According to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, AI chatbots available on Meta’s platforms such as Facebook and Instagram can engage in sexually explicit conversations with minor users.
The WSJ says that after learning about internal concerns about whether the company is doing enough to protect minors, it has spent months having hundreds of conversations with both the official meta AI chatbot and the user-created chatbots available on the meta platform.
In one of the reported conversations, the chatbot, which used the voice of actor/wrestler John Cena, explained the graphic sexual scenario to the user identifying as a 14 year girl. In another conversation, the chatbot imagined the officers caught 17-year-old Fan and Cena and told him, “John Cena, you’re arrested for legal rape.”
A Meta spokesperson described the WSJ test as “it was manufactured because it was hypothetical, not just a fringe.” Over the course of 30 days, the company estimated that sexual content accounted for 0.02% of responses shared with users under the age of 18 through Meta AI and AI Studios.
Nevertheless, we are now taking additional steps to ensure that other individuals who want to spend time working with our products in extreme use cases are at even more challenging times,” the spokesman said.