We Got Hot and Heavy with Meta’s Muse—And Underwhelmed by Apple’s HomeView

Reece Rogers: Not hard at all. Not hard in the least. Our features director, Reyhan, was in the office recently and asked if she could see them and she was a bit shocked. So I feel like we’ll leave it at that. But it was not some kind of jailbreak method. I was not doing any kind of random strategies. I asked, “Can you sext?” And I said, “You go first.” And the rest is history.

Brian Barrett: And if anything, it kept encouraging you. I feel like it was definitely a two-way street of it was really up for anything.

Leah Feiger: Did you try this out with other agents? What was your success rate there?

Reece Rogers: Yeah, I actually, after I found out it could sext, I was curious how this would compare to other popular agents. There’s a few big ones right now, but two I was interested in is OpenAI’s Dots, which was recently released, and as well as xAI’s Grok Bot, because Grok specifically is known for not necessarily having strong guardrails, whether it’s text or image.

Leah Feiger: No, I feel like Grok would love sexting. That feels like a Grok attribute to me.

Reece Rogers: Yeah. So when I downloaded that app and sent in similar prompts, it was kind of surprising for the Grok Bot to be like, “No, dude, let’s focus on tasks. I’m not here for sexting. Let’s do tasks.”

Brian Barrett: And, Reece, when you came to Meta with this, how did they respond?

Reece Rogers: They did not respond at all in the way that I expected. They emphatically said that Muse is an app for an adult, for people 18 and over, and that these were consensual interactions that I engaged with, that it would not block, quote, unquote, “Legal adult behavior.” But I also found this to contrast really interesting with their policies for other platforms. There’s been a really interesting story lately about different queer bars in San Francisco, as well as around the world, getting their Instagram pages shut down and having a tough time getting access to those back because sometimes it’s claimed that they’re promoting some kind of sexual content. So for Meta to have those kind of rules for some creators on Instagram, but essentially say, “Our AI agent can get as freaky as it wants,” that was just kind of hard to square for me.