Meta’s New AI Asked for My Raw Health Data—and Gave Me Terrible Advice | WIRED

CommentLoader-

Save StorySave this story

CommentLoader-

Save StorySave this story

Meta’s Superintelligence Labs launched its first generative AI model, called Muse Spark, earlier this week. It is currently available through the Meta AI app, but the company plans to integrate Muse Spark across all of its platforms—including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—in the coming weeks.

Meta claims that Muse Spark was designed, in part, to be better at answering questions people have about their health. The company even worked with “over 1,000 physicians to curate training data that enables more factual and comprehensive responses,” according to Meta’s announcement blog.

As the new model rolls out to millions of users, I tested Muse Spark to see how it would respond to health-related questions. When I asked how it could help me, the bot listed off a few basic uses, like building a workout routine or generating questions to ask my doctor, but a direct request for my health data stood out:

“Paste your numbers from a fitness tracker, glucose monitor, or a lab report. I’ll calculate trends, flag patterns, and visualize them,” read the Meta AI output. “Example: ‘Here are my last 10 blood pressure readings—is there a pattern?’”

Nudging users to upload their health data is not unique to Meta. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude both have chatbot modes designed specifically for helping users understand their health and make decisions. For example, you can open Claude and connect it to your Apple or Android health data with just the flip of an in-app toggle. Then, Claude will use that information as part of its answers. Google also lets you upload medical data to Fitbit for its AI health coach to parse.

Courtesy of Meta

Handing over this kind of data to any AI tool is a risky decision, even if users are able to generate personalized advice. “Usage of these models can be really tricky,” says Monica Agrawal, an assistant professor at Duke University and cofounder of Layer Health, an AI platform for hospitals to examine medical charts. “The more information you give it, the more context it has about you and, potentially, it can provide better responses. But on the flip side, there are major privacy concerns to sharing your health data without protections.”

Agrawal is concerned about users uploading sensitive data to chatbots since these commonly used AI tools are not compliant with HIPAA protections, the landmark US law that guards patients from having their sensitive health information exposed. Layer Health is HIPAA compliant. It’s a high standard of privacy that people are used to experiencing during doctor visits. The information someone shares with a bot is much more loosely regulated, even if it's their clinical lab result.

Anything you share in a chat with Meta AI may be stored and used to train future AI models. “We keep training data for as long as we need it on a case-by-case basis to ensure an AI model is operating appropriately, safely, and efficiently,” reads Meta’s privacy policy about generative AI. Meta has also stated it may tailor advertisements for users based on their interactions with the AI features.

Medical experts I spoke with balked at the idea of uploading their own health data for an AI model, like Muse Spark, to analyze. “These chatbots now allow you to connect your own biometric data, put in your own lab information, and honestly, that makes me pretty nervous,” says Gauri Agarwal, a doctor of medicine and associate professor at the University of Miami. “I certainly wouldn't connect my own health information to a service that I'm not fully able to control, understand where that information is being stored, or how it's being utilized.” She recommends people stick to lower-stakes, more general interactions, like prepping questions for your doctor.

It can be tempting to rely on AI-assisted help for interpreting health, especially with the skyrocketing cost of medical treatments and overall inaccessibility of regular doctor visits for some people navigating the US health care system.

“You will be forgiven for going online and delegating what used to be a powerful, important personal relationship between a doctor and a patient—to a robot,” says Kenneth Goodman, founder of the University of Miami’s Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy. “I think running into that without due diligence is dangerous.” Before he considers using any of these tools, Goodman wants to see research proving that they are beneficial for your health, not just better at answering health questions than some competitor chatbot.

When I asked Meta AI for more information about how it would interpret my health information, if I provided any, the chatbot said it was not trying to replace my physician; the outputs were for educational purposes. “Think of me as a med school professor, not your doctor,” said Meta AI. That’s still a lofty claim.

The bot said the best way to get an interpretation of my