Meta’s Muse is creepy, but maybe not for the reasons you think

Meta 的 Muse 令人毛骨悚然，但原因可能与你想的不同

Meta’s Muse is apparently an effective AI assistant, but one that’s a little creepy. Part of that is because of its new Mac app, which can access Messages, Calendar, and Notes. But for all its smarts, Muse doesn’t actually know how to describe itself. Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted on Threads screenshots of an interaction he had with Muse in which the assistant asks him some questions about a conversation he was having in Messages.

Meta 的 Muse 显然是一款高效的 AI 助手，但它也让人感到有些毛骨悚然。部分原因在于其新的 Mac 应用程序可以访问“信息”、“日历”和“备忘录”。尽管 Muse 很聪明，但它实际上并不知道该如何描述自己。《Inc》杂志的特约编辑 Jason Aten 在 Threads 上发布了他与 Muse 互动时的截图，截图显示该助手向他询问了一些关于他正在进行的“信息”对话的问题。

The problem is that Aten says he didn’t give Muse access to his messages. When asked how it knew about the contents of his messages, Muse replied, “I saw the notification previews, not your message history. I haven’t been reading your texts.” Aten continued to push, asking how Muse was receiving message previews, it didn’t have a good answer. “Honest answer: I can’t give you the exact plumbing,” it said. “What I know is that the paired Mac app exposes notifications as one of its capabilities, and they arrive to me through the device sync. Obviously, not great.”

问题在于，Aten 表示他并没有授予 Muse 访问其信息的权限。当被问及它是如何得知信息内容时，Muse 回答道：“我看到了通知预览，而不是你的信息历史记录。我并没有阅读你的短信。”Aten 继续追问 Muse 是如何接收通知预览的，但它并没有给出合理的解释。它回答说：“老实说，我无法告诉你具体的技术细节。我所知道的是，配对的 Mac 应用程序将通知作为其功能之一，并通过设备同步传达给我。”显然，这并不理想。

Meta Superintelligence Labs’ David Singleton chimed in below the post to try to explain. First, he walks through all the permissions Muse needs to read messages, including granting the Mac app full disk access. He states that the features are opt-in. The more interesting part comes in towards the end of the thread in which Singleton says that Muse, “does not watch notifications on your Mac, but rather syncs data from Messages only after the user has specifically enabled access.” He suggests that the issue isn’t Muse illicitly reading Aten’s texts, but simply that Muse has no idea what it’s talking about:

Meta 超级智能实验室（Meta Superintelligence Labs）的 David Singleton 在帖子下方留言试图解释。首先，他详细说明了 Muse 读取信息所需的所有权限，包括授予 Mac 应用程序完全磁盘访问权限。他指出这些功能是需要用户主动开启的。该讨论串末尾的部分更为有趣，Singleton 表示 Muse “并不会监视你 Mac 上的通知，而是在用户明确启用访问权限后，才会同步来自‘信息’的数据。”他认为，问题不在于 Muse 非法读取了 Aten 的短信，而仅仅是 Muse 自己根本不知道自己在说什么：

“In the conversation with his Muse in Jason’s screenshots, when Muse said it synced ‘device notifications’, it was confused about how to explain the feature and gave an incorrect explanation. That’s on us. We apologize for the incorrect response from Muse and we’re working to improve Muse’s understanding of its own internals so that it gives correct answers to questions about how it functions more consistently.”

“在 Jason 截图显示的与 Muse 的对话中，当 Muse 说它同步了‘设备通知’时，它对如何解释该功能感到困惑，并给出了错误的解释。这是我们的责任。我们对 Muse 的错误回答表示歉意，我们正在努力提高 Muse 对其自身内部机制的理解，以便它能更一致地就其运作方式的问题给出正确答案。”

That might not be particularly reassuring, but it also makes some sense. We already know chatbots won’t tell you their secrets and will instead tell you what you want to hear.

这可能并不能让人感到特别安心，但也确实说得通。我们已经知道，聊天机器人不会告诉你它们的秘密，反而会告诉你你想听的内容。