Mark Zuckerberg wants you to trust Meta with your personal AI. Good luck with that

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, dropped a 6,500-word essay Monday arguing that AI is safest and most beneficial when it’s distributed widely and not controlled by a few leading AI labs. It was more than an essay; it was a manifesto, a proclamation about how the artificial intelligence era should proceed. It was also an exercise in repositioning. Meta wants to present itself as the responsible, democratizing force in AI, and Zuckerberg as a serious thinker about the technology’s social consequences-territory more often associated with people like Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei. The problem is that Zuckerberg’s vision requires users to trust Meta. And unless people have very short memories, that will be a difficult sell. Zuckerberg and company have already burned through most of the public’s trust. During Meta’s last obsession, the “metaverse,” I argued that the company would never dominate the AR/VR space because of the immense amount of personal data users (and people they interact with) would be asked to give up. (That concern hasn’t exactly disappeared. Meta’s AR glasses are now facing a privacy backlash severe enough that some people have taken to calling them “pervert glasses.”) That distrust extends well beyond Meta. Americans have consistently expressed deep skepticism about social media companies’ handling of personal information. In one Pew survey, just 23% of social media users said they were confident the platforms they used would protect their personal information from hackers or unauthorized users. And 77% of Americans said they had little or no trust in social media executives to acknowledge mistakes and take responsibility when user data is misused. It’s the same problem with personal AI agents. Zuckerberg’s vision is to give users a personal superintelligent agent that knows everything about them. In his words: “Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.” Given Facebook’s track record on data privacy, that should send chills down the spine. Meta’s business has always been operating an advertising network where ads are targeted based on thousands of little breadcrumbs of information it picks up about users and their interests. Users who chatter away with a personal AI agent could end up forfeiting much more of their personal data.