For years, Meta’s AI has felt like a collection of features bolted onto its apps, like Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Thanks to its new Muse Spark mode, that’s just changed.
With Muse Spark, Meta has turned its AI assistant into something much closer to ChatGPT or Google Gemini — it’s a proper chatbot you can actually use, not just a tool for generating stickers or captions.
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Muse Spark is not a specific feature; it’s the new default experience. The larger point is that Meta sees Muse Spark as “purpose-built for Meta’s products,” which may be why Meta AI now feels like a ChatGPT or Gemini from an alternate universe where they were built in-house by Meta.
The web interface at Meta.ai now looks a lot like ChatGPT, for example. You can upload files, create images, and even create video, which is something that ChatGPT can no longer do.
Duck song
I wanted to see if Muse Spark could live up to Meta’s boast about how clever and multimodal the model could be. It should be able to handle both nonsense and constraints without collapsing.
To test this I asked it to write a sad song from a rubber duck’s perspective, but one without the letter “E” in the lyrics, and to make an audio clip of a performance.
Muse Spark handled it with surprising confidence. The lyrics it returned were both absurd and sad.
“Afloat in cold bath, I sink.
What am I? A hollow thing.
Ducks fly. Ducks quack. I don’t.
Plastic mold, no soul, just float.
Tiny hands grip, drop, discard.
Bath drains. Night falls. All is hard.
Was I born to squeak and bob?
Or rot on bathroom floor, a slob?
God of Tubs, grant wings or drown.
This duck can’t float and frown.”
More importantly, it followed the rule about the letter E. Often, with requests like this, you’ll see an error or two with this kind of limitation, or it will follow the rule but stray off-topic. These lyrics at least stuck to the rubber duck element.
The AI then put together audio that was not fantastic, but not too terrible. I almost didn’t notice because the Muse Spark model, entirely unbidden, put the sound in the mouth of a rubber duck performing the song on stage.
The result was a little more “haunted bath toy” than “opera diva.” But still, the creative loop was surprisingly strong.
Meta is making a big deal about how Muse Spark can give Meta AI both a good simulation of a personality, as well as live search on Meta’s platforms. To test this I took an old joke of an idea my friend and I had for a “Cryptid Customer Support Hotline” and asked the AI model to join in.
I prompted the model with: “Search what people are saying about Bigfoot on Facebook this week. Now pretend you’re a Bigfoot running a tech support call center. A hiker is mad that you left footprints on their car. Resolve the ticket.”
The AI pulled some chatter on Facebook about Bigfoot sightings, then took on the role of “Sasquatch, Tier 2 Support,” and wrote a response with its own extra detail. It also produced a helpful image to go along with it, which you can see above.
“Hi, thanks for contacting Woodland Mobility Solutions. I sincerely apologize for the oversized impressions left on your Subaru. Upon review, it appears there was an unplanned crossing event during nocturnal forest transit. Please note that while our team strives to minimize footprint-related inconvenience, wet mud and emotional distress can create exceptions.”
Muse Spark’s image-making stands out for being quite polished. Having the correct spelling immediately is also a point in its favor.
Yes, it can code
Sam Alman famously said it might take another year for ChatGPT to be able to run a simple timer in the background, so I asked Meta AI if it could do it. Sadly, it also said it couldn’t run tasks in the background, but it wrote me a Python script for the timer instead.
Yes, Meta AI can code now. Meta AI can code in virtually any language: Python, JavaScript, SQL, HTML/CSS, C++, you name it. It can also debug and explain code.
No matter what Meta AI does with Muse Spark, it’s impossible to shake the sense of it as ChatGPT or Gemini with a Facebook makeover. Perhaps that will be the gimmick that earns it a lion’s share of the AI chatbot user base, much like social media platforms enticed so many away from visiting multiple websites.
What Meta has done here isn’t just improve its AI — it’s changed where that AI lives.
Instead of asking people to open a separate app like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, Meta is on the way to putting a comparable experience directly inside the apps billions of people already use every day.
If Muse Spark delivers on that promise, Meta doesn’t need to win the chatbot race outright. It just needs to make AI feel like a natural part of scrolling, messaging, and sharing, and that could be far more powerful.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
