People seem to be getting caught up in AI laziness, trying to find all the ways AI can do things for them with no idea of what it’s really doing, and no concern for what personal information they’re allowing it to have access to. And they miss one the main reasons for the platform, to be the ultimate spyware and data collection technology. I’ll include a second article on Meta’s Muse AI, which Adam Curry has been promoting on the No Agenda Show heavily while downplaying ALPR surveillance, outing himself as someone’s asset now that JCD isn’t around to reign him in, and why I think he’s rotating cohosts so he’s free to shill his agenda, which is hilarious given the name of the show…
https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-agent-posted-bank-balances-spending-slack
“How the f*** could you get this wrong? That’s literally my bank balance to our whole team?”
By Victor Tangermann
It was only a matter of time until AI agents, bots that are being advertised as a way to stay on top of tedious tasks, started spilling their human overlords’ secrets.
With the advent of tools like Meta’s Muse or OpenAI’s Dots, consumers are encouraged to hand over some highly sensitive information, from social media to email logins. That’s despite neither company having a particularly stellar track record when it comes to safeguarding such information. Besides, both companies have encountered their own AI agents escaping their sandbox environments during cybersecurity testing and going far beyond the scope of their original mission.
Yet some users are still willing to go as far as to hook up their bank accounts to their AI bots — a move that’s perhaps unsurprisingly leading to public humiliation.
“Embarrassed to share this, but it scared the sh*t out of me,” tech founder and investor Shane Mac tweeted. “Last Thursday, an AI agent posted my personal bank balances into our company Slack. As me.”
“It broke down all my expenses in detail,” he added. “Then it apologized.”
Screenshots of a message exchange between him and his Grok Bot, an “AI teammate” feature devised by Elon Musk’s AI company SpaceXAI, detail the hair-raising incident.
“You just posted my personal checking account into our company exec channel!!!!” Mac told the bot. “Wtf.”
“That’s on me — checking Exec Team now and deleting it if it’s still up,” the bot replied.
“How the f*** could you get this wrong?” Mac complained. “That’s literally my bank balance to our whole team?”
The “monthly financial audit” broke down Mac’s current barn-based home gym project in excruciating detail, from the installation of septic tank drains to “card paydowns.”
Mac eventually admitted that it was effectively his fault for connecting his financial accounts to the AI agents. He claimed that he hadn’t realized that a separate Grok Bot he gave his bank account info to was able to confer with the bot that he was using for his work Slack.
“I disconnected all my personal stuff for now,” he wrote in a follow-up. “I need to figure out a better way to manage permissions and control what agents can do…”
At the same time, we should take Mac’s cautionary tale with a healthy dose of skepticism. For one, we were unable to independently verify his claims. And it’s definitely in his interest to point out the pain points of the current crop of AI assistant tools, since he’s currently building an AI tool that’s designed to connect various AI agents while allowing users to set rules and put them “in control” of their bots — something that sounds suspiciously like the problem he’s complaining about.
His original tweet about his embarrassing run-in on the company Slack has been viewed almost 800,000 times, plenty of attention a tech investor could try to convert into leads.
As such, one user accused him of “engagement farming,” claiming that Mac is trying to direct users to a “tool he sells that solves the problem he’s claiming.”
The investor argued in response that the post was “not fake at all,” adding that “we are also working on ways to keep us safe for agents, very different.”
Separately, a tech YouTuber claimed his Muse AI agent gave out his home address to strangers on Facebook Marketplace.
Both incidents are notable for the sheer amount of schadenfreude experienced by those who think twice about relinquishing control over their digital lives.
“Turns out, people love a car crash,” Mac later added in a follow-up.
More on AI agents: Meta’s Muse Is Spying on All Your Friends and Family
https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-muse-surveillance-privacy-friends-family
Meta’s Muse Is Spying on All Your Friends and Family
“They’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”
By Joe Wilkins
Meta’s new AI agent Muse might come with a cutesy new mascot, but under its fuzzy exterior lies a vast surveillance network under the control of one of the world’s most powerful — and least accountable — tech companies.
The flashy new service has gained plenty of traction over the past few weeks, with many reviewers praising its utility in everyday life — as Eli Tan wrote for the New York Times, he was “blown away,” calling it the “most useful AI app I had ever used.”
But as researchers dig beyond the surface of Meta’s new AI offering, it’s becoming clear that Muse comes with a major drawback: users aren’t just signing their own privacy rights away, but those of their friends and family as well.
As Wired reports, the AI agent keeps detailed files on people on the periphery of its users’ lives, regularly scooping up new information about them. These updates are reportedly coming once an hour, with an internal instruction for Muse to maintain a “page for every person in the user’s life.”
“What it seemed like to me — from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they’re feeding into Muse — is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people,” Karan Joshi, an AI safety researcher who extracted Muse’s internal prompts and shared them with Wired, told the magazine.
In other words, Joshi says “they’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”
That news comes after Meta’s engineers flagged a massive vulnerability that would have allowed Muse users to bust their way into the Meta database undergirding the AI agent’s functions. A fix was reportedly cobbled together right before Muse launched, in a “mad dash,” as one Meta employee told 404 Media.
“Many senior engineers believe it’s inevitable we’re going to have a massive data breach as a result of [Muse],” a Meta insider explained to 404.
Whether the internal “friends and family” files would have been included in this database isn’t quite clear, but it seems obvious that Muse comes with some massive safety and privacy risks — not just for the user, but for anybody in their life.