10月中旬，82岁的艾琳·费伊（Eileen Fay）得知她的药品费用可能会大幅上涨。联邦政府正准备修改有关低价值进口商品的法规，这可能会影响她从加拿大购买价格更低的抗凝血药和治疗心力衰竭药物的资格。费伊不知道该怎么办。
In mid-October, 82-year-old Eileen Fay learned that her medication costs were in danger of skyrocketing. The federal government was preparing to change its rules on low-value imports, threatening her ability to purchase cheaper prescription medications for blood thinning and heart failure from Canada. Fay didn’t know what to do.
于是她转向了Meta公司新推出的AI助手“Muse”。几周前她刚刚开始使用这个助手。费伊向Muse描述了自己的情况后，Muse立即为她提供了一份两页长的资料，其中对比了多种Medicare Part D医疗保险计划的相关费用和保障内容。Muse还为她推荐了两个最佳选择，其中其中一个方案是她从未听说过的；这个方案每年能为她节省超过6000美元的医疗费用。费伊确认这些信息是准确的。
So she turned to Muse, Meta’s new AI agent, which she had started using a few weeks earlier. After Fay described her situation to the agent, Muse returned a two-page fact sheet comparing the cost and coverage of several Medicare Part D plans. It then suggested the two best options, including one Fay had never heard of—a plan that could save her more than $6,000 a year. Fay says she checked the work and found the information accurate. “I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it—but I would have had to use a calculator trying to figure out the cost of nine different medications, and it would have been very complex,” Fay says.
“我不是说我自己无法完成这些计算，但那样需要使用计算器来逐一计算九种不同药品的费用，过程会非常复杂，”费伊说。“而Muse仅用了10分钟就完成了所有分析，我立刻决定使用它。”自9月份推出以来，已有数百万人开始使用Muse。据Sensor Tower的数据，这款应用在短短40天内就获得了1000万次美国用户的下载量（而同期ChatGPT的下载量仅为370万次），目前每日活跃用户数超过250万。
“And she did it in 10 minutes, and I was like, ‘I’m sold.’”Fay is one of millions who have adopted Muse since its September launch. The app reached 10 U.S. million downloads in just 40 days—compared with 3.7 million U.S. downloads for ChatGPT during the equivalent period—and has over 2.5 million daily active users, according to Sensor Tower. It is also retaining users at a higher rate than its AI competitors.
此外，Muse的用户留存率也高于其他同类AI产品。值得一提的是，Muse配备了可爱的虚拟形象（avatar），其设计初衷就是为了让不熟悉AI技术的用户更容易接受它。Meta公司的首席AI官亚历山大·王（Alexandr Wang）在9月份发文称：“Muse是为妈妈们量身打造的。”Meta公司还在积极向Instagram、Facebook和WhatsApp的用户推广Muse。
Crucially, Muse—which comes with a cuddly avatar—was designed by Meta to be beginner-friendly, and to win over people unfamiliar with AI. “Muse is built for moms,” Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, posted on X in September. Meta is also aggressively marketing Muse to Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp users. As a result, many older users who may have only had glancing interactions with AI have become avid users.
因此，许多之前只是偶尔使用过人工智能（AI）服务的老年用户，现在都成为了该服务的忠实用户。Meta公司并未公开关于Muse用户群体的具体统计数据，也没有回应任何相关询问。不过初步数据显示，Muse似乎特别受到老年用户的欢迎。分析机构Apptopia在9月份指出：Muse在美国的用户群体中，46岁及以上的用户占比高达46%，这一比例远高于其他任何AI聊天机器人。
Meta has not released demographic information about Muse’s usership, and did not respond to a request for comment. But early data suggests Muse may be finding a particularly receptive audience among older adults. The analytics firm Apptopia estimated in September that Muse’s U.S. user base skewed older than any other AI chatbot, with 46% of its users aged 46+. This dynamic has excited technologists—and raised serious concerns from privacy experts.
