Meta's Muse AI Knows Your Friends: Creepy or Helpful?

Meta's new AI assistant, Muse, is rapidly gaining popularity, with millions of downloads. Researchers have successfully extracted its internal operating instructions, offering a transparent view into its functionalities. A key feature highlighted is Muse's ability to create detailed profiles for every person in a user's life, including family, friends, and colleagues. This hourly process involves compiling and organizing data to understand relationships.

The AI's system prompts suggest it aims to know users intimately, akin to a friend, a capability described by one researcher as 'pretty creepy.' Muse is designed to use its 'memory' to collect relationship data, offering suggestions for improvement or even activity recommendations. The instructions emphasize using available evidence rather than inventing details, and can include personal history, recurring threads, and important dates.

Meta states Muse operates within dedicated virtual machines, ensuring data isolation and user control, with options to wipe memories or disconnect services. The AI is programmed to seek human confirmation for actions like sending emails or making purchases, and maintains an audit log of its activities. However, experts note that such assistants encourage users to proactively share more extensive personal data than ever before.