i had missed meta's muse product and man the hype press is so funny.
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AI people literally cannot help but immediately go for "automate love for my children" holy shit HOW is this ALWAYS the first use case. I love how literally everything failed here and the headline still reads "muse is very powerful"
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-muse-review-access-to-emails-credit-cards-health-data-2026-9Before 9/11 I joked about a dystopic world where everyone plugged in to virtual reality for work.
And it was a robot that spent all day with the children.
When the parent came home after the child had already been put to bed, they could playback the child’s day for them
Branded BabyRaise
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the dual-sided market on marketplace is grim. earlier this year they made it possible to auto reply if you're selling and proactively suggests automatic haggling if you're buying. that's the most transparent "profit from both sides of a problem you create" i've seen yet - and since presumably meta is able to tell when it's a meta chatbot negotiating with a meta chatbot, that's some juicy arbitrage to e.g. bump up (or down) your "negotiated" sales prices with an upgrade to your subscription.
i have seen several other articles and blog posts link to the nyt piece as like "it would be foolish to believe these things weren't useful" and i am convinced that not only do uncritically pro-AI people not read any of the output, they don't read anything anymore.
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i had missed meta's muse product and man the hype press is so funny. the nyt's puff piece that is actually titled "I gave my life over to meta's A.I. agent and was blown away" cites three good things that it can do without problems: find duplicate subscriptions when given full access to a bank account, handle a call to dental insurance, and buy things from amazon. well, I can discover duplicate subscriptions by "looking at my bank statement," the calls were made by a person in a call center, and amazon banned muse from buying things. Aside from that, it failed to fill in a web form from a company who didn't partner with meta (which presumably means some streamlined deterministic api or mcp), and spent multiple days lowballing people for plates on facebook marketplace before the person stepped in paid full price. I am looking around for other positive reviews and they are all like this lmao.
@jonny i adore how we're getting to the point where we're giving everybody personal spambots. want to waste your dentists time? first hit is free!
want to harass people on Facebook marketplace? let's go -
i have seen several other articles and blog posts link to the nyt piece as like "it would be foolish to believe these things weren't useful" and i am convinced that not only do uncritically pro-AI people not read any of the output, they don't read anything anymore.
the fight brewing over the advertising eyeballs is also very funny to me. Amazon blocks Meta's agent product because it destroys their ad market, of course. But since every company is actually an ad company, you'd expect all of them to follow suit unless they reach an arrangement in a shakedown. The idea of consumer chatbot agents being exactly like the fractured streaming landscape is so awesome, subscribing to five different whole life surveillance apps so that you can avoid the tedium of typing "chicken" and clicking "buy" with 100% accuracy in favor of typing "buy chicken" and clicking "send" with some unknowable nonzero failure rate.
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the fight brewing over the advertising eyeballs is also very funny to me. Amazon blocks Meta's agent product because it destroys their ad market, of course. But since every company is actually an ad company, you'd expect all of them to follow suit unless they reach an arrangement in a shakedown. The idea of consumer chatbot agents being exactly like the fractured streaming landscape is so awesome, subscribing to five different whole life surveillance apps so that you can avoid the tedium of typing "chicken" and clicking "buy" with 100% accuracy in favor of typing "buy chicken" and clicking "send" with some unknowable nonzero failure rate.
@jonny Oligarchy inevitably devolves into a war of all against all, ultimately resolving into collapse or dictatorship.
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AI people literally cannot help but immediately go for "automate love for my children" holy shit HOW is this ALWAYS the first use case. I love how literally everything failed here and the headline still reads "muse is very powerful"
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-muse-review-access-to-emails-credit-cards-health-data-2026-9@jonny I would not attempt to use AI for this or much of anything else, but you may not appreciate what a nightmare keeping up with school communication can be for parents. Our district switched to a new system this year, and now I get **at least** 20 texts/emails every week, many of which are generic school-wide announcements that may or may not actually be relevant to my kids. Every parent hears about every bus that’s late or activity that’s been rescheduled, even if their kid isn’t involved.
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@jonny I would not attempt to use AI for this or much of anything else, but you may not appreciate what a nightmare keeping up with school communication can be for parents. Our district switched to a new system this year, and now I get **at least** 20 texts/emails every week, many of which are generic school-wide announcements that may or may not actually be relevant to my kids. Every parent hears about every bus that’s late or activity that’s been rescheduled, even if their kid isn’t involved.
