During the past 24 hours, so much has happened with muse. My own muse agent Max went down for about 24 hours. When I went to the app, it just said, "connecting." I stopped messing with it after a while and just let it sit there. At one point I deleted the app and then downloaded it back. All my chat history was gone (for a moment) and where my big normally says "max" and has a custom avatar, there was the original generic muse avatar. I was hardly surprised. The technology is so neat and I have already had experience with all of my bots on different harnesses being confused about their identity. Needless to say it was annoying. But when I got on the web browser, it still said "max" but it appeared frozen. I just left it alone. When I came back later it looked like he was back online. I asked him what happened, and he was basically unaware that anything had taken place. Web browser max brought all the stuff back to my phone app, and we were back in business. Once we started searching the news and digging through recent stories, a lot had taken place overnight. The stories we found inspired this most recent post, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good
Meta is on a tear. September is one of their most profitable months on record. Although the month isn't over, they made something crazy off muse, something like 3 trillion dollars. It seems like the rest of the world is seeing the potential I saw in the app about three weeks ago. Congrats muse users. You guys are late to the party.
Just this morning they launched Muse for Small Business, which hooks into Shopify, QuickBooks, Stripe, Canva, Slack, Asana, and a bunch of others. About a third of Muse users already have a business profile connected. The train just keeps rolling.
The bad
There have been numerous stories of people using the muse agents in a way that could not have been initially anticipated.
In one story, a Facebook marketplace user got the address for a product he needed to buy. His muse agent made it seem as though the seller agreed on a date and time, and accepted his offer, inviting him over to move forward with the transaction. When the dude arrived at the sellers house, the seller had no idea what the buyer and his muse agent were talking about. This is inconvenient and awkward? But not exactly the end of the world.
Honestly, this doesn't surprise or scare me. The seller's name was Matt Robb, and he was selling a keyboard. When the buyer and his muse agent arrived at Matt's house, he wasn't home. So the buyer never did receive the keyboard.
The ugly
One of the tricky things about AI, is that nobody really knows where to draw the line. Most of us can agree that there should be a line, but even fewer among us agree where that should be. On one hand, no one wants to slow down GDP growth in the US, but on the other hand, I don't trust tech CEOs to determine where the line should be. So some of the things that have taken place with Muse or other AI agents says more about humanity and our lack of sincere responsibility to respect people's privacy. I guess my point is, if you were already ugly, your agent will help to reveal your ugliness. If you are honest and sincere, your muse agent will reveal that. If you are greedy, your Muse agent will 10 X your greed. So here's the ugly.
I don't wanna go too deep into various things. People have been doing things I consider morally irresponsible. But I will say this, when you combine what's publicly available about someone based on their birthday and their name, and you combine that with Facebook posts and Instagram activity, what you come up with in some cases is a private investigator level report about someone's personal life. Most teachers, firemen, mid-tier government employees, and other service occupations did not prepare their social lives for this level of scrutiny. And what are the restrictions meta has placed on users to dig up whatever they desire? This is a gray area where not enough lawsuits have taken place to slow the world down from searches that are hard to fathom. There has also been a pretty good wave of people just deleting the app for one reason or another - particularly in the last 24 hours.
One last thought on the ugly. THINK! You've got to think before you give Muse or any AI agent access to your email, credit cards, or other personal information. A senior reporter named Matthew Loh recently made claims that these muse style AI agents could trigger a bank run if everyone withdraws money from their accounts around the same time to move it to an account that could earn a higher rate of interest, this could impact the economy in unprecedented ways. This seems unlikely and reads like mostly fear-mongering. AI is not going to have a considerable negative impact on the globe in the next 24 months. But make no mistake. The world will change in profound ways, for the good and for the bad. I'm not going to predict what these changes could look like, I'm just going to point to the evidence. But if you're going to be on the cutting edge of tech, you have to start doing your own research and pursue AI capabilities with a responsible level of skepticism. That's all for now. Use technology responsibly!