Critic says Muse's plush mascot softens AI risk
The author argues Muse's cute, toy-like image lowers adults' guard and encourages them to hand over accounts and personal data, and calls on companies to be held accountable for AI harms.
This is Muse, Meta's AI agent. It's fluffy, beige, smiley, and toy-like. It evokes child-oriented imagery for a tool that is used by adults and that can cause serious privacy and safety incidents, often with societal implications. It wants you to use it freely and often, giving it access to your accounts and sharing personal data with it. Meta wants you to see it as cute and harmless. It wants you to treat it like a friendly mascot. That's how people slowly forget what AI is, how it works, how it affects society, and the risks it poses. That's how companies carefully shape and manipulate the public perception of AI. Let me make it clear: Companies build AI systems and design them to seem cool and desirable. They profit from them. So if/when these systems harm people, companies must be held accountable. That's how it must work, and the only acceptable answer to emerging AI challenges. Everything else is manipulation and/or regulatory capture. More in my newsletter.