Meta released its new Muse Spark<\/a> AI model on Wednesday as part of a major overhaul of its AI efforts. It\u2019s do-or-die time for Meta \u2014 the company cannot afford\u00a0<\/span>invest<\/span>ing billions of dollars again<\/a> into something that doesn\u2019t pan out, like the metaverse<\/a>. Well, maybe they literally<\/em> can afford it, but it\u2019d be pretty damaging, not to mention embarrassing.<\/p>\n Speaking of embarrassing: Imagine a bunch of your friends, family, and strangers you met once in college getting a notification that you use the Meta AI app. I have lived this humiliation, and I am here to warn you that it could happen to you, too.<\/p>\n Meta\u2019s Muse Spark model<\/a> might be new, but the Meta AI app is not. It came out last April, and at the time, I wrote an article<\/a> about the app\u2019s launch. As one does when reporting on an app, I downloaded the app. I used it.<\/p>\n At some point, Meta started sending people 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.<\/p>\n In its first month and a half in the App Store, only 6.5 million people had downloaded the app, market intelligence provider Appfigures<\/a> told us at the time. That\u2019s a lot of people, but not for a company that counts an estimated 42% of the entire world as daily users of at least one of its apps.<\/p>\n Perhaps that\u2019s why in the early days of the Meta AI app, I stuck out on my friends\u2019 Instagram notification feeds. (Yes, your friends will get a whole notification devoted to your use of the app, displayed as prominently as a new follower.)<\/p>\n Things are looking up for the Meta AI app, though. It is seeing a spike in downloads<\/a> after releasing its revamped chatbot, now charting at No. 5 on the U.S. App Store, up from No. 57, per Appfigures. That\u2019s also why I must warn you now about the horrors you may face if you use this app and Instagram tells your friends.<\/p>\n As much as I don\u2019t want people to know I installed an app with an AI-generated \u201cvibes\u201d feed<\/a>, this issue runs deeper. Meta\u2019s apps are so interconnected that it\u2019s hard to keep up with what data we\u2019re sharing, where, and with whom. Why would I think that my Instagram mutuals would know I\u2019m on the Meta AI app? (At least X didn\u2019t tell people that I used Grok\u2019s anime waifu<\/a> \u2014 which was also for work.)<\/p>\n In order to access the Meta AI app, you have to log in with a Meta account \u2014 so, I joined using the same account I\u2019ve had since I was a teenager, which connects to my Instagram and Facebook. Meta will continue to use whatever I do on Instagram, Facebook, and yes, now even the Meta AI app<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n The Meta AI app never asked permission to notify people about my use of the app, nor has it asked if I want my AI chats to be used as advertising fodder. But it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s liked Reels. We all know too much about each other, and yet, Meta knows even more.<\/p>\n In a sense, I\u2019m lucky that the only thing that people 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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 use its app, and they are sometimes bad at using technology. Combine that with the fact that, since AI is not real, people will use chatbots to discuss things that they find too intimate or embarrassing to share with others. Then, you have a disaster on your hands.<\/p>\n Soon, people like a16z partner Justine Moore began to notice<\/a> that the Meta AI discover feed was mostly filled with older users who didn\u2019t realize that they were sharing their AI conversations with the world.<\/p>\n Sometimes, these shared conversations were benign: at the time<\/a>, I encountered a man with a Southern accent who asked, \u201cHey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?\u201d In other cases<\/a>, we saw people share their personal home address, information about medical issues, and intimate concerns about their marriage.<\/p>\n To give Meta some credit, these users did have to manually press publish on these chats. But enough people seemed to accidentally share private information that, clearly, there was a design issue to address. (Meta has since removed this Discover feed.)<\/p>\n At least if using the Meta AI app turns out to be a hot new trend, I will get to rub it in my friends\u2019 faces that I was there first. But I would not bet on that future. There is still that \u201cVibes<\/a>\u201d feed, after all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/image.jpg?w=680\")
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