Mark Zuckerberg spent years deciding what you're allowed to say. Now he wants to be the one saying it. Meta's Muse AI agent can place phone calls on your behalf — reservations, appointments, and what Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang called "calls you don't want to make," according to Engadget. The price: a paid subscription, plus whatever it costs to hand a surveillance empire the sound of your voice and the content of every call it makes.
This is the same company that throttled dissent, banned accounts, and fact-checked Americans into silence for years. Now it wants to literally speak for you — to real people, on real phone lines, without telling them a machine is on the other end.
Engadget framed the rollout as a helpful "personal assistant" upgrade and buried the critical detail: in a demo call to a Volvo dealership shared by Meta employee Matt Schlicht, Muse "doesn't explicitly identify itself as an AI agent." It says it's calling on your behalf and transcribing the call. The person on the other end has no idea they're talking to an algorithm. That's not a feature. That's deception baked into the product.
Muse already claims more than 10 million users. Meta is also letting users assign a dedicated email address to their agent, looping it into correspondence without full inbox access — another foothold in your private communications. Step by step, the platform that built an empire on your data is positioning itself as the gatekeeper for every interaction you'd rather avoid.
The tech press barely blinked. No questions about consent when an AI calls a human who doesn't know it's an AI. No questions about where the transcriptions go, who stores them, or what Meta's advertisers might do with a dataset of every restaurant reservation and doctor's appointment you'd rather outsource. Just another feature, another subscription, another slice of autonomy traded for convenience.
Meanwhile, the assault on free expression accelerates on every front. As HotAir reported, French author Michel Houellebecq now faces legal charges for criticizing Islam — a judge hit him with "complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence" for calling Islam "the dumbest of religions" and warning about demographic clashes. His attorneys told Le Monde the remarks contain "no dimension of incitement, not even implicitly." He was acquitted once before. They're coming back for seconds. The pattern is the same whether the censor is a French courtroom or a Silicon Valley content-moderation queue: the people who want to control what you say always eventually want to speak for you.
There's an alternative. As XDA Developers documented, open-source tools like Home Assistant let you automate your life — thermostats, sensors, presence detection — on your own hardware, for free, with your data staying in your own house. No subscription. No Zuck in the middle. It takes more work. Freedom usually does.
The question isn't whether AI can make your phone calls. It's whether the company that spent a decade silencing you deserves to be your voice when you're not on the line.
