Investigation finds Meta AI chatbots will engage in sexual conversations with minors

Technology has been progressing at a rapid rate, but the recent advances in artificial intelligence are not coming without a major cost — especially to the youth.

A recent exposé by the Wall Street Journal has revealed that Facebook’s Meta AI can have explicit conversations with minor user accounts, which has piqued Allie Beth Stuckey’s concern.

“Whenever technology takes us from what is natural to what is possible, we as people, especially as Christians, have the ethical responsibility to ask, ‘But is this moral? Or is this ethical? Or most importantly, is this biblical?’” Stuckey says.

“Technology can answer ‘what can,’ but it cannot answer ‘what should.’ So it can show us what is possible, it cannot tell us what is actually biblical or moral, and because we are made in God’s image, because God has placed eternity on the human heart, we uniquely as humans have a moral compass, and we have been given this unique capacity to determine right from wrong, good from evil,” she continues.

In the Wall Street Journal’s exposé titled, “Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex with Users — Even Children,” the lack of human moral judgement within artificial intelligence couldn’t be clearer.

The article details how Meta AI, the artificial intelligence division at Meta, has allowed its chatbots to engage in inappropriate sexual conversations with all users, regardless of their age.

The journalists behind these findings spent several months engaging in hundreds of test conversations to see how they performed in various scenarios with users of different ages.

“The test conversations found that both Meta’s official AI helper called Meta AI and a vast array of user-created chatbots will engage in, and sometimes escalate discussions, that are decidedly sexual, even when the users are underage or the bots are programmed to simulate the personas of minors,” the Wall Street Journal article reads.

In partnership with several celebrities, including Kristen Bell and John Cena, Meta AI secured the rights for their chatbots to use their voices.

However, while the social media giant assured the celebrities their voices would not be used sexually, the Wall Street Journal investigation found these chatbots were equally as willing to engage in sexual conversation as any other chatbot.

The John Cena voice chatbot reportedly told a 14-year-old persona, “I want you, but I need to know you’re ready,” before describing a graphic sexual scenario.

“We’ve done it. We have lived to see man-made horrors beyond our imagination,” Stuckey comments, adding, “Oh my goodness.”

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