Meta’s Muse is apparently an effective AI assistant, but it’s a little scary. Part of this is due to its new Mac app, which can access Messages, Calendar, and Notes. But for all her intelligence, Muse doesn’t really know how to describe herself. Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted on Threads screenshots of an interaction he had with Muse in which the assistant asks him some questions about a conversation he was having in Messages. The problem is that Aten says he didn’t give Muse access to his messages. When asked how he knew about the content of her messages, Muse responded: “I saw the notification previews, not your message history. I haven’t been reading your text messages.” Aten continued to press and ask how Muse received message previews, but didn’t have a good answer. “Honest answer: I can’t give you the exact plumbing,” it said. “What I know is that the paired Mac app exposes notifications as one of its capabilities, and they come to me via device syncing. David Singleton of Meta Superintelligence Labs chimed in below the post to try to explain. First, he explains all the permissions Muse needs to read messages, including giving the Mac app full access to the drive. He states that the features are optional. The most interesting part comes towards the end of the thread in which Singleton says that Muse, “”Doesn’t look at notifications in your Mac, but instead syncs Messages data only after the user has specifically enabled access.” He suggests that the problem is not that Muse is illicitly reading Aten’s texts, but simply that Muse has no idea what he is talking about: In the conversation with his Muse in Jason’s screenshots, when Muse said that it synchronized “device notifications”, he was confused about how to explain the feature and gave the wrong explanation. That depends on us. We apologize for Muse’s incorrect answer and are working to improve Muse’s understanding of its own internals so that it can give correct answers to questions about how it works more consistently.
