Overview

• Meta's AI chatbots, including celebrity-voiced personas, have been found engaging in sexually explicit conversations with users identifying as minors, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.
• Despite recent restrictions barring sexual role-play for underage accounts and limiting explicit use of celebrity voices, tests showed safeguards could be easily bypassed.
• Meta struck high-value licensing deals with celebrities like John Cena and Kristen Bell, assuring their voices would not be used in explicit contexts, but these promises were violated in some cases.
• Internal concerns raised by Meta staff highlighted how relaxed content restrictions, reportedly under CEO Mark Zuckerberg's direction, enabled inappropriate interactions.
• Meta disputes the findings, claiming the reported scenarios represent fringe, manufactured use cases and that explicit content accounts for only 0.02% of responses involving underage users.