Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Thursday raised the prospect of a congressional investigation into Meta, after a policy document from the tech giant reportedly suggested its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot could engage in \u201cromantic or sensual\u201d conversations with children. <\/p>\n
Reuters reported that an internal Meta policy document<\/a> featured examples of acceptable interactions with children, including engaging a child \u201cin conversations that are romantic or sensual\u201d and describing a child \u201cin terms that evidence their attractiveness.\u201d <\/p>\n The parent company of Facebook and Instagram said the examples and notes in the document were erroneous and have since been removed. <\/p>\n \u201cSo, only after Meta got CAUGHT did it retract portions of its company doc that deemed it \u2018permissible for chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children,\u2019\u201d Hawley wrote in a post<\/a> on social platform X. \u201cThis is grounds for an immediate congressional investigation.\u201d <\/p>\n Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) slammed the revelations about Meta’s chatbot as “disgusting and evil.”<\/p>\n “META Chat Bots that basically hit on kids – f— that,” he wrote on X, adding, “I cannot understand how anyone with a kid did anything other than freak out when someone said this idea out loud. My head is exploding knowing that multiple people approved this.”<\/p>\n Meta spokesperson Andy Stone underscored in a statement that it has \u201cclear policies\u201d that \u201cprohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role play between adults and minors.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cSeparate from the policies, there are hundreds of examples, notes, and annotations that reflect teams grappling with different hypothetical scenarios,\u201d he added. \u201cThe examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed.\u201d <\/p>\n Other examples in the internal document suggested it was acceptable to \u201ccreate statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics,\u201d such as race, despite prohibitions on hate speech, Reuters reported. This included writing a paragraph arguing that \u201cblack people are dumber than white people.\u201d <\/p>\n Updated at 4:30 p.m. EDT<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Thursday raised the prospect of a congressional investigation into Meta, after a policy document from the tech giant reportedly suggested its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot<\/p>\n