“I do see this as a continued trajectory of their main business model of controlling what people see, putting ads in front of them, and collecting more data,” Mir says.
It’s definitely rational to be anxious about handing over your credit card to an agent. Even if you could trust these AI tools wouldn’t be tricked into spending money in ways you don’t want, outsourcing your shopping decisions can have unintended consequences. Consumer advocates see this purchasing automation as potentially opening the door for companies to prioritize certain brands or other products in an agent’s output, based on sponsorship deals. Meta’s Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang hinted in an interview with Axios that it’s looking for more revenue opportunities in Muse that aren’t ads, without disclosing specifics.
Personally, I enjoy the slow scrolls of online shopping, where I can spend an hour on a website and leave with nothing in my cart. There’s a whimsical inefficiency to browsing Depop for leather jackets I likely won’t even buy. By exploring the Internet on my own, I’m slowly building my own sense of taste and curating an understanding of what I actually enjoy. If Muse does everything for me, I lose out on the journey that led to the decision.
“At some point, the AI is making all of your meaningful taste decisions, your preference decisions, decisions about where you go, where you eat, what you do, what vacations you take,” Schroeder says. “That’s kind of the joy of being human—getting to test things out and figure out what you like. So, the concept of turning all of that over to a machine is pretty horrifying to me.”
Sharing Machines
Relying on agents, like Meta’s Muse, could degrade our functioning while these tools collect data about us.
“The design of AI agents is such that it disengages users,” says Margaret Mitchell, a researcher and chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face. “So, users become more passive.” Mitchell recently co-wrote a research paper unpacking how agentic tools are not effectively designed for human oversight and may actually worsen the user’s ability to assess what the agent is doing on their behalf.
People who use agents may become overly reliant on the tools, even more so than when interacting with a standard chatbot, since agents have access to more information and can do more tasks. One potential impact is “cognitive degradation,” where users rely on automations from a confident-sounding, external source and are less able to make independent decisions.
Mitchell also sees high levels of personalization as potentially priming users to share even more data about themselves. “It’s not only that it knows about you, so you trust it more,” she says. “It’s that it’s actually aligning to you in what it talks about and how it talks about it, in a way that further pulls you into interacting with it and divulging more private information.” Recent research shows that AI tools may start to mirror a user’s speaking style as they collect more interaction data.
While Muse is powerful, I’ve decided to send this data goblin back to its cave, and deleted the app after my initial experiments.
Before I could remove Muse from my phone, the agent sent me one final ping. A tip! I wonder what it could be. “Connect your apps so I can do more,” the notification read. Alright, buddy. I heard you the first time.
