The more an AI assistant knows about you, the less you have to explain yourself and the more seamless the interaction. One of the ways Meta is pushing that idea with Muse by getting to know your inner circle.

Users raised privacy concerns when Meta launched its Muse app, given the company's reputation and track record across its other businesses. As a result, researchers have been extracting Muse's internal files to better understand how it works. Karan Joshi, an independent AI safety and security researcher, shared her findings with WIRED, which suggest that Muse knows a lot more about you and your loved ones than you might think.

Muse's instructions include a directive to create "a page for every person in the user’s life." The report explains that this involves an hourly process that compiles data on family, partners, friends, colleagues, collaborators, and people you follow. Other details include:

• Muse can use these suggestions to offer advice on how to improve relationships or where to take a friend that suits their interests.
• The pages can be filled out over time with sections including facts, such as where they live, what they do, birthdays; history, such as a backstory; and strengthening, or how a relationship can be improved.
• Other details include how people interact with each other.

"What it seemed like to me—from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they’re feeding into Muse—is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people," said Joshi to WIRED. "They’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy."

While this may seem like a deep encroachment on a user's personal life, it is important to note that Meta's Muse was designed to take these actions only when a user gives it access to the information. In a statement to The Deep View, Meta also highlights that each user has their own virtual machine, which stores user data and content and is inaccessible to other agents, and that users can modify memories or disconnect external services at any time.

"For any agent to be useful and actually help you achieve your goals, it needs to have context about you and those you interact with," Meta told The Deep View. "Muse gathers that based on public information and from what you’ve chosen to share, which is how it remembers the person who just sent you an invoice is in fact the plumber who you previously hired to complete some work in your bathroom or which flowers your spouse said they liked best."

The backdrop for this report are less than favorable incidents from users who are already finding that Muse is already breaching people's privacy, which I recap in this article from last week.

Our Deeper View

When I read this report, I understood why people would be alarmed to have their friends and relationships essentially mapped out for them in data. However, I wasn't surprised. These AI applications are essentially on a mission to collect as much information about you as possible to make your interactions as frictionless and useful as possible. That's why so many connectors exist to give AI assistants access to your email, Slack messages, bank accounts, and, in some cases, your hard drive. What concerns me more than the agent having access to these things is how little people know about it, through no fault of their own. Companies don't make it clear how much information users are opting in to share or what the AI assistant can do with it. If privacy is a concern and you don't want an AI system to know intimate details of your life, my best recommendation is to use these tools and get familiar with the technology without connecting any personal data. Wait until you feel completely comfortable with the idea that the company you're trusting may use that data in more elaborate ways than you originally imagined, such as mapping out your most personal connections.