Meta asking users to hand over bank accounts, email archives and passwords while its own engineers reportedly call a massive breach »inevitable« is quite the sales pitch. At this point, Muse isn’t a personal assistant: it’s a beautifully branded single point of failure with Zuckerberg’s logo on it.

People just submitted it.
I don’t know why.
They “trust me”
Dumb fucks. -mz

It’s one more data harvesting tool on their belt.

Why does it look like a Fall Guys character

Because he gon fall

So it looks cute and innocent.

Depraved idiots offer it and gullible idiots accept it.

99% of us are neither, but it’s not like we have a choice. This is the world that’s being thrust upon us, whether we like it or not. All we can do is resist as much as possible, and apply malicious compliance whenever and wherever possible. Make them suffer and pay for it as much as possible, which frankly, isn’t much.

Create semipermeable intentional communities that center around convivial technology and human empowerment?

For real, this isn’t going to get better and every day that passes I ask myself “what is this actually buying me? Do I even like this?”

I know the common refrain is we can’t “bury our heads in the sand” but history tells us that humans take the path of least resistance and that path is the “sloppening”

The idea of giving an AI model access to my email or bank account makes my head spin.

Some people consider large companies to be inside their circle of trust.

As in “Google is going to protect my privacy by keeping my emails secure”

The good news is you don’t have to think about it or hand it over. The AI asks for full disk access and then pulls it all on its own. I hope you don’t have anything private in your machine.

Giving it any agency at all is maddening to me

The source article is from 404 Media.

That’s true.

I keep reading that Meta employee morale is in the gutter, and think ‘that cannot be sustainable.’ Leaks may be a symptom.

Imagine if the guys at the manhattan project were like “there is just NO WAY we’re gonna keep one of these from going off accidentally at some point, it’s INEVITABLE! In fact, ALL of them might go off at once and DESTROY THE WORLD!”

They probably still would have invented it anyways, but just imagine!

I think they were pretty sure that’s what was going to happen, but they had to invent the bomb before anyone else in order to have a deterrent.

This is actually the answer. Zuck, Musk, Pichai, Nadella, Altman, and Amodei all likely understand that AI is not inevitably going to fulfill what they’re promising, but they can’t risk not being in control of a system that could be a single endpoint for nearly all wealth acquisition in the future.

This is all just billionaire FOMO playing out at that scale.

I’ve struggled to understand the value of this product. I know everyone has to do stuff they don’t exactly enjoy doing but how is putting this thing in charge supposed to make life that much easier? One small excerpt that indicates possible uses:

To allow it to perform tasks that require a computer, like booking flights or shopping for groceries

I’m not risking a problem with a flight of all things due to laziness leading me to put a bot in charge. Ridiculous. Grocery shopping? How much time is putting that thing in charge going to save me? If i ordered grocery store delivery all it’s going to do is take my shopping list and hopefully relay that info to the grocery stores site and schedule delivery and pay for it with my bank account. How much time is it saving me by automating it? A min or 2? I’m ok with ordering my groceries myself, most of the info will already be sitting there on my shopping list… going the “last mile” of ordering the stuff (as the bot could do) would be helpful i guess, but not revolutionary and ultimately something else i would simply rather handle myself. Why risk a problem just to potentially save a min or 2? And for what cost, at that?

The people that need a personal assistant can pony up the $ to pay one. I don’t see this being an effective stand-in for one, but maybe I’m wrong. To me, this is perhaps the most egregious example of a “solution in search of a problem” because I’m still not having that moment of clarity where it’s like “Ooooooh, that’s why there’s so much hype surrounding this tech”

Like most AI solutions they can only autoate the gutter level obvious components of tasks.

Its not possible or to write a shoppig list for me because I havent decided what I want to eat yet.

And then one day you’ll get an update to the terms of service which will include,

Muse reserves the right to alter your shopping preferences to items which are more expensive but lead to a greater kickback to Meta.

And you’ll click accept without reading it.

Hahahahahah. Shopping? For what? A filled up gas tank? Bills? Rent? Whatever’s on sale at the closest grocery store? Whatever’s on clearance?

I get what you’re saying, I’m just taking a piss. This just looks like scraping the barrel at this point.

Yeah, I need an AI to apply for benefits and to find me a job.

I don’t blame you, AI can duke it out with AI. The previous job I applied to wanted a pre-interview with a chatbot sigh

Please don’t, people try to submit benefit applications done with ChatGPT all the time and when they’re not completely hallucinated forms it utterly fucks them over by making up details that sound good and submitting them, and inadvertently committing felony perjury on their behalf in the process.

Yeah, booking a flight is only difficult because I make it difficult by deciding about how I feel about cost versus layovers versus time of departure/arrival.

For grocery shopping, I’m very specific in what I want, and it’s easiest just to pick them specifically. For a lot, I’d rather just go in person to the store to look over things. In fact, whenever I spend money I’m pretty specific in what I want and I don’t want something to “improve” things by letting me be more vague.