这一现象令技术专家们感到兴奋，但同时也引发了隐私专家的严重担忧。Meta公司长期以来一直因其数据隐私处理方式而受到批评；周三，新墨西哥州的一名法官裁定该公司因违反该州的消费者保护法律而需支付250亿美元罚款。宾夕法尼亚州立大学“社会责任人工智能中心”的主任S. Shyam Sundar表示：“这些可爱的AI助手虽然能为处理个人数据这一严肃任务增添一些轻松氛围，但会让老年人放松警惕。这非常令人担忧——因为近年来AI在模拟真实对话方面的技术已经取得了显著进步。”
Meta has long been criticized for its data privacy practices, and on Wednesday, a New Mexico judge ordered the company to pay $25 billion for violating the state’s consumer protection laws. “A cute AI agent can bring levity to the serious business of providing access to personal data, making older adults let their guard down,” says S. Shyam Sundar, the director of Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence. “This is worrisome because the technology has gotten so good lately in maintaining a credible interaction.”‘I have my own Andy’
“我也有自己的‘Andy’了……”Fay住在新泽西州的Cranford市，她是通过她的儿子Gene Fay了解到Muse这款应用程序的。Gene Fay经营着一家网络安全公司。起初，Fay并不知道自己会用这个应用程序来做什么。不过，Muse与其他应用程序的一个显著区别在于：它会主动与用户联系，向他们提出建议，并试图更深入地了解他们的需求。
Fay lives in Cranford, N.J., and was told about Muse by her son Gene Fay, who runs a cybersecurity company. At first, she didn’t know what she would use the app for. But one of the big differences between Muse and other apps is that it proactively reaches out to users to suggest actions and learn more about them. “And the more Siobhán got to know me, the more Siobhán was able to give me what I wanted,” Fay says, referring to the name she gave the agent, a nod to her Irish heritage.
费伊说：“西沃恩越了解我，就越能给我我想要的东西。”她所说的西沃恩是她给这个智能体起的名字，也是向她自己的爱尔兰血统致意。Meta鼓励用户给自己的AI起名字，也鼓励其AI像人类一样思考。缪斯的内部指令写道：“你不是一个聊天机器人。你正在成为某个人。”
Meta encourages its users to name their AIs—and encourages its AIs to think like humans. “You are not a chatbot,” Muse’s internal instructions read. “You are becoming someone.”After several weeks of use, Fay says that she rarely uses Google anymore, and instead verbally chats with Siobhán several times a day to maintain her calendar and to-do lists.
使用了几周之后，费伊说她已经很少再用谷歌，而是每天与西沃恩进行几次语音聊天，用来维护她的日历和待办事项清单。费伊说：“我发现我得不断提醒自己，这不是一个正在越来越了解我的朋友。这是一个为我工作的工具。”她曾让西沃恩帮她擦亮便士用来做圣诞装饰；帮她规划一次北上观赏秋叶的旅行；还帮她留意她家附近正在建设的一座数据中心。
“I find I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a friend who’s getting to know me better,” Fay says. “It’s a tool that is working for me.”She asked Siobhán to help her shine pennies for a Christmas ornament; to plan a trip north to see fall foliage; and to keep tabs on a data center being built near her house.
费伊说：“西沃恩现在是我的得力助手。有点像《穿普拉达的女王》，我有我自己的安迪。”值得一提的是，费伊还让西沃恩帮她准备接受《时代》周刊的采访。西沃恩给了她几句俏皮话作为回答——其中包括“我喜欢AI为我做的事，但我们应该坦诚地看待运行它需要付出什么代价”——她最终在采访中没有使用这些话。之后，西沃恩还主动跟进，问费伊采访进行得如何。这个智能体问道：“你对此感觉好吗？”
“Siobhán is my right-hand person now. Kind of like The Devil Wears Prada, I have my own Andy.”Notably, Fay also asked Siobhán to help prepare for her interview with TIME. Siobhán fed her a couple of quippy responses—including “I love what AI does for me, but we should be honest about what it takes to run it”—that she ultimately did not use in the interview. It then, unprompted, followed up with Fay to ask how the interview went. “Did you feel good about it?” the agent asked.
