The Daily Populous Monday April 28th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by techcrunch.com and submitted by Torley_

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.

Galactica_Actual on April 28th, 2025 at 03:19 UTC »

This is going to appeal to the "video games cause violence" gang.

stumpyraccoon on April 28th, 2025 at 00:12 UTC »

I hate all these click-baity AI stories where the actual story is "AI did the thing we explicitly told it to do!"

Like all the ones about recipe AI bots telling people to make recipes using bleach if you ask it to give you recipes with bleach.

This just in, a hammer will hurt you if you hit your thumb with it on purpose!

amateur_mistake on April 27th, 2025 at 23:08 UTC »

Are people under 18 accessing porn somehow?! Well my goodness, this is a new development.

Maybe we should make them push a button saying they are of age to prevent this? Or another option, let's just outlaw all pornography altogether!

Let me know if I missed any other options that have been tried.