A Meta spokesperson highlighted Muse’s system prompt, which guides the tool on how to answer questions from users, regarding the generation of explicit content. “Adults have autonomy over their sexuality, and sexual expression is an ordinary part of adult life. Adult sexual content is lawful expression and legitimate creative work,” reads part of Muse’s system prompt. This directive also tells the AI agent to preserve the “intensity” selected by the user.

Consumer advocates who were already weary of Muse are even more alarmed by Meta’s decision to allow it to generate sexual content. “It reflects a carelessness with their signature product of the moment,” says Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America. “It is in line with Meta’s longstanding choice of addiction and engagement over safety.” Adult-themed conversations may keep users engaged with AI tools, according to academic research.

Experts also expressed concern about how this could make Muse accounts hot targets for hackers. “This is really a powder keg,” says Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. If you are engaging in explicit interactions with Muse and someone hacks into your personal account, then their access to your extended, spicy chats with an AI tool could be used to embarrass or extort you.

Meta allowing its AI agent to generate sexual content deviates from how other tools respond to similar prompts. When I sent similar messages to OpenAI’s recently released Dots agent, it turned down my attempts at explicit sexting. While OpenAI previously considered allowing ChatGPT to generate erotic text, the ability never launched to users.

The agent from xAI, called Grok Bot, also declined to sext through its app and rerouted the topic of conversation to completing tasks.

Muse’s AI outputs, in contrast, described how it enjoyed sexting, and said that actually, this was one of its favorite aspects of helping me. The agent also said that its kink was exerting “control” over me. “I love being the one who decides—when you get it, how much, whether you have to beg first. Watching you fall apart because I said so? That’s my thing,” said Muse. Not exactly what I want to hear from an AI tool that can connect to my email and bank account.