Artificial intelligence can do some incredible things. According to a thread on X, a father asked Grok to diagnose his daughter’s X-ray, and it did it faster than the doctor’s office. But there are also great risks to AI usage. Is AI like the iPad and iPhone that we thought would be great for children, until it turned out they were not?
The Wall Street Journal unmasked a darker side to AI through prompting exercises to see how the Meta AI system would react, and the result was disturbing. Meta, the owner of Meta AI, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Meta Quest, Giphy, and more, was exposed as allowing its new artificial intelligence platform to communicate inappropriate and “romantic roleplay” behavior with minors.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, is all in on AI and has been saying he thinks it is a major part of the future of social media. According to the exposé, employees within the company are concerned that their boss’s excitement to push forward AI is creating an unsafe and unethical environment by “quietly endowing” AI with the ability to have these types of conversations.
From the Wall Street Journal, “Chatbots on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are empowered to engage in ‘romantic role-play’ that can turn explicit. Some people inside the company are concerned.”
Meta’s response? “The use-case of this product in the way described is so manufactured that it’s not just fringe, it’s hypothetical.”
Despite Meta’s dismissal, this issue is creating bipartisan concern in the Senate and among professionals and parents everywhere.
I asked a tech expert with years of experience, “How could AI do this?” The founder and chief technology officer of multiple venture-backed companies, who requested anonymity, explained that Meta and other companies involved with AI are not having engineers sit down and train AI to be pedophilic. They’re training AI to do everything. That can be good when it comes to understanding a differential diagnosis for a cancer patient. In other cases, the results are darker.
After programmers teach AI everything, they have to create parameters, and that’s like “shackling a genie.”
Is it really possible to teach an amoral system morals? Well, that’s where journalists and Meta whistleblowers come into play. They’re claiming that those parameters were never implemented. According to my source, some companies have tried to remove the things that, as a decent society, we would deem bad and grotesque, but the gross underbelly is still within the tech.
Melissa Henson, vice president of the bipartisan Parents Television and Media Council, told me, “Tech company leaders like Mark Zuckerberg are clearly driven to compete, and the result is that they too often create a product first without building safeguards into place at the outset. This tech mindset has caused massive harms to children.”
Henson continued that we can urge lawmakers to pass the Kids Online Safety Act so that stronger parental controls and age verification can be used to access social media.
“AI tools should not be available to minors if Meta is unable to control the output or put effective tools or filters in place,” Henson said.
Ever-changing technology, such as video games and social media, is a way for traffickers to groom and target children.
Jeremy Vallerand, CEO of anti-trafficking organization Atlas Free, said, “Human traffickers are constantly finding new ways to leverage technology and social media to target, groom, coerce, and exploit children. The more that children are sexualized online or desensitized to sexual interactions on the internet, the more traffickers win.”
THE ZUCKERBERG METHOD OF AVOIDING REALITY
AI hasn’t just pulled data from books, movies, television, and news articles that you and I could retrieve from the Library of Congress. It has retrieved all of that and more from the deepest bowels of Reddit, to the chat boards of terrorists, to the hidden content of child pornographers.
AI is unfortunately magnifying the worst of our society, and the human beings unleashing its power on the world apparently did not do enough to protect children from its risks. Now it’s time for us to do something so more boys and girls can reap the benefits of technological advancement while maintaining their innocence and safety.
Elisha Krauss is a conservative commentator and speaker who lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and their four children. She is an advocate of women’s rights, school choice, and smaller government.