the dawn of a new chapter for the web. What will it be like?
According to experts I interviewed, the internet is about to get more frustrating. These agents may cause a cascading chain of problems that shake the foundations of digital infrastructure. Chances are good that you’re about to live through an era of online chaos.
The internet was built for humans with limited time and patience. AIs don’t have those restraints. You’ll probably have to fight with robots over concert tickets and booking appointments. Small businesses could drown in machine-made pestering. AIs don’t look at ads, and websites that rely on them are already crumbling. You’ll be buried in endless loops of proving you’re human. And if you use these AI tools, some may betray you.
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“Imagine there are no rules of the road. And you release billions of cars – the AI agents – and you just let them drive through playgrounds, hitting kids. That’s where we are,” says Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US who studies AI agents. “It’s a pivotal moment.”
To access the road, Muse arguably asks for more trust and sensitive information than any product in the history of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire. When you open it, the cutesy avatar asks for a name. Then it asks for total control of your Gmail, calendar and entire computer if you’re on a Mac.
There, staring at the download button, I felt a moment of panic. People begged me to say no. “I wouldn’t use it,” says Patrick Wardle, co-founder of Objective-See, a US nonprofit security foundation that uncovered serious flaws in the Muse app. “Personally, I would tell you to uninstall it altogether.”
Despite the warning, I need to see what Muse users are up against. So I named my AI “Bob”, gave it the keys to my life, and stepped into the future.
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If Muse plans your holiday trip, Shroeder says there’s no way to know if it got you the best deal, or if it chose flights and hotels that benefit Meta’s business partners. If you ask for music recommendations, will they be based on your taste, or will you hear about artists who inked deals with the social media company?
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According to Raskar, regulators need a tailored approach to agents. “Think about the models like an engine. The agents are the cars, and that’s what we need to regulate,” Raskar says. “We need to establish the rules of the road: windshields, brakes, traffic lights and so on.”
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Raskar is optimistic. “Agents could unlock so much investment, innovation and value,” he says. We just need to make sure the rules and systems we develop don’t give any companies unfair advantages.
But the road will be bumpy. And people who use these agents will pay a toll: personal data, perhaps at higher risk than ever before.
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I’ve had the same Gmail address for 21 years. It’s my login for hundreds of accounts. It holds medical test results, contracts and legal documents, conversations with family and endless receipts and financial information.
My inbox even has love letters an ex-girlfriend sent, from an era when email (briefly) felt suitable for romance. (I got her permission before handing it to Muse.)
More than any other digital service, my email is a window into my brain. Now Meta has it. If that’s not enough, Muse also suggested I give it my bank accounts. No thanks. I didn’t let the AI run wild on my computer hard drive, either.
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But given Meta’s history of privacy problems, should you trust what it’s telling you now?
Not according to Wardle from the Objective-See Foundation in the US. Soon after Muse launched, he found a critical vulnerability. “This was literally 20 minutes of me poking at the app, and it just, like, fell over,” says Wardle. With a simple hack, he says an attacker could have hijacked Muse, all of its data, and even controlled other devices you connected like your phone or a smart lock.
Meta fixed it immediately, but Wardle says the oversight made it impossible for him to trust the company’s promises about privacy and safety.
“These bugs were trivial to discover,” says Wardle. “If they were willing to ship something that’s security was not well vetted, it doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy about their intentions.” A Meta spokesperson disputes this and says Muse was delayed for months for more privacy and security tests.