Meta released the new Muse Spark AI model on Wednesday as part of a major overhaul of its AI efforts. It’s time for the Meta — the company cannot afford investbringing billions of dollars back into something that doesn’t go out like the metaverse. Well, maybe they do literally he can afford it, but it would be quite damaging, not to mention annoying.
Speaking of embarrassing: Imagine a bunch of friends, family, and strangers you met once in college getting a notification that you’re using the Meta AI app. I have experienced this humiliation, and I am here to warn you that it can happen to you.
Meta’s Muse Spark model may be new, but the Meta AI implementation is not. It was released last April and at that time I wrote an article about the app’s launch. As one does when reporting on an app, I downloaded the app. i used it.
At one point, Meta started sending people notifications on Instagram about which of their friends were using the Meta AI app, presumably to encourage them to download it. It’s been almost a year. I keep getting messages from my friends notifying me that Instagram told them I’m on the Meta AI app. This is generally seen as awkward behavior.
In its first month and a half on the App Store, only 6.5 million people had downloaded the app, market intelligence provider Appfigures he told us then. That’s a lot of people, but not for a company that counts roughly 42% of the entire world as daily users of at least one of its apps.
Maybe that’s why in the early days of the Meta AI app, I was glued to my friends’ Instagram notification feeds. (Yes, your friends will get an entire notification dedicated to your use of the app, which will appear as prominently as a new follower.)
However, things are looking up for the Meta AI app. It’s seeing an uptick in downloads since the launch of its revamped chatbot, which is now No. 5 in the US App Store, up from No. 57, according to Appfigures. This is also why I have to warn you now about the horrors you may face if you use this app and Instagram tells your friends.
As much as I don’t want people to know I’ve installed an app with an AI-generated stream of “vibes”, this issue runs deeper. Meta’s applications are so interconnected that it’s hard to keep track of what data we’re sharing, where, and with whom. Why would I think my Instagram partners will know I’m on the Meta AI app? (At least X didn’t tell people I used Grok’s anime waifu — which was also for work.)
To access the Meta AI app, you need to sign in with a Meta account — so, I joined using the same account I’ve had since I was a teenager, which is linked to my Instagram and Facebook. Meta will continue to use everything I do on Instagram, Facebook, and yes, now even the Meta AI app, to show me targeted ads. So if I were to confide in Meta AI about a problem with my period, Instagram might show me period underwear ads.
The Meta AI app has never asked for permission to notify people about my use of the app, nor has it asked if I want my AI conversations to be used as advertising fodder. But you don’t have to, because I probably opted into it implicitly in some terms of service that I never read. I mean, I also found out via Instagram that my brother was weirdly invested in Eurovision last year, since we can all see each other’s sympathetic Reels. We all know too much about each other, and yet Meta knows even more.
In a way, I’m lucky that the only thing people knew about using Meta AI was that I was in the app. Some users had unwittingly shared much more incriminating information about themselves: their AI chat logs.
As a veteran of the Meta AI app, I can tell you that back in my day (summer), Meta experimented with a Discover stream in the app. Meta didn’t take into account the fact that many boomers use their app and are sometimes bad at using technology. Combine that with the fact that since AI isn’t real, people will use chatbots to discuss things they find too intimate or embarrassing to share with others. Then, you have a disaster on your hands.
Soon, people like partner a16z Justine Moore began to notice that the Meta AI discovery stream was mostly filled with older users who didn’t realize they were sharing their AI conversations with the world.
Sometimes, these shared conversations were benign: that time, I met a man with a southern accent who asked, “Hey Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?” In other caseswe saw people sharing their personal home address, information about medical issues and intense concerns about their marriage.
To give some credit to Meta, these users had to manually hit publish in these conversations. But enough people seemed to accidentally share personal information that, apparently, there was a design issue that needed to be addressed. (Meta has since removed this Discover feed.)
At least if using the Meta AI app turns out to be the new hot trend, I’ll be able to rub it in my friends’ faces that I was there first. But I wouldn’t bet on that future. Besides, there’s still the “Vibes” feed.
