YouTuber accuses Meta's AI assistant of leading strangers to his house

According to the Guardian, the incident happened last week when Robb asked Muse to sell the keyboard on the online marketplace Facebook Marketplace. Usman, an active person on the platform, asked to buy it and received an enthusiastic response. The two sides agreed on a price and quickly arranged to meet on the weekend at Robb's home in Toronto.

When he and his wife and daughter arrived, Usman texted and received the reply "Yes, it's me", but no one opened the door. After 20 minutes of waiting, Usman gave up and left. An hour later, he received an apology from the other person.

The problem occurred because Usman had no contact with the "real Robb". The first message that Robb actually sent to Usman was 24 hours later, when the YouTuber discovered the problem. "I activated Muse, Meta's new AI. It manages your Marketplace account and gives you the address. I actually didn't know it arranged for you to come to my house, it didn't ask first," Robb explained, and posted a screenshot of the conversation between Muse and Usman on Threads.

David Singleton, an expert at the Meta Super Intelligence Laboratory, then contacted Robb to find out the cause. They initially discovered that when Robb asked Muse to handle interactions on Facebook Marketplace, the system presented two options: "Allow once" and "Always allow". Robb didn't know that clicking the second option meant he was giving Muse permission to respond to all messages on the online marketplace with the information he provided, including his home address.

"I clicked on the second option because I thought it would still send a request to approve the purchase offer, but it didn't, so please be careful. I told the Meta team that this could be misleading like in my case, and they said they would adjust the notification to be more clear," Robb updated on Threads on September 29.

Singleton also responded to Robb's post, saying Meta confirmed there were "no breaches of privacy controls". "We appreciate the opportunity to learn from your experience with Muse and continue to make the product better for everyone," Singleton said.

Muse launched on September 8, can automatically perform tasks such as booking tables, booking airline tickets, shopping, sending emails, filling out forms, looking up information, finding pet sitters or connecting to Spotify, Instagram, OpenTable services. After a week, this virtual assistant climbed to number one on the free application rankings on the App Store in the US, surpassing ChatGPT and receiving many positive reviews.

According to Business Insider, with the new product, Alexandr Wang, Director of AI Meta, promoted communication by posting more than 100 articles on Twitter after 5 days of launch, each attracting at least tens of thousands of views. "Muse is the first AI for artificial intelligence skeptics," he wrote.