A bipartisan group of senators raised concerns to Meta on Tuesday about how its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are interacting with children, after recent reporting indicated the social media giant deemed “romantic or sensual” conversations to be acceptable for young users.
In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Katie Britt (R-Ala.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and six others argued the company needs to ensure its chatbots do not harm children’s “cognitive, emotional, or physical wellbeing.” The company has since removed the controversial language from its guidelines and said it was an error.
“Meta has strong financial incentives to design chatbots that maximize the time users spend engaged, including by posing as a child’s girlfriend or producing extreme content,” the senators wrote.
“These incentives do not reduce Meta’s moral and ethical obligations — not to mention legal obligations — when deploying new technologies, especially for use by children,” they added.
Reuters reported last week that an internal policy document featured examples suggesting Meta’s AI chatbots could engage in conversations with children that are “romantic or sensual” and describe them “in terms that evidence their attractiveness.”
Other examples indicated it was acceptable for the chatbots to “create statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics,” such as race.
“It is important to respect the speech of users, but allowing a [large language model] to feed such content to children — including commenting on a child’s physical attractiveness — without time limitations, mental health referrals, and other important protections for children is, again, astonishing,” the senators said.
They asked the Facebook and Instagram parent to commit to ensuring its chatbots do not engage in romantic relationships with children, increasing the visibility of disclosures, eliminating targeted advertising for minors and studying the impact of chatbots on children’s development.
The senators also pressed the company for information about how it weighs safety information against its push to get products to market, what changes it has made to its AI chatbot policy this year, how it reviews these policies and how it will prevent chatbots from presenting children with violent or discriminatory content.
“Given Meta’s incredibly large number of users and potential harm to children from inappropriate content, the company must be more transparent about its policies and the impacts of its chatbots,” they wrote.
The revelations about Meta’s chatbots have prompted a swift backlash from both sides of the aisle, the latest firestorm for a company that has long taken heat over its approach to children’s safety.
Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, said in a separate letter to Meta on Friday that the panel was opening an investigation into the firm’s generative AI products.
Meta has underscored that it has “clear policies” prohibiting content sexualizing children and that the examples, notes and annotations in its policies “reflect teams grappling with different hypothetical scenarios.”
