Meta's Muse Is a Viral Hit—But Does It Come With Added Privacy Costs?

[Matt] Millions of people have downloaded Muse,

Meta's AI agent with a cute and cuddly looking mascot.

But researchers have already shown

that getting Muse to complete task for you

comes with added privacy costs.

An independent AI safety and security researcher

extracted Muse's operating instructions and safety prompts

by essentially asking the agent

to copy and share its own system files.

Part of these instructions,

which the researcher shared with Wired,

appears to be the ability to create a page

for every person in the user's life.

What this means is that Muse compiles data

on a user's family and friends, even the people they follow.

It can then make suggestions like giving pointers

on how to improve particular relationships.

The security researcher likened this

to Muse wanting to know the user like a friend,

which he said was honestly pretty creepy.

A Meta spokesperson told us

that for agents to actually be useful,

they need to have context about users

and those they interact with.

While it's not unusual for AI chatbots

to track social information in general,

it's interesting to see how Muse is set up,

especially given Meta's vast access to social network data.

As one AI ethics professor tells us,

are we giving AI systems much more information

about us than we're receiving from them?

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and me, Matt Burgess.