Meta’s Muse AI agent: a hilarious security disaster
Meta released Muse, its new AI agent as a service, earlier this month. You can download the app frontend free, at first! [Meta] What you get is an agent running on your own small virtual Linux PC at Meta. It’s like an OpenClaw agent, but Facebook sets it all up for you. Muse does everything! It’ll…
Meta released Muse, its new AI agent as a service, earlier this month. You can download the app frontend free, at first! [Meta] What you get is an agent running on your own small virtual Linux PC at Meta. It’s like an OpenClaw agent, but Facebook sets it all up for you. Muse does everything! It’ll go through your email! It’ll book appointments! It’ll even make phone calls for you, using AGI — A Guy Instead. Calls are made by humans in a call centre. [404, archive] The trouble with sending real-world tasks to a chatbot is that hallucinations are how a chatbot works. So an agent will routinely do completely wrong things. That’s tolerable when it’s OpenClaw because every user is a completely fried AI gambling addict. With Muse, ordinary people get to share this special joy: [Threads, archive] So muse handled my Facebook marketplace today. Just found out it told people my address and agreed a lowball price and then they showed up without it even telling me until late tonight that it messed up. That is, Muse will happily give out your home address to strangers without checking with you. No doubt Meta will put in a prompt about that. The Muse chatbot is also an insufferable sycophant. You’re absolutely right! But some people love Muse. Eli Tan at the New York Times was “blown away” by Muse. He was particularly impressed at how it helped him cancel forgotten subscriptions. [NYT, archive] You can dump a copy of your entire Muse virtual machine just by prompting it. Meta says this is intentional. [blog post; Mastodon] The estimable Jonny from Neuromatch has, of course, gone digging. Every task the New York Times guy was amazed by is hard-coded. The subscription thing is the first one in the Muse task list. [Mastodon] Muse has a “self-improvement” prompt that builds a dossier on all your friends and every Facebook group you’re in: [Mastodon; Mastodon] muse is instructed to read, “unmetered — gather deliberately from primary sources” when doing its hourly social graph surveillance. muse itself confirms this draws from any connected account, including gmail threads, messenger conversations, instagram profiles, facebook timelines. the skills confirm all these are near at hand. I’m sure Meta’s delighted to get all that data, complete with the social graphs. But Muse uses it mostly so it can build lists of your preferences when you go shopping! The highest human activity. [Mastodon] Muse has a hidden feature to forward requests to Anthropic instead of Meta’s Spark chatbot. This looks very like a way for Meta to train Spark on Claude’s responses. [Mastodon] Jonny says the Muse codebase is “100% claude authored by the way, unmistakable.” [Mastodon] Jonny talked Muse into using its Linux VM to run a BitTorrent client and as a Fediverse server. You can even use Muse as a Monero crypto miner, which is the standard use case when someone gives out free virtual machines. All on Meta’s bill. [Mastodon; Mastodon] Jonny explains where this ends up: [Mastodon] so here you are — provisioning a persistent, permissive computing environment, run by something with an infinitely large attack surface — for your customer base that consists of 99.9% of people who have never paid you a dime, so, pretty much for free. congratulations: the only form that this kind of product can take is a botnet factory. Meta has a gadget coming for Muse in December: the Muse Charm. You wear it around your neck as a surveillance device, so Meta can train its AI on your remaining friends. [Guardian] The one positive achievement of Muse is messing up venture capital funding for crappy little AI agent startups. Meta’s moat is that it can just blow unlimited money on its botnet as a service — and you can’t. Sorry, lads, it was always going to be just the big boys. [Pitchbook] Video — Podcast It’s pledge week at Pivot to AI! Please put in your $5 to keep us going! It really helps!Source: Pivot to AI — Published — Category: Business