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Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

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Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#161

Post by ryandrake »

RGS1811 wrote: post #126
matherial wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care". And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of anything that some trillion-d…

I get this, and I’ve said similar things about privacy and security in the past, but Meta in particular has a history of intentionally using customer data and behavior to the detriment of those customers. Creating experiences designed to ensnare, addict, and ultimately harm their users. This goes beyond paranoia about security or privacy. It’s handing your drug dealer the keys to your house.

For a lot of companies, you can usually assume incompetence when they end up doing something terrible, but Meta is the strongest "Anti Hanlon's Razor" example. You have to always assume malice with those guys.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#162

Post by ryandrake »

aftbit wrote: post #48
RGS1811 wrote: post #13

I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".

Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?

This comes up a lot here! Your comment reads like a lot of similar HN "Can't we just talk about the pure technology? Why do you all always have to bring up ethics/politics of it all??" As if these things are separable. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. As soon as it touches society, it necessarily gets dirtied up with messy things like law, ethics, corporate responsibility, capitalism, profit-seeking, public good. The technology is never separate from the environment around the technology.

It's impossible (or at least dishonest) to try to simply discuss the pure technical aspects of The Torment Nexus.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#163

Post by addandsubtract »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #80
lxgr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, so I'm not trusting Meta with much, and it's the only way I can reach quite a lot of people. A lot of people I know trust them begrudgingly (primarily with Instagram, because all of their friends are on it as well). People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.

> WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, - Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when - backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained - even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintex…

WhatsApp / Meta is also on both sides of the E2EE.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#164

Post by dabedee »

aftbit wrote: post #48
RGS1811 wrote: post #13

I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".

Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?

The technology is an agent you name. You give it a face. Maybe tune the personality. And, it only gets useful as you grant it more and more access to your accounts.

The technology is produced by a public company. And, in this case, the company is useful context for this story since it has just recently agreed to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit claiming it intentionally designed addictive platforms that harmed young people's mental health.

You cannot detach the technology from the company. It's definitely not a neutral artifact.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#165

Post by filoleg »

cactacea wrote: post #135
matherial wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care". And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of anything that some trillion-d…

> hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.

> Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.

The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.

My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).

It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.

And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).

The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#166

Post by cyanydeez »

Egrodo wrote: post #78
cyanydeez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone's questioning that claim legally: https://www.pcmag.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has...

I work there. The claims made in this article are just blatantly false, and so obviously so to any employee I'm not sure how this hasn't been thrown out.

I agree, it should be rediculously easy to demo it's real e2e capabilities. to everyones benefit

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#167

Post by runjake »

augment_me wrote: post #33
RGS1811 wrote: post #13

I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".

There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.

3.6 billion (de-duped) daily users!

https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#168

Post by ryandrake »

dools wrote: post #91

I love how the marketing departments of these things always imagine people are just constantly plagued by the hassle of organising their flights, restaurant bookings and movie tickets

If you want to know why Silicon Valley Execs think these are such huge pain points, think about what Silicon Valley Execs farm out to their armies of personal assistants. Some Senior Vice President guy probably has a lot of restaurant bookings and would forget them if they didn't have a PA to help organize them.

AI itself is a product that could only come from the mind of a corporate executive: It's a cheerful, helpful sycophant, who always does what it's told and stays in its lane, has infinite energy and memory, and allows the user to concentrate on his golf game instead of all those mundane other things. It's the perfect employee, from their perspective.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#169

Post by walthamstow »

wnevets wrote: post #86
augment_me wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.

> There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.

India is 1bn-something people and they're pretty much all on WhatsApp

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#170

Post by subpixel »

sudohalt wrote: post #115
darkwizard42 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person is not using a calendar and is not getting more than 1 relevant personal email per week. Most people use their personal email extremely sparingly and it is inundated with promotional / account-related materials which are already handled rather deftly by most mainstream email providers

lol no one is getting personal emails, maybe some people get one every few months, but most probably never (not taking into account other than order/shipping confirmations, login codes, etc)

I can only imagine you have no kids, serve on no boards, do not volunteer, and play no sports.
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