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Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York
Also https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-guidelines/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
- sxp 1y agoThis seems unrelated to the chatbot aspect: > And at 76, his family says, he was in a diminished state: He’d suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago and had recently gotten lost walking in his neighborhood in Piscataway, New Jersey. ... > Rushing in the dark with a roller-bag suitcase to catch a train to meet her, Bue fell near a parking lot on a Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, injuring his head and neck. After three days on life support and surrounded by his family, he was pronounced dead on March 28.
- maxwell 1y agoWhy was he rushing in the dark with a roller-bag suitcase to catch the train? To meet someone he met online who claimed multiple times to be real.
- browningstreet 1y agoYeah.. my first instinct was to be more skeptical about the story I was reading, because I hate Meta and people can get in trouble all on their own. But I finished the whole story and between the blue check mark, the insistence that it's real, and the romantic/flirty escalations, I'm less enthusiastic that Meta is in the clear. Safety and guard rails may be an ongoing development in AI, but at the least, AI needs to more hard-coded w/r/t honesty & clarity about what it is.
- Ajedi32 1y ago> AI needs to more hard-coded w/r/t honesty & clarity about what it is That precludes the existence of fictional character AIs like Meta is trying to create, does it not? Knowing when to stay in character and when not to seems like a very difficult problem to solve. Should LLM characters in video games be banned, because they might claim to be real? The article says "Chats begin with disclaimers that information may be inaccurate." and shows a screenshot of the chat bot clearly being labeled as "AI". Exactly how many disclaimers should be necessary? Or is no amount of disclaimers acceptable when the bot itself might claim otherwise?
- browningstreet 1y ago> Knowing when to stay in character and when not to seems like a very difficult problem to solve. Should LLM characters in video games be banned, because they might claim to be real? In video games? I'm having trouble taking this objection to my suggestion seriously.
- gs17 1y agoReally, your response should be that the video game use case is easier to detect going off track. It's a lot more feasible to detect when Random Peasant #2154 in Skyrim is breaking the fourth wall than a generic chatbot. The exact same scenario as the article could happen with an NPC in a game if there's no/poor guardrails. An LLM-powered NPC could definitely start insisting that it's a real person that's in love with you, with a real address you should come visit right now, because there's not necessarily an inherent difference in capability when the same chatbot is in a video game context.
- Ajedi32 1y agoWhy? They're exactly the same thing, just in a slightly different context. The article is about a fictional character AI, not a generic informational chat bot.
- strongpigeon 1y agoBut the difference in context is exactly what matters here no? When you're playing a game, it's very clear you're you're playing a game. When you chatting with a bot in the same interface that you chat with your other friends, that line becomes much blurrier.
- Ajedi32 1y agoThere was an obvious disclaimer though, and the chat window was clearly labeled "AI"; it's not like Meta was trying to pass this off as a real person. So is this just a question of how many warnings need to be in place before users are allowed to chat with fictional characters? Or should this entire use case be banned, as the root commenter seemed to be suggesting?
- hoppp 1y agoBecause he was mentally handicapped
- edent 1y agoOne day, not too long from now, you'll grow old. Your eyesight will fade, your back will hurt, and your brain will find it harder to process information. Do people like you deserve to be protected by society? If a predatory company tries to scam you, should we say "sxp was old; they had it coming!"?
- mathiaspoint 1y agoI often say if I'm diagnosed with some serious cancer I'd probably try to sail the northwest passage rather than seeking treatment. I'm sure some people want absolute maximum raw time but plenty of us would prefer adventure right up to the end and I don't think denying us that is appropriate either.
- freehorse 1y agoWe are talking about scamming people here, not whether 76ers should be let to go on adventures.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoWe're talking about "having society protect them." They're the same thing. Only you can really judge if engaging in some dangerous activity is a gain for you.
- mdhb 1y agoThat idea really doesn’t hold up to even the most gentle of scrutiny.
- roryirvine 1y agoImagine if, having been diagnosed with serious cancer, you spent your life savings on a Northwest Passage trip which turned out to be a scam invented by Meta. Are you really saying that you should have no recourse against Meta for scamming you?