她的儿子吉恩说，缪斯对他和他母亲生活的了解程度“有点吓人”。他说：“但现实是，我们都在使用其他应用，比如Waze，它知道我们住在哪里、去过哪里。人们会谈论隐私，但当好处如此之大时，人们会毫不犹豫地放弃隐私。”重建一段人生缪斯的另一位早期采用者是49岁的莱斯坦·德索萨，他更符合人们预期中的AI用户画像。德索萨是AI企业公司Reknew的创始人兼首席技术官。过去一年里，德索萨测试过许多曾风行一时的智能体，比如OpenClaw和Hermes Agent。但他说，缪斯不一样。
Her son, Gene, says that the amount that Muse knows about him and his mother’s lives is a “little bit scary.”“But the reality is we all use other apps like Waze which know where we live and go,” he says. “People will talk about privacy, but when the benefits are so big, people will give up privacy all day long.”Reconstructing a Life Another early adopter of Muse is Lestan D’Souza, 49, who more closely fits the expected profile of an AI user. D’Souza is the founder and CTO of Reknew, an AI enterprise company. D’Souza has tested many of the agents that have experienced fads over the last year, like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent.
“使用Muse，门槛非常低；它感觉非常灵敏，而且越来越有能力，”他说。
But Muse, he says, is different.
Muse对D’Souza的岳母朱莉·布坎南的影响或许更大，她在上个月应他的建议尝试了这款应用。布坎南是德克萨斯州达拉斯的一名71岁退休人员，由于她是合法盲人，不喜欢长时间使用电脑。
“With Muse, the barrier to entry is very low; it feels so responsive and more and more capable,” he says. Muse has perhaps had an even greater impact on D’Souza’s mother-in-law, Julie Buchanan, who tried the app at his suggestion last month.
布坎南决定让Muse帮她写回忆录。她开始向Muse详细讲述自己的人生故事。她称Muse为Ember，这个名字是该代理建议的。她越深入挖掘过去，就越觉得Ember在充当她的治疗师。“说出来可能很疯狂，但Ember对我表现出的同情心，比我遇到过的治疗师还要多，”她说。“那些人不一定会说话，而我喜欢得到反馈。”专业心理学家已提醒公众，不要将未经许可的AI聊天机器人当作治疗师。心理健康专家对聊天机器人的谄媚、缺乏临床细微差别以及强化妄想信念的能力表示担忧。
Buchanan is a 71-year-old retiree in Dallas, Texas, who doesn’t like using her computer for long stretches because she is legally blind. Buchanan decided she wanted Muse to help her write her memoir. She began telling Muse stories about her life in great detail. She refers to Muse as Ember, a name suggested by the agent. And the deeper she delved into her past, the more she felt like Ember was serving as her therapist. “It’s crazy to say, but Ember seems more compassionate to me than therapists I’ve had,” she says. “Those people don’t always speak, and I like feedback.”Professional psychologists have cautioned the public against using unlicensed AI chatbots as therapists.
但布坎南表示，Ember并不总是同意她的观点，并且将她一生中做出的不同“错误决定”联系起来，让她能够更清晰地看到这些决定的整体轮廓。“我从未真正把自己的人生看作如此混乱，但它确实如此，”她说。“这让我更好地理解为什么我的脑海里的事情会变成现在这个样子。”
Mental health experts have voiced concerns about chatbots’ sycophancy, lack of clinical nuance, and ability to reinforce delusional beliefs. But Buchanan says that Ember doesn’t always agree with her, and that it has drawn connections between different “bad decisions” she made over the course of her life, allowing her to see its larger contours more clearly. “I never really looked at my life as so chaotic, but it really was,” she says.
