You’ve probably seen bespectacled Mark Zuckerberg recently. The billionaire has been on a media tour wearing his Ray-Ban Meta glasses and talking about the future of AI. Zuckerberg has a specific vision of that future and how everyone should be using this new technology. Though he is not a super-popular guy, Zuckerberg, by dint of Meta’s enormous reach, will get his way in some shape or form.

The new Meta AI app is a glimpse into that future. Launched a little over a week ago, the app looks and works a lot like ChatGPT. But instead of relying on OpenAI’s large language models to generate words and images, it uses Meta’s open-source Llama models. There’s also a social element to the experience in the form of a feed, where you can see AI prompts other users have shared. Looking at this endless pit of AI slop is, at best, confusing and, at worst, an absolute nightmare. Meanwhile, the app is a privacy minefield. It’s designed to be personalized so it can tap into your Facebook or Instagram profile for information about you.

“Anytime ‘personalized’ is used in a description that means surveillance,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. “That means it’s tracking a bunch of individual information and targeting you with it.”

Meta has nearly 3.5 billion daily active users worldwide. Many are already using a version of Meta’s AI, even if they don’t realize it, since it’s been integrated into the search box on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for the past year. In the latest Meta earnings call, Zuckerberg said that the Meta AI app alone already has “almost a billion monthly actives,” and that he thinks “there will be a large opportunity to show product recommendations or ads” on Meta AI in the future.

We don’t exactly know what Zuckerberg and his........

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