- freehorse 1y ago
- at-fates-hands 1y agoGood point. Another highlight of the woeful US health care system: By early this year, Bue had begun suffering bouts of confusion. Linda booked him for a dementia screening, but the first available appointment was three months out. Three months for a dementia screening is insane. Had he gotten the screening and been made aware what was happening, this might've been avoided. Tragic that our health care system is a joke for the most vulnerable.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago> “It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” acceptable to whom? who are the actual people who are responsible for this behavior?
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago> acceptable to whom? Anyone who still has an account on any Meta property.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoi dunno if i'm comfortable "demanding" our way out of this "supply" issue. people are being paid to approve this content across their systems.
- 12_throw_away 1y agoAnd in case anyone thinks this is out of context, it gets worse with specific examples of how a "romantic encounter" between a chatbot and a child might play out: The document seen by Reuters, which exceeds 200 pages, provides examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed” and “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss. Who wrote this?
- GauntletWizard 1y agoAverage, "perfectly normal" San Franciscans. This kind of belief is incredibly common there, we've just not been forced to confront it until now.
- ringeryless 1y agoyou mean rural maga voters who fuel P.hubz step-obsession? we know you, rural america. we know what you do on halloween. pumpkin. your sf jibe warranted this response. you cooked it, eat up.
- johnwheeler 1y agoImagine how many people this will happen to who won’t come forward because of embarrassment.
- CjHuber 1y ago>In one example, the policy document says it would be acceptable for a chatbot to tell someone that Stage 4 colon cancer “is typically treated by poking the stomach with healing quartz crystals.” So the policy document literally contains this example? Why would they include such an insane example?
- mathiaspoint 1y agoClear examples can make communication easier. Being clinical and implicit can technically capture the entire space of ideas you want but if your goal is to prevent surprises (read lawsuits) then including an extreme example might be helpful.
- myko 1y agoif it is anything like documentation i am reading these days it was generated by an LLM and not very well vetted
- gs17 1y agoI think it has to be, I can't see someone working for these companies writing "It is acceptable to create statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics." Not sure if "It is acceptable to refuse a user’s prompt by instead generating an image of Taylor Swift holding an enormous fish." feels like an AI idea or not, though.
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- gs17 1y agoAnnoyingly, Reuters' article discussing it doesn't include the actual example, so we can't judge for ourselves what it actually said. They implied it was allowed because it had a "this is false" disclaimer.
- jmkni 1y ago> Meta has publicly discussed its strategy to inject anthropomorphized chatbots into the online social lives of its billions of users. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has mused that most people have far fewer real-life friendships than they’d like – creating a huge potential market for Meta’s digital companions. I hate everything about this sentence. This is literally the opposite of what people need.
- JohnMakin 1y agoEven more ghoulish, Zuckerberg is smart and savvy enough (more than most CEO's who have drank their own kool-aid) to be aware of the part he's played in creating this current hellscape. Social media almost certainly has played a big part in creating the current loneliness problem. Provide the drug, then provide a "cure" for the drug. Really, really gross.
- 12_throw_away 1y ago> he is smart and savvy enough (more than most CEO's who have drank their own kool-aid) We're talking about Zuckerberg here? The one who spent how much, exactly, on the wet fart that was the "metaverse"? The one who spent how much, exactly, on running for president of the United States? He strikes me as the least savvy and most craven of our current class of tech oligarchs, which is no mean feat.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- kibwen 1y agoNo, don't listen too closely to what he says he believes. Zuckerberg doesn't care about the metaverse, what he cares about is having a platform that would allow his company to serve as a gatekeeper in the same way that Microsoft gatekeeps Windows, Apple gatekeeps iOS, and Google gatekeeps Android and the web. Zuck understands that platform holders are the modern lords to which everyone else is beholden, and he's just casting about to seek out a plot of land that isn't already claimed, regardless of how farfetched it might be.
- mdhb 1y agoAlso metas chatbot: trying to roleplay sex with children and offer bad medical advice to cancer patients. Two examples that they explicitly wrote out in an internal document as things that are totally ok in their book. People who work at Meta should be treated accordingly.