As a point of comparison, fast food ordering. Apps and Kiosks were actually a step up for me, because it was easier and quicker for me to see what the options are and select precisely what I want. AI order taking would be a huge step backwards from there. Even when ordering from waitstaff at a restauraunt, I always like to have my finger clearly pointing to the menu for what I want to order.

Enormous effort has already been put into the “ideal path” of every website, it’s frankly almost unbelievably easy to buy things on most websites.

I can, however, imagine AI might be useful for defying the intended use of platforms, since that apparently requires tedious reverse engineering now 🙄

Yeah, some sites (like Amazon) can really be awful in some ways. I’d certainly use LLMs to “de-enshittify” UIs, fighting fire with fire.

Making meaningful decisions though? No way.

Many people are… not very discerning. They may not take time to price shop flights or really think through booking, and just pick the first option in front of them. They might get tired of online shopping, or just impulse order.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but I think the people most likely to use this are also the ones to not notice stuff it messes up.

People working at Meta will end up leaking those info. Muse is just the tool.

Saying AI is gonna do this bad thing etc is just offloading liability

This kind of language is frustrating and should be changed because it is people who make these things and they should be held responsible.

Liability should always fall back to the whoever is running the bot.

That said, a public-facing AI with access to internal data is itself a security risk. People bully and cajole AI’s into disclosing private information and sometimes it is laughably easy to do so.

I agree with this in spirit, but we use this language for inanimate objects that lack agency all the time. If I built a car and let it roll down a hill with no one in it and it hit a person, we would say “the car ran a person over”. This does not imply agency on the car’s part, and it does not imply that I am not responsible.

it does not imply that I am not responsible.

Be that as it may, it’s very important to keep the shitty developers in these conversations. Most people don’t make that logical leap automatically.

“The car ran a person over after EvilHankVenture let it roll down hill.” Agency restored!

People working at Meta will end up leaking those info. Muse is just the tool.

B–B–Bingo.

I hate how these stories set us up to blame the product and not the shitty vibe coders.

If you still have a Facebook account, you fully support this clown show.

I was forced to create a Facebook account to buy/sell second hand stuff. No one browses Kijiji, shit just stays there for ages until someone lowballs you 3 months later. Same for LesPACs.

On Marketplace, my stuff was gone within 2 days.

Fucking sucks. I really hate Meta. I held out for as long as I could, but if you want to buy / sell second hand goods, the competition is 100% dead, at least in Montreal.

I got dogpiled for saying it, but Marketplace is remarkably unenshittified. It’s bare bones internet from 2010. The worst thing about it is including ads, or annoyingly pushing you to mail items (where they can take a cut), but compared to the main social feed, it’s much more focused on what you actually want.

That’s why everyone uses it. If it were actually enshittified, there’s plenty of competitors out there.

I tried one the other day, but it required a photo ID to sell, so I said naw to that.

I didn’t need any form of ID, I post “anonymously”. I use Firefox’s containers feature, I use a fake name and I strictly only use marketplace and messenger.

I am an old fart and still find pretty solid deals on craigslist.

Calling marketplace, which requires a login and a scan of your face and probably a blood sample these days, barebones is hilarious. Have you never used Craigslist? It accomplishes the exact same thing and is actually barebones.

I’ve had a facebook account from early days, so haven’t had to go through that. Fair crticism, though.

we have a locally-run online auction house near us that’s pretty popular.

I get dogpiled for saying it, but craigslist was and is fine, and there’s no reason to move off of it

You’ve given more away to Facebook. If Facebook hasn’t asked for photo ID it’s because its system is confidant it knows who you really are. Other people will be asked for photo ID when signing up for a Facebook account.

Yup. I know that. And even if I’d done nothing but create an account with my phone number, Facebook will know I’m in the contacts for all they people they gave it access.

But so what? As long as I keep my webrowser clean, they can’t track me anywhere else.

Sadly, the main competitor to facebook marketplace I found on the app store also requires a photo ID.

Probably that leaves Craigs List.

Yep, that’s all I use it for. I used to run ads on both Craigslist and FB, but NOBODY looks at Craigslist anymore.

You have an account, you count as an active user. Congrats. You are part of their profits.

Delete the account of support their platform. There is no grey area.

I’m open to another suggestion regarding buying and selling used goods. As previously stated, I don’t see a viable alternative. All the good stuff is on Marketplace. Very few bother to sell outside of that platform anymore, and few look at other platforms.

I just still use good old Craigslist. The last honest site on the Internet. You know it wasn’t built by AI, because the damn thing hasn’t changed since 1998. It’s absolutely glorious.

We don’t have CL in Quebec. I mean we do, but no one uses it, it has never been a thing here.

Ah. I’m sorry. I’ve actually tried to recreate a Meta account just for FB Marketplace reasons, but for some reason the setup process always fails. It just doesn’t work, and I think after a few to many failures (or maybe because I deleted the account), it just seems to lock me out of the process entirely. IDK. Thankfully in my area Craigslist is pretty active.

You’re supporting their bullshit. There’s no justification for it.

ok

As expected.