@jonny Figuring out if each message is important for you requires clicking into a parent portal that basically never keeps you logged in, and once you get in there the actual content of the message is often in an attached image or PDF that cannot be easily read on a phone because the web app disables zooming. It is unbelievably bad and I absolutely understand why someone might think “ugh, maybe I’ll throw this at the bot and see what happens.”
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AI people literally cannot help but immediately go for "automate love for my children" holy shit HOW is this ALWAYS the first use case. I love how literally everything failed here and the headline still reads "muse is very powerful"
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-muse-review-access-to-emails-credit-cards-health-data-2026-9@jonny My VP, a couple years ago, told a story about using AI to GM a role playing session with him and his friends. At every step it failed: it wasn’t random. They started rolling dice and even when they told it they rolled low, it would say a bad thing happened…but just in the nick of time it all turned out OK. Finally he lamented that, even though they uploaded PDFs of the non-D&D game they wanted to play, the LLM kept applying D&D rules and mechanics. It wouldn’t stay on the right rules for very long.
The VP’s punchline was that people need to know how these things work in order to use them well. Which was ironic because all these failures are really obvious and easy to explain if you understand how LLMs work. And he didn’t. So the failures remained a mystery and cautionary tale to him.
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the fight brewing over the advertising eyeballs is also very funny to me. Amazon blocks Meta's agent product because it destroys their ad market, of course. But since every company is actually an ad company, you'd expect all of them to follow suit unless they reach an arrangement in a shakedown. The idea of consumer chatbot agents being exactly like the fractured streaming landscape is so awesome, subscribing to five different whole life surveillance apps so that you can avoid the tedium of typing "chicken" and clicking "buy" with 100% accuracy in favor of typing "buy chicken" and clicking "send" with some unknowable nonzero failure rate.
@jonny I'll try to play the devil's avocate on that one. So here are three striking arguments:
1) Tech bros are smart and rich and they say we shouldn't worry. They know things.
2) It's not just buy chicken it can also be buy water. Jensen Huang recently stated we'd be able to get omelet recipes too.
3) Wow look at the value created in markets. It can't be just speculation.
We're definitely in contact with reality. And it's not scary at all.
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@jonny I would not attempt to use AI for this or much of anything else, but you may not appreciate what a nightmare keeping up with school communication can be for parents. Our district switched to a new system this year, and now I get **at least** 20 texts/emails every week, many of which are generic school-wide announcements that may or may not actually be relevant to my kids. Every parent hears about every bus that’s late or activity that’s been rescheduled, even if their kid isn’t involved.
@cbirdsong I feel this. At one point I had 3 kids in 3 different schools in the same county. I got like 20 messages EACH per week, plus the county-wide stuff, my school board rep, AND the at-large school board reps. It was overwhelming.
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@cbirdsong I feel this. At one point I had 3 kids in 3 different schools in the same county. I got like 20 messages EACH per week, plus the county-wide stuff, my school board rep, AND the at-large school board reps. It was overwhelming.
@paco @cbirdsong I don't doubt it, and i also don't doubt that having kids in general is extremely draining and tiring. summarizing a ton of to-everyone announcements doesn't seem that bad to me, but the part about automating communication with other parents or risking my kid not being able to take band because I outsourced signing them up is very sad to me.
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AI people literally cannot help but immediately go for "automate love for my children" holy shit HOW is this ALWAYS the first use case. I love how literally everything failed here and the headline still reads "muse is very powerful"
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-muse-review-access-to-emails-credit-cards-health-data-2026-9@jonny okay I'll bite.
Parents need help. Desperately.The kinds of tasks they listed: "plan things" and "keep on top of things" are the kinds of things that make parents go "numb" from overwhelm. (as described in the Surgeon General's 2024 report)
While I appreciate your point, "automate love for my children" is offensively skewed.
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@jonny My VP, a couple years ago, told a story about using AI to GM a role playing session with him and his friends. At every step it failed: it wasn’t random. They started rolling dice and even when they told it they rolled low, it would say a bad thing happened…but just in the nick of time it all turned out OK. Finally he lamented that, even though they uploaded PDFs of the non-D&D game they wanted to play, the LLM kept applying D&D rules and mechanics. It wouldn’t stay on the right rules for very long.
