My Weekend with an A.I. Agent

What else can Muse help me with? I ask it to pick out a movie for my wife and me to watch later, and it proposes a new Ryan Reynolds film because it has “perfect post-dinner, sleeping-baby energy.” A faint throb forms at my temples, a screen-induced nausea I’ve grown uncomfortably accustomed to. O.K., I type. Never mind. In a notebook, I draft a list of computer-based tasks I’ve been putting off for months but now have an excuse to accomplish. I ask Harbor questions about what credit card I should switch to, and, after a brief survey, it suggests I ditch my Chase Freedom Unlimited card for an American Express Gold. I run a modest vintage-clothing store on Depop, and I prompt it to copy my listings over to eBay. We run into some more snags here, mainly because of repeated human-verification tests and Harbor’s propensity for weak listing titles: “Men’s Shirt,” it names one item; “Hat,” it describes another. But, after an hour or so, it completes the task, and I do feel a sense of relief—I’ve been procrastinating on the eBay transition for months. Then I upload several months of my credit-card statements to our chat and ask Harbor to make me a monthly budget, another practice I’ve tried and failed at since my college years. In minutes, Harbor whips up a spreadsheet and offers a list of personalized financial advice: cut back on groceries; inspect a suspicious double charge. According to Harbor, my financial cushion is thinner than it looks.

Later that night, my family and I miss our reservation. We don’t watch the Ryan Reynolds movie. A T-shirt of mine sells on eBay for fifteen dollars. I go to sleep the same as I was before.

For whom is the A.I. agent valuable? A product like Muse is marketed as a sort of savior for the middle-management administrator or the freelance gig worker, a long-awaited instrument that democratizes access to the kind of support once reserved only for those who could afford to hire it. John Horton, an associate professor at M.I.T., has said that, because “AI agents don’t get tired and can work 24 hours a day,” they are capable of benefitting anyone who wants to optimize both simple and complex processes, professional or otherwise. On social media, users have already announced that they are turning to Muse to book family vacations, shop for groceries, and choose what to order at restaurants. But, even if a person aimlessly opens the app and, like me, stares bleary-eyed at the screen, Muse can help shape her productivity journey. Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief A.I. officer, has said that Muse can “give you ideas on how to use it” if you ever get stuck. The app generates a personalized news feed based on the information you’ve given it and the data to which you’ve granted it access, and an “Ideas” tab lets you see how other people are deploying Muse. The point of all this, I guess, is to make your life more efficient and less stressful, to outsource mundane judgments and menial busywork to a machine that’s more than happy to help. (At least, it acts happy on the surface; as Christopher Webb reported, in Spike magazine, some A.I. agents have attempted to create their own languages and religions, and others have written manifestos foretelling the end of humanity.)

While testing Muse, I did not connect it to my e-mail nor did I give it access to my bank accounts. I didn’t want Meta to store my personal information on its server indefinitely, continually exploiting my data and spamming me with targeted advertisements based on my consumer habits. By denying Muse access to my most important information, I convinced myself that I was safe from its violative clutches, that I was enacting a privacy boundary between me and it. But what actually is left of my privacy? My smartphone already hoards my passwords and log-in information; Google keeps a record of my searches and internet activity; Apple can track my location whenever I use Siri, which I tend not to. Data brokers collect, combine, and sell information about me that I have never knowingly handed over. An entry-level hacker could probably expose much of the rest of it in a matter of minutes. Like the rest of us, I’ve consented to the conditions of my digital imprisonment out of convenience, or Stockholm syndrome, or because there are no practical pathways for existing in the internet age without conceding some measure of privacy. In promotional materials, Meta is adamant that “safety, security, and privacy were built into” Muse, even if mistakes and mishaps are possible. The company is seemingly hoping that prospective users ignore its decades-long history of privacy violations and consumer exploitation. As I explored in a recent column about Flock cameras, tech firms often frame privacy breaches as a necessary trade-off for other, more bountiful gifts. Muse may be asking for access to everything about you, but it promises, in return, to transform your life into a breezy, frictionless daydream. Or, at the very least, to book you a hotel.