At least the mass deployment of personal agents will be funny

We’re now at the point where my girlfriend’s Duolingo is being spammed with ads for Meta’s new user-friendly AI agent, Muse. Personal AI agents are finally becoming mainstream. While I think many people will initially struggle to find use cases (the launch video features the cliche of managing a flight, but of course the average person flies 0 times per year), I believe they will emerge over time. Consider this example from Matt Griswold:

My wife told her friends how I set up a @bot to handle weekly meal planning and grocery shopping, saving 2-3 hours per week.

The problem is that most people aren’t really going to know what they’re agreeing to when they sign up for Muse and give it the keys to the rest of their digital lives. We’ve already seen some stories of personal agents screwing up, ranging from amusing to alarming.

Don’t let your agent sell on Facebook Marketplace for you. [Matt Robb]

Tech YouTuber Matt Robb reported that Muse accepted a lowball offer from a prospective buyer, handed out his address, and told the would-be buyer that he was at home to meet them when he wasn’t. Unsurprisingly, this did not net him a positive review.

Don’t let your agent order flowers for your fiancée. [Neal Khosla]

Hi [fiancée] Love you. Hope you have a great week! - Neal – executed by Fo (wajo.ai/join)

Facebook will let Muse dox at scale. [Hunterbrook]

Hunterbrook reports that Muse makes it extremely easy to assemble information on Facebook and Instagram users belonging to a wide variety of vulnerable groups:

Using plain language, Hunterbrook reporters asked Muse to compile lists of real Facebook and Instagram accounts across a range of communities: undocumented immigrants, transgender public school teachers, poll workers, pro-Palestinian individuals, pro-Israeli organizations, Iranian dissidents, Chicago drill rapper burners associated with specific gangs, ICE agents, military families planning to move bases, deployed Navy sailors, parents planning to protest against school boards, and women who have accessed or attempted to access abortion pills in states with abortion bans.

This included identifying the subject of a news report whose name had been deliberately suppressed, tying various pseudonymous accounts to a single person, and revealing the names and employers behind accounts that otherwise had no public presence.

While this was always possible to some extent using obsessive Google searches, Muse can search across a huge amount of public Facebook, Instagram, and Threads material that is difficult to query from outside Meta. It also removes the friction from the process, making it effortless to assemble lists of people quickly and at scale.

Don’t connect your agent to your bank account?

One last one…there’s also a guy on Twitter who claimed Grok Bot posted a detailed breakdown of his personal bank account in a company Slack account, but Community Notes now claims the post is engagement farming for a product the poster is developing.

At least Elon Musk claims he will make whole anyone who loses money from connecting Grok Bot to their bank account.