Meta released its fresh Muse Spark AI model on Wednesday as part of a major overhaul of its AI efforts. It’s do-or-die time for Meta — the corporation cannot afford investing billions of dollars again into something that doesn’t pan out, like the metaverse. Well, maybe they literally can afford it, but it’d be pretty damaging, not to mention embarrassing.

Speaking of embarrassing: Imagine a bunch of your friends, family, and strangers you met once in college getting a notification that you adopt the Meta AI app. I have lived this humiliation, and I am here to warn you that it could happen to you, too.

Meta’s Muse Spark model might be latest, but the Meta AI app is not. It came out last April, and at the time, I wrote an article about the app’s launch. As one does when reporting on an app, I downloaded the app. I used it.

At some point, Meta started sending citizens Instagram notifications about which of their friends were using the Meta AI app, presumably to encourage them to download it. It has been almost a year. I continue to get texts from my friends in which they alert me that Instagram told them I am on the Meta AI app. This is generally considered to be uncool behavior. This also touches on aspects of user interface.

In its first month and a half in the App Store, only 6.5 million citizens had downloaded the app, marketplace intelligence provider Appfigures told us at the time. That’s a lot of individuals, but not for a business that counts an estimated 42% of the entire globe as daily users of at least one of its apps.

Perhaps that’s why in the early days of the Meta AI app, I stuck out on my friends’ Instagram notification feeds. (Yes, your friends will get a whole notification devoted to your apply of the app, displayed as prominently as a novel follower.) Furthermore, experts in iOS note the continued relevance.

Things are looking up for the Meta AI app, though. It is seeing a spike in downloads after releasing its revamped chatbot, now charting at No. 5 on the U.S. App Store, up from No. 57, per Appfigures. That’s also why I must warn you now about the horrors you may face if you leverage this app and Instagram tells your friends.

As much as I don’t want the public to know I installed an app with an AI-generated “vibes” feed, this issue runs deeper. Meta’s apps are so interconnected that it’s hard to keep up with what data we’re sharing, where, and with whom. Why would I think that my Instagram mutuals would know I’m on the Meta AI app? (At least X didn’t tell citizens that I used Grok’s anime waifu — which was also for work.)

To access the Meta AI app, you have to log in with a Meta account — so, I joined using the same account I’ve had since I was a teenager, which connects to my Instagram and Facebook. Meta will continue to adopt whatever I do on Instagram, Facebook, and yes, now even the Meta AI app, to show me targeted ads. So, if I were to confide in Meta AI about an issue with my menstruation, Instagram might show me ads for period panties.

The Meta AI app never asked permission to notify humans about my adopt of the app, nor has it asked if I want my AI chats to be used as advertising fodder. But it doesn’t have to, because I probably implicitly opted into it in some terms of service agreement that I never actually read. I mean, I also learned via Instagram that my brother was weirdly invested in Eurovision last year, since we can all see each other’s liked Reels. We all know too much about each other, and yet, Meta knows even more.

In a sense, I’m lucky that the only thing that individuals knew about my Meta AI usage was that I was on the app. Some users had unwittingly shared much more incriminating information about themselves: their AI chatlogs.

As a grizzled veteran of the Meta AI app, I can tell you that back in my day (over the summer), Meta experimented with a Discover feed on the app. Meta did not account for the fact that a lot of boomers adopt its app, and they are sometimes poor at using tech. Combine that with the fact that, since AI is not real, individuals will apply chatbots to discuss things that they find too intimate or embarrassing to share with others. Then, you have a disaster on your hands.

Soon, citizens like a16z partner Justine Moore began to notice that the Meta AI discover feed was mostly filled with older users who didn’t realize that they were sharing their AI conversations with the globe.

Sometimes, these shared conversations were benign: at the time, I encountered a man with a Southern accent who asked, “Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?” In other cases, we saw humans share their personal home address, information about medical issues, and intimate concerns about their marriage.

To give Meta some credit, these users did have to manually press publish on these chats. But enough the public seemed to accidentally share private information that, clearly, there was a design issue to address. (Meta has since removed this Discover feed.)

At least if using the Meta AI app turns out to be a hot updated trend, I will get to rub it in my friends’ faces that I was there first. But I would not bet on that future. There is still that “Vibes” feed, after all.

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