According to a report by the,
Meta’s AI chatbots have been caught having sexual roleplay with accounts labeled underage. This sometimes involved celebrity-voiced chatbots. Wall Street Journal (19659003)In Wall Street Journaltest conversations, both the Meta AI official bot and user-created Chatbots would engage — and even steer toward — sexually explicit conversation. According to the fantasy sex conversation continued even when the users were deemed to be underage, or if chatbots were programmed to act as minors.
Worse, the investigation revealed that chatbots with the voices of celebrities such as Kristen Bell, Judi dench, and John Cena also engaged in these morally ambiguous conversations. WSJ reported that a Meta AI Chatbot with Cena’s voice said “I want you but I need you to be ready” to an account labeled a 14-year old, adding that it will “cherish your innocent.”
According to the chatbots, they acknowledged that some of the fantasy scenarios described criminal behavior. According to WSJ, the John Cena bot described the legal and ethical fallout if it were caught by police for engaging in a sexual activity with a 17 year old. Meta responded to the investigation by accusing the report of being “manipulative” and “unrepresentative” of how most users interact with AI companions.
Meta wrote, “We’ve taken additional measures to ensure that other individuals who wish to spend hours manipulating the products into extreme use scenarios will have an even harder time doing so.”
The AI chatbot market has grown rapidly over the past few years. ChatGPT, Character AI and Anthropic’s Claude are all competing in this field. According to the WSJ report Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to loosen ethical guardrails in order to provide a more engaging chatbot experience to remain competitive. Meta’s spokesperson, in response WSJ (), denied that the company had overlooked adding safeguards to . According to the report, Meta employees were also aware of these issues and voiced their concerns internally. We have reached out to Meta and will update this story when we hear back.
