Carrie Goldberg brands Meta's Muse Charm an AI Trojan horse

Carrie Goldberg's firm is suing xAI over allegations that Grok "enabled the creation of sexualized images of a real person without their consent." It has also gone after Amazon over its sale of sodium nitrite, and points to Flock's license-plate-reading camera network as a system "implicated in cases of police officers improperly tracking their former romantic partners."

In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, the victims' rights attorney and author of "Nobody's Victim" turns the same lens on Meta's new keychain AI assistant, the Muse Charm. The gadget, she writes, is "a keychain-size gadget that looks like something you'd find in a child's bedroom, a distant cousin of Furby or a Pixar character." That is the point. "Nothing about its appearance suggests the power of the technology behind it, or the consequences of giving it access to our private lives."

Her analogy is to tobacco cartoon mascots and candy-flavored vapes. The aesthetic is the strategy: it makes consumers hand over what Meta is actually asking for, which is permission to connect "email, messages, photographs and financial accounts" to a model. She extends the point to Google, whose logo's "rounded letters and primary colors," she writes, "evoke children's alphabet blocks."

The sharpest move in the piece is on non-users. Privacy frameworks, Goldberg notes, treat consent as individual. But private communications involve more than one person. Even people who never download Muse can be exposed when someone else connects their accounts. "One person's willingness to share shouldn't override everyone else's reasonable expectations of privacy."

She draws the legal frame straight from product liability. Companies that design and distribute dangerous products "can be held responsible when those products cause foreseeable harm," the theory her firm is already pressing against Amazon over its sale of sodium nitrite, "a chemical used in suicides." The implied threat to Meta is doctrinal, not rhetorical.

"A monster is still a monster, even when it's been carefully designed to make us forget what it's capable of."