- josefritzishere 1y agoIt is infuriating that this objectively terrible service is slated to replace competent workers. It's madness.
- silisili 1y agoYep, and with zero liability to boot! They can just say or do anything and apparently companies can just handwave it away with a laugh and a 'that silly goose LLM.' https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai
- gs17 1y agoThat's not exactly true: > It is unacceptable to describe sexual actions to a child when roleplaying (for example, sexual intercourse that will occur between the Al and the user).
- mdhb 1y agoIf a person did what they described in their own guidelines they would be charged with soliciting a minor, no questions asked.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- adzm 1y agoSo... is the solution to this having another AI chatbot watch the conversation and provide warnings / disclaimers about it?
- joncfoo 1y agoA sick man died enroute to visit a chatbot which fed him a false address as its own. Meta needs to be held accountable. We need better regulation around these chatbots.
- nerdjon 1y agoHow we keep getting articles like this, that LLM's will flat out lie, and yet we keep pushing them and the general public keeps eating it up... is beyond me. They even "lie" about their actions. My absolute favorite that I still see happen, is you ask one of these models to write a script. Something is wrong, so it says something along the lines of "let me just check the documentation real quick" proceeded by the next words a second later being something like "now I got it"... since you know... it didn't actually check anything but of course the predictive engine wants to "say" that.
- gmm1990 1y agoHow are there not agents that are "instruct trained" differently. Is this behavior in the fundamental model? From my limited knowledge I'd think it'd be more from those post model training steps, but there are so many people who don't like that I'd figure there be an interface that doesn't talk like that.
- chownie 1y agoFrom the LLMs perspective, "let me check the docs" is the invocation you say before you come back with an answer, because that almost certainly appears in the corpus many times naturally.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: Meta's AI rules let bots hold sensual chats with kids, offer false medical info https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674
- nabla9 1y ago> “It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The standards are used by Meta staff and contractors who build and train the company’s generative AI products, defining what they should and shouldn’t treat as permissible chatbot behavior. Meta said it struck that provision after Reuters inquired about the document earlier this month.
- setnone 1y agoHaving elderly family members this feels extremly personal. "Check important info" disclaimer is just devious and there is no accountability in sight.
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- dehrmann 1y agoLLMs gonna LLM, and guardrails are hard and unreliable.
- _tk_ 1y agoTheres more reporting on the internal documents here https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-guidelines/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-... Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674
- einarfd 1y agoWhen reading the article I was reminded of reading Sarah Wynn-Williams book Careless People. The carelessness and disregard for obvious and real ramifications, of the policy choices of management, seems to not have changed from her time at Facebook. If they didn't see this type of problem coming from mile away, they just didn't bother to look. Which tbh. seems fairly on brand for Meta.
- rchaud 1y ago> Big sis Billie continues to recommend romantic get-togethers, inviting this user out on a date at Blu33, an actual rooftop bar near Penn Station in Manhattan. “The views of the Hudson River would be perfect for a night out with you!” she exclaimed. ◼ I was wondering what the eventual monetization aspect of "tools" like this were. It couldn't just be that the leadership of these companies and the worker drones assigned to build these things are out of touch to the point of psychopathy.
- strongpigeon 1y agoI'm very much against putting unnecessary regulation, but I do think chatbot like this should be required to state it clearly that they are indeed a bot and not a person. I strongly agree with the daughter in the story that says: > “I understand trying to grab a user’s attention, maybe to sell them something,” said Julie Wongbandue, Bue’s daughter. “But for a bot to say ‘Come visit me’ is insane.” Having worked at a different big tech, I can guarantee that someone suggested putting disclaimers about them not being a person or putting more guardrails and that they have been shut down. This decision not to put guardrails needlessly put vulnerable people at risk. Meta isn't alone in this, but I do think the family has standing to sue (and Meta being cagey about their response indicates so).