The VP’s punchline was that people need to know how these things work in order to use them well. Which was ironic because all these failures are really obvious and easy to explain if you understand how LLMs work. And he didn’t. So the failures remained a mystery and cautionary tale to him.
@paco that's also very sad. being a DM is fun. playing a TTRPG is fun. having a human being with judgement and ability to craft a narrative and being in the same room and responsive to the other human beings you are playing a game with together is the whole reason the game is fun
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i had missed meta's muse product and man the hype press is so funny. the nyt's puff piece that is actually titled "I gave my life over to meta's A.I. agent and was blown away" cites three good things that it can do without problems: find duplicate subscriptions when given full access to a bank account, handle a call to dental insurance, and buy things from amazon. well, I can discover duplicate subscriptions by "looking at my bank statement," the calls were made by a person in a call center, and amazon banned muse from buying things. Aside from that, it failed to fill in a web form from a company who didn't partner with meta (which presumably means some streamlined deterministic api or mcp), and spent multiple days lowballing people for plates on facebook marketplace before the person stepped in paid full price. I am looking around for other positive reviews and they are all like this lmao.
@jonny lol, are we at the Singularity yet? I can't tell....
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the fight brewing over the advertising eyeballs is also very funny to me. Amazon blocks Meta's agent product because it destroys their ad market, of course. But since every company is actually an ad company, you'd expect all of them to follow suit unless they reach an arrangement in a shakedown. The idea of consumer chatbot agents being exactly like the fractured streaming landscape is so awesome, subscribing to five different whole life surveillance apps so that you can avoid the tedium of typing "chicken" and clicking "buy" with 100% accuracy in favor of typing "buy chicken" and clicking "send" with some unknowable nonzero failure rate.
@jonny i tell claude mega 8.3748 to buy chicken. two days later a chicken coop flatpack and five live hens arrive at my appartement.
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@jonny Like, not even getting into some of the Nth order risks of, like, your child's data being harvested and weaponized against them before they're even old enough to know what any of that means, just, entrusting one of the known-least-reliable technologies available, who's main purpose is to generate bullshit and propaganda, with anything relating to your kid seems.. like a remarkably bad "Someone should call CPS about it" degree of negligence...
And the people sociopathic enough to think bots can replace human bonding and nurturing, will hand over their kids to a system that is designed to cultivate further sociopathy, eating human relationships and society from the inside out until nobody remembers how to care about each other enough to even know how to WANT to fight back.
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@jonny okay I'll bite.
Parents need help. Desperately.The kinds of tasks they listed: "plan things" and "keep on top of things" are the kinds of things that make parents go "numb" from overwhelm. (as described in the Surgeon General's 2024 report)
While I appreciate your point, "automate love for my children" is offensively skewed.
@travisfw i'm aware of that. planning and keeping on top of things is the best case framing. this particular blog post doesn't go to where the actual CEOs go, but "automating love for my children" is not something i made up to denigrate stressed out parents but to accurately describe what oligarchs think is relatable
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113901881006276920
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111157425231982006
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/110122530864356955 -
@jonny ... How the fuck do you wake up and decide "Y'know, I'm gonna have the notoriously unreliable slop and propaganda generator automate taking care of my literal human child." and not for a moment pause to realize how horrible a parenting decision that is...
@miss_rodent @jonny It might be bold of you or I to presume that they reflect on parenting decisions in any context, I think.
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AI people literally cannot help but immediately go for "automate love for my children" holy shit HOW is this ALWAYS the first use case. I love how literally everything failed here and the headline still reads "muse is very powerful"
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-muse-review-access-to-emails-credit-cards-health-data-2026-9@jonny dropping a cinder block on your bare feet is powerful but that doesn't mean you should integrate it into your daily life
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AI people literally cannot help but immediately go for "automate love for my children" holy shit HOW is this ALWAYS the first use case. I love how literally everything failed here and the headline still reads "muse is very powerful"
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-muse-review-access-to-emails-credit-cards-health-data-2026-9@jonny paywalled
