{"id":857429,"date":"2026-09-23T05:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T05:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/857429\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T05:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T05:34:14","slug":"surprise-metas-latest-ai-gimmick-is-just-underpaid-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/857429\/","title":{"rendered":"Surprise, Meta’s latest AI gimmick is just underpaid humans"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most overvalued technology in the history of the world has once again been revealed to be a cover for cheap human labor, the Scooby Gang at 404 Media reported today<\/a>. In this case, Meta\u2019s latest AI product, Muse, which purportedly makes calls for humans too afraid to call a barbershop, is actually just humans making calls to other humans. Meta\u2019s chief AI officer Alexander Wang claimed last week that Muse was expanding to phone beta use for making outbound calls to US businesses. That AI could feasibly make restaurant reservations or, we guess, refill a ketamine prescription if it worked. But 404 has unmasked the ghost haunting Meta\u2019s creepy, bot-ridden amusement park, revealing \u201ca human agent layer\u201d doing the heavy lifting. The social media giant, which hasn\u2019t made a worthwhile product in two decades, would\u2019ve gotten away with it too if it wasn\u2019t for those snooping reporters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An internal message board post to employees, reviewed by 404, shows the roundabout ways Meta obfuscates its human labor. \u201cMuse doesn\u2019t just dial a number. It calls a business on your behalf, handles the conversation, completes your request, and reports back with a transcript and a summary,\u201d the post about Muse\u2019s capabilities reads. \u201cIt also no longer works alone. Muse is now able to hand requests to a trained human agent, who places the call and works it through.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Okay, so, Meta\u2019s Muse AI makes calls on users\u2019 behalf, communicates with the person on the other end of the line, and sends the user a transcript afterward, but only if a \u201ctrained human agent\u201d makes the call and handles the communication. Does this simply mean Muse is an auto-dialer with transcription capabilities? It sure seems like it. But a much easier way to understand Meta\u2019s latest product is to think of it like every other Meta product: Completely useless unless you\u2019re a scammer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some Meta employees have been praising Muse on X, where AI boosters and AI agents alike can share ever more hype about the technology that\u2019s boiling the Earth. Internally, though, Meta employees realize that a human-driven AI making calls for users has potential for \u201cso much negative PR,\u201d warning co-workers on the board that \u201cIt could portray us as \u2018their AI is not good enough so they still need humans\u2019 kind of coverage for this launch. Another post, with a fairly lucid handle of the situation, wrote, \u201cPlease PLEASE do not release this as-is and at least make this a user preference if we absolutely must launch this. Please.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is hardly the first time AI has been revealed to be nothing more than underpaid and hidden laborers, typically from countries like Venezuela and Kenya<\/a>, where workers train and moderate AI models. Here in the U.S., that means people cleaning up human feces from the back of Waymos<\/a>. Companies would like customers to think this is all magic, but as always, it\u2019s simply exploitation that solves the problem of calling people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The most overvalued technology in the history of the world has once again been revealed to be a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-857429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}