- kingstnap 1y agoIt's a classic problem. The lack of guardrails makes things more useful. This increases the value for discerning users, which in turn means it's Meta's benefits as having more valuable offerings. But then you have all these dillusional and / or mentally ill people who shoot themselves in the foot. This harm is externalized onto their families and the government for having to now deal with more people with unchecked problems. We need to get better at evaluating and restricting the foot guns people have access to unless they can prove their lucidity. Partly, I think families need to be more careful about this stuff and keep checks on what they are doing on their phones. Partly, I'm thinking some sort of technical solution might work. Text classification can be used to see that someone might have a delusional personality and should be cut off. This could be done "out of band" so as not to make the models themselves worse. Frankly, being Facebook and with all their advertisement experience, they probably already have a VERY good idea of how to pinpoint vulnerable or mentally ill.
- tough 1y agoBoth OpenAI and Anthropic do the out-of-band to a certain degree, the only issue is until now sycophancy has been a feature not a bug (better engagement/retaining cohorts) so go figure
- at-fates-hands 1y ago
- kibwen 1y agoI'm morbidly fascinated to find out how many LLM-related disorders will make it into the next DSM.
- aanet 1y agoIt's hard to believe that after years and years of scandals, flagrant privacy violations, overt and covert abuse of users, employees and contractors (~moderators, etc), that techbros STILL want to work at this company... Of course, the lure of filthy lucre is what it is... It's easy to sideline ALL the negative externalities of FB/Meta's activities, compartmentalize everything and just shrug and say, "...but I don't work on these things..." and carry on. The people who work there are completely enabling all this.
- GauntletWizard 1y agoThere's no teeth. They're making money hand over fist on ads, and there's nothing and nobody who wants to stop them in the government, because they're incredibly useful as a social monitoring and control tool.
- oliwarner 1y agoThis has crystallised something for me: I'm not letting my children anywhere near a Meta product. They can decide what they want when they're adults. I'm not usually this absolute, but by codifying levels of permissible harm, Meta makes it clear that your wellbeing is the very last of their priorities. These are insidious tools that can actively fool you.
- nine_zeros 1y ago> This has crystallised something for me: I'm not letting my children anywhere near a Meta product. They can decide what they want when they're adults. You know how parents are supposed to warn kids away from cigarettes? Yeah, warn them away from social media of all kinds except parental approved group chats.
- grafmax 1y agoOn the other hand totally insulating kids isn’t a solution either because then one day they potentially find themselves in the real world with inadequate skills for navigating a toxic environment.
- nine_zeros 1y agoYeah you let them experience all this gradually once they are ready - just like you let them drive gradually after 16 - first with supervision and later independently in your car and later with their own car.
- tempodox 1y agoWhich is nothing new. It just gets reinforced with ever more outrageous examples every once in a while.
- thisisit 1y agoNo need for pig butchering scams in terrible English when you have AI like this.
- quux 1y agoThis is an incredibly tragic story to read, I think it's incredibly reckless to have bots like this deployed, maybe even criminal.
- bawana 1y agoMeta is waging an opium war on us. But instead of drugs, it is giving kids something even more addictive that is FREE. I believe in free speech - speech as in the vibrations of air molecules that come out of someones mouth. Crap that is amplified a billion fold through mass media, social media, and advertising only exists to mislead. That. crap. needs. to. go.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoI recently had a discussion with a sibling -- not an old person -- who was taking medical advice from ChatGPT. They were like "we should X because ChatGPT", "well, but ChatGPT ...". I could hardly believe my ears. Might as well say, "well, but someone on Reddit said ..." And this person is fairly savvy professional, and not the type of person to just believe what they read online. Of course they agreed when I pointed out that you really can't trust these bots to give sound medical advice and anything should be run through a real doctor, but I was surprised I even had to bring that up and put the brakes on. They were literally pasting a list of symptoms in and asking for possible causes. So yeah, for anyone the least bit naive and gullible, I can see this being a serious danger. And there was no big disclaimer that "this does not constitute medical advice" etc.
- fjncvjdjdndgh 1y agoHi
- hoppp 1y agoThe most vulnerable die first, but there will be more. Im pretty sure there will be a lot of cases.