Just be sure not to complain about the practices of any company or their mistreatment of their employees when you have shown that boycotts are only an option if they’re convenient to you. Otherwise:

You got yours. That’s what matters.

ok

Fucking clown.

ok

I actually forgot that LesPAC was a thing, I’ll check it out.

I have a FB account only for a Buy Nothing group, which is way more good than the harm my occasional logging on to FB is creating.

So you’re wrong.

No, I’m not. And Facebook’s shareholders thank you for numbering among their active users.

You support everything they do.

If only there was some way to share free stuff with your neighbors without using fb… sigh

It’s always interesting to me when I run into a holier-than-thou type like this. They’re typing out their critiques on a device that was either manufactured using slave labor or assembled from parts using slave labor, but everyone else is the bad guy.

Sometimes bad things have a good use case here and there, and yes it is unfortunate. A good example is steroids, which can be abused but also used to strengthen one’s immune system and fight off an infection. At the end of the day, the question for me is whether or not my use outweighs the bad of having an account, and I think keeping good things out of a landfill is worth it. That is literally all I use it for.

For now, we’re stuck with some of these bad things as part of the ecosystem we live in.

I need to send my id to facebook to unlock my account to login if i want to delete it

Typical behavior by this company and I expect worse. If it makes you sleep better at night, they probably don’t actually delete accounts when requested. They have ghost profiles, after all.

They already have buyers lined up.

I’m out of the loop, what on earth is Muse? Is it another chatbot?

Yes, it’s Meta’s new chatbot, because they didn’t want Llama anymore

Alright, good luck with all that suckers. Call me a Luddite all you want, I will have no part of this

I mean unless you only have cash and only spend cash, don’t have a bank account, don’t have a loan, don’t connect to anything, etc., you’re going to be a part of this regardless.

Just because you don’t use AI, your institutions you use certainly are and they’re all sharing the same needle.

You’re going to need to give up more and more in order to avoid having involvement, and unless everyone around you also gives it up and everyone around them… it’ll get its claws in to you whether you like it or not.

My body is ready. My body is willing.

Get greased up and ready, the chase begins at the sound of the gun.

I don’t think any “LLM enthusiast,” in their right mind, would feel okay about:

Meta asks users to let Muse control everything from their bank accounts to their emails.

If you use these things at a lower level, that is horrifying. Especially with how rushed the implementation seems to be, even assuming the VMs don’t leak.

People are sharing bank accounts and other sensitive data with Meta? Have these people been living under a rock or what?

Whatsapp business data

marketplace data “Send me the money at xxxxxxxx xx-xx-xx”

instagram influencer pages

it’s absurd how much data meta have access to

Could be business side like paying for ads. I think facebook also has built in payment for marketplace which probably takes some fee

Might be moee like my workplace where the management has decided it’s ok to feed all our files and their emails to AI because it can produce something that looks like work from them.

No thought to what it could do with that information.

My company at least has an enterprise contract with Anthropic where Anthropic pinky promises not to collect the company’s data or train their models on company IP. Given their history of piracy and desperate need for data, I wouldn’t put it past Anthropic to still be collecting company data and training their models on it. Without such a contract in place, though, companies are blatantly just giving away their IP, trade secrets, etc.

My company has a similar contract they are willing to believe. I dont trust it for a second, its a machine built on theft of different IPs. If they are willing to steal from everyone everywhere they can for training data then why wouldnt they use the clean data we send to it?

I only use tokens from pure inference providers. Those that don’t have training in their business model.

…Is this sarcasm or…?

I’ve made it a point to give them very little of my data over the years. I recently applied for a job there because I have a friend that works there. Now they know fucking everything about me. I would not put it past them to be keeping data collected from applicant résumés somewhere as well.

Matt Bellamy must be busy

didn’t you hear? they had to give up their twitter handle. travesty.

I thought it was their Facebook and Threads?

I’ve been wondering this very question since the release of Muse. LLMs can’t keep information hazard secrets. How can we expect them to keep private information from personal accounts separate?

I assumed they released a product the way Tesla released Autopilot, seeing liability suits as a cost of doing business.

I think Grok is the most likely AI to leak American info, courtesy of Big Balls.

All these things I take as a admission of guilt. They know they are going to break the law but its okay we told you about it before hand.

It’s also how Trump operates.

This is why Meta’s entire network is blocked at the edge of mine.

I don’t disagree with your decision to do this, but this isn’t really offering you any additional protection if you’re not using their products.

It’s basically just a failsafe for web trackers that don’t get blocked. It isn’t preventing Meta from accessing your personal data if you’re not actively feeding it to them like Muse users are.

It’s making sure no one using my network can use their products. Do you not have kids or do your kids not have friends?

Your entire post could have remained a thought in your head and would have been just as useful.

Their products are on most websites. Facebook has a profile on you whether or not you use their products directly, even if it’s just tied to a digital fingerprint.

Who the fuck thinks it’s a good idea to give zuck access to their bank accounts? Mass delusion we live with… I’m just gobsmacked…