Meta’s New AI Asked for My Raw Health Data—and Gave Me Terrible Advice | WIRED
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Meta’s Muse Spark model offers to analyze users’ health data, including lab results. Beyond the obvious privacy risks, it’s not a capable stand-in for a real doctor.
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyMeta’s Superintelligence Labs launched its first generative AI model, called Muse Spark, earlier this week. It is currently available through the Meta AI app, but the company plans to integrate Muse Spark across all of its platforms—including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—in the coming weeks.Meta claims that Muse Spark was designed, in part, to be better at answering questions people have about their health. The company even worked with “over 1,000 physicians to curate training data that enables more factual and comprehensive responses,” according to Meta’s announcement blog.As the new model rolls out to millions of users, I tested Muse Spark to see how it would respond to health-related questions. When I asked how it could help me, the bot listed off a few basic uses, like building a workout routine or generating questions to ask my doctor, but a direct request for my health data stood out:“Paste your numbers from a fitness tracker, glucose monitor, or a lab report. I’ll calculate trends, flag patterns, and visualize them,” read the Meta AI output. “Example: ‘Here are my last 10 blood pressure readings—is there a pattern?’”Nudging users to upload their health data is not unique to Meta. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude both have chatbot modes designed specifically for helping users understand their health and make decisions. For example, you can open Claude and connect it to your Apple or Android health data wit...