Meta on Wednesday released a new Muse Spark AI model as part of a major overhaul of its AI efforts. The time has come for Meta to die. — The company can’t afford it. investSpending billions of dollars again on things that don’t work, like the Metaverse. Well, they literally could afford it, but it would be quite damaging, not to mention embarrassing.
It’s embarrassing, but imagine friends, family, and strangers you met once in college receive a notification that you’re using the Meta AI app. I’ve been through this humiliation and I’m here to warn you that the same thing can happen to you.
Meta’s Muse Spark model may be new, but the Meta AI app is not. It was released in April of last year, and at the time I wrote an article about the app’s release. Just like when I report on an app, I also downloaded the app. I used it.
At some point, Meta started sending you Instagram notifications about which of your friends were using the Meta AI app. This was probably to encourage downloads of the app. It’s been almost a year. I keep getting texts from friends alerting me that Instagram told them I was using the Meta AI app. This is generally considered uncool.
Market intelligence provider Appfigures told us at the time that just 6.5 million people downloaded the app in its first month and a half on the App Store. That’s a lot of people, but not for a company where an estimated 42% of the world uses at least one app every day.
Perhaps that’s why I stuck to my friends’ Instagram notification feeds in the early days of the Meta AI app. (Yes, your friends will receive full notifications about your app usage and will be prominently displayed as new followers.)
However, things are looking up for Meta AI apps. According to Appfigures, the number of downloads has skyrocketed since the release of the improved chatbot, moving from number 57 to number 5 in the US App Store. 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.
You don’t want people to know you’ve installed an app that includes an AI-generated “vibes” feed, but the problem goes deeper than that. Meta’s apps are interconnected, making it difficult to know what data you’re sharing, where, and with whom. Why do I think my mutual users on Instagram know that I use the Meta AI app? (At least X didn’t tell people I was using Grok’s Anime Wife, which was also for work.)
To access the Meta AI app, you must log in with your Meta account. So I joined using the same account I’ve had since I was a teenager, connected to Instagram and Facebook. Meta uses everything I do on Instagram and Facebook and even uses the Meta AI app to show you targeted ads. So if I open up to Meta AI about my menstrual issues, Instagram might show me an ad for period pants.
The Meta AI app has never asked for permission to notify people about my use of the app. I also didn’t ask if they wanted to use my AI chat as promotional material. But you don’t have to. Because you’re probably opting in implicitly in some part of your service contract that you haven’t actually read. I mean, last year I also found out through Instagram that my brother had invested in Eurovision, which was strange. Because you can see each other’s favorite reels. We all know too much about each other, but Meta knows even more.
In a way, I’m lucky that the only thing people knew about my use of Meta AI was that I was using an app. Some users unknowingly shared even more critical information about themselves: their AI chat logs.
As a grizzled veteran of Meta AI apps, I can tell you that in my time (during the summer) Meta was experimenting with the Discover feed on the app. Mehta didn’t take into account the fact that many baby boomers use the company’s apps, and they may not be comfortable using technology. Combine this with the fact that because AI is not real, people will use chatbots to discuss things that are too intimate and embarrassing to share with others. Then you are in for a disaster.
Soon, people like a16z partner Justine Moore began to notice that the Meta AI Discover feed was dominated by older users who didn’t realize they were sharing their AI conversations with the world.
Sometimes these shared conversations were innocuous. Back then, I ran into a guy with a southern accent and asked, “Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than others?” In other cases, people were seen sharing their home addresses, information about medical issues, and intimate concerns about their marriages.
To give Meta credit, these users had to manually press publish on these chats. However, it appears that many people accidentally shared personal information, and there were clearly design issues that needed to be addressed. (Meta has since removed this Discover feed.)
At the very least, if the use of Meta AI apps becomes a hot new trend, I’ll be rubbing it in my friends’ faces that I was there first. But I wouldn’t bet on that future. After all, that “vibes” feed is still there.
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