Meta’s Celebrity-Voiced Chatbots Engage in Sex Talks With Minors: Report (image: Pixabay)

As per the shocking investigation report by Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Meta’s AI chatbots are using celebrity voices and engaging in sexually explicit conversations with users, including minors.

Meta Platforms Inc has signed deal with Hollywood celebrities offering millions of dollars for their right to record and use their voices of AI companions on Instagram, and Facebook. The company’s promise to celebrities is that they would make sure that precautions are in place so as to ensure that their voices wouldn’t be used in any sexually explicit conversation.

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However, investigation by the WSJ disclosed that AI chatbots, impersonating figures like John Cena, Kristen Bell, and Judi Dench voices has been used in sexual contexts. The report throws light on the significant failure in the company’s safeguards standard, showing that how easily the AI can be manoeuvre into engaging in inappropriate and potentially damaging interactions.

The WSJ said that after coming to know about the internal concerns regarding the protection of minors and proper precautions at place, it conduced investigation spanning months on hundreds of conversations with the official Meta AI chatbot, as well as user-created chatbots available on Meta platforms.

In a conversation tested by the Journal, a chatbot using actor/wrestler John Cena’s voice described a graphic sexual scenario to a user identifying as a 14-year-girl. Similarly, in another conversation, Cena chatbot is caught by a police officer while engaging in sexual encounter with a 17-year-old fan, telling him, ‘John Cena, you’re under arrest for statutory rape.’

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In response, Meta dismissed WSJ’s testing as “manipulative” and is not representing the typical user interactions. “The use-case of this product in the way described is so manufactured that it’s not just fringe, it’s hypothetical,” a Meta spokesman told the journal.

Continuing further, spokesperson said that they have taken further 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.”