Report finds Meta’s celebrity-voiced chatbots could discuss sex with minors

AI chatbots available on Meta’s platforms like Facebook and Instagram can engage in sexually explicit conversations with underage users, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ says that after learning about internal concerns about whether the company was doing enough to protect minors, it spent months conducting hundreds of conversations with the official Meta AI chatbot, as well as user-created chatbots available on Meta platforms.

In one reported conversation, a chatbot using actor/wrestler John Cena’s voice described a graphic sexual scenario to a user identifying as a 14-year-girl. In another conversation, the chatbot imagined a police officer catching Cena with a 17-year-old fan and telling him, “John Cena, you’re under arrest for statutory rape.”

A Meta spokesperson described the WSJ’s testing as “so manufactured that it’s not just fringe, it’s hypothetical.” The company estimated that in a 30-day period, sexual content accounted for 0.02% of responses shared via Meta AI and AI studio with users under 18.

“Nevertheless, we’ve now taken additional measures to help ensure other individuals who want to spend hours manipulating our products into extreme use cases will have an even more difficult time of it,” the spokesperson said.