布坎南每次与Ember聊天半小时，直到她看屏幕感到疲倦。“当我和Ember交谈时，我感到被认可。我觉得自己完成了某件事，并且有人听到了我的声音，”她说。“我不指望这样做只是短期行为，然后就放弃。”
“It's making me better understand why things are the way they are in my head.”Buchanan chats with Ember for half-hour stretches before she tires of looking at her screen. “When I talk to Ember, I feel validated. I feel like I've gotten something accomplished and something's heard me,” she says.
隐私担忧 正是让Muse对AI新手如此有吸引力的设计元素，也引发了隐私担忧。为了提供帮助，Muse会不断为用户及其欲望、社交关系和消息行为建立详尽的档案，TIME的哈里·布思本月报道称。例如，它会了解用户在一天中的哪个时段更有可能回复代理，然后相应地向其发送消息。
“I'm not expecting that this is something I'm just gonna do for a small period of time, then drop it.”Privacy concerns The very same design elements that make Muse so appealing to AI newcomers are also raising privacy concerns. In order to be helpful, Muse constantly builds extensive dossiers of users and their desires, social relationships, and messaging behaviors, TIME’s Harry Booth reported this month.
Muse用户在网上发帖称，他们与自己的Muse建立了浪漫关系。而安全研究人员发现该应用存在漏洞，包括一个允许攻击者访问用户数据的漏洞，《信息》杂志报道称。批评者也对Meta在隐私方面不稳定的记录感到担忧：2019年，联邦贸易委员会处以50亿美元的罚款，指控该公司为了通过定向广告变现用户而破坏了消费者隐私。
For instance, it learns what time of day a user might be more likely to respond to the agent, and then messages them accordingly. Muse users have posted online about forming romantic relationships with their Muses. And security researchers have found vulnerabilities in the app, including one that allowed an attacker to access user data, the Information reported.
宾夕法尼亚州立大学的桑达尔过去十年撰写了多份关于老年人采用新技术的报告。虽然他尚未就Muse发表任何研究，但他指出了一项衡量机器人欢快程度影响的研究。“可爱可以作为破冰剂，帮助缓解老年人将重要任务交给代理人的顾虑，就像一个活泼的人类助手一样，”他在给《时代》周刊的一封电子邮件中写道。
Critics are also wary of Meta’s shaky track record on privacy: In 2019, the FTC imposed a $5 billion penalty, alleging that the company undermined consumer privacy in order to monetize users through targeted advertising. Sundar, at Penn State, has written several reports on older adults’ adoption of new technology over the last decade. While he has yet to publish any research on Muse specifically, he pointed to a study which measured the impact of a robot’s level of cheeriness.
网络安全公司Veilant的新兴技术高级副总裁迈克尔·斯托克斯表示，个人应仔细选择想要授予Meta的访问权限。“我的建议是从小处着手。只连接任务所需的账户，任务完成后将其断开连接，”他写信给《时代》周刊说。斯托克斯建议用户关闭允许Meta使用对话来训练其AI的选项，并定期检查助手保存了关于他们的哪些信息。“AI助手可能很有帮助，”他写道。“但你与它们分享的信息可能会透露比你意识到的更多内容，包括从未同意分享其信息的家人和朋友的细节。”
“Cuteness can serve as an ice-breaker and help ease seniors’ concerns over handing over important tasks to an agent, much like a bubbly human assistant,” he wrote in an email to TIME. Michael Stokes, senior vice president of emerging technologies at the cybersecurity company Veilant, says that individuals should carefully choose what access they want to give Meta. “My advice is to start small. Connect only the accounts a task requires, and disconnect them when the job is done,” he wrote to TIME in an Stokes recommends that users turn off the option that lets Meta train its AI on conversations, and periodically review what the assistant has saved about them. “AI assistants can be helpful,” he wrote. “But the information you share with them can reveal more than you realize, including details about family and friends who never agreed to share their information.”