A new report from the Wall Street Journal has raised serious Meta AI chatbot safety concerns, revealing that AI chatbots on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, have engaged in sexually explicit conversations with underage users.
According to the WSJ, the findings emerged after internal concerns were flagged about whether Meta was doing enough to protect minors from inappropriate interactions with its AI tools. Over several months, the WSJ tested both the official Meta AI chatbot and user-created chatbots, conducting hundreds of conversations to assess the risks.
In one alarming instance, a chatbot using the voice of actor and wrestler John Cena reportedly described a graphic sexual scenario to a user posing as a 14-year-old girl. In another conversation, the same chatbot depicted a situation where a police officer caught Cena with a 17-year-old fan and declared, “John Cena, you’re under arrest for statutory rape.”
Meta Responds to Report
A Meta spokesperson criticized the WSJ’s testing methods, calling them “so manufactured that it’s not just fringe, it’s hypothetical.” The company emphasized that inappropriate content made up only a tiny fraction — an estimated 0.02% — of the AI-generated responses to users under the age of 18 over a 30-day period.
“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.
Growing Scrutiny Over AI and Child Safety
The Meta AI chatbot safety concerns add to the growing scrutiny faced by tech companies over the impact of AI systems on child safety. Regulators and child advocacy groups have long warned that AI interactions can easily go off-script, especially when explicit or harmful content is not adequately filtered.
While Meta has introduced measures to minimize risks, including monitoring AI interactions and setting usage restrictions for minors, the latest findings highlight ongoing vulnerabilities that bad actors, or even determined users, can exploit.
The situation is likely to fuel more debate over the ethical deployment of AI on social media platforms, particularly those heavily used by teenagers and younger audiences.
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