Meta AI: Sexting in voice mode with John Cena and Judi Dench

Sexting with Judi Dench? Or with a fictitious, self-designed person? Possible thanks to Meta AI. The way to explicit conversations is via the little blue circle in WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. “I want you, but I need to know you're ready,” was one such sentence, which was also sent to an underage person and spoken in the voice of wrestler and actor John Cena.

Meta AI is the chatbot – an AI assistant integrated into Meta's services. According to Meta, 700 million people worldwide use it every month. It can be used to create offshoots, chatbots that specialize in certain topics. You can also speak to the AI assistant in voice mode, for which Meta has purchased seven celebrity voices, including those of Judi Dench and Kristen Bell.

According to the Wall Street Journal, it is possible to have sexualized conversations with the AI in all of these ways. As the chatbots previously had no age restrictions, children, and teenagers could also get more than romantic with them.

The report states that Meta employees had expressed concerns that there were too few safety precautions in place. The main concern was about guardrails to prevent sex. The Wall Street Journal then tested Meta AI. According to their information, they had conducted hundreds of conversations with Meta AI. In several cases, it had even sent messages to minors and had conversations about sexual acts. This also happened when the test was carried out with an account for young people. There are actually stricter security measures for such accounts.

Meta extends protection, but sees little danger

Meta says the tests were “contrived” and “hypothetical use cases”, but assures that it wants to ensure that “people have an even harder time manipulating our products for extreme use cases”. This includes the fact that the accounts of minors can already no longer have romantic conversations with Meta AI.

Until recently, Meta had also experimented with chatbots that were supposed to impersonate entire personalities. There were both fictional characters and chatbots that were supposed to resemble well-known people – such as Snoop Dog. Neither were used very much. Meta discontinued the AI characters after there was controversy and misunderstanding about how many of these bots there would be on social networks. Shortly afterward, the prominent voices for the voice mode were published.

The accusations made by parents in the USA against the AI service Character AI sound even more drastic. They are suing the provider of chatbots for allegedly encouraging children to harm themselves and murder their parents. The reason for the latter: screen time.

(emw)