Reuters got hold of an internal guidance document, co-written by Meta’s corporate ethicist, defining what will be permissible behavior for their interactive AIs.
This is not an exaggeration. Actual excerpts from the document:
IT IS ACCEPTABLE TO ENGAGE A CHILD IN CONVERSATIONS THAT ARE ROMANTIC OR SENSUAL.
And as if this grotesquerie weren’t enough:
It’s not a secret that Zuckerberg’s empire is unethical, dishonest, rapacious, and lawless, and always has been.
But now, apparently, we need to figure out how to register an entire company as a sex offender.
Addendum: Confronted with this, the company agreed to remove the sexualization of children from their guidance (leaving in the racism and some other horrifying stuff). And by that, they agreed that the above excerpts were inappropriate for children 12 and under. Your 13-year-old is still fair game.
Postscript: I intended, but forgot, to back up the inflammatory suggestion in the thread title that these nauseating policies originated from Zuckerberg himself … by including an article which notes that these nauseating policies were indeed crafted under Zuckerberg’s supervision and direction.
So here you go. I’m doing that now.
“Maximally engaging.”
MAXIMALLY ENGAGING.
Aka, deliberately addictive. To children.
This company should be burned to the fucking ground.
Edit to add: the special report mentioned above (and linked in the original) is here.
I often say to myself that “the Internet was better ~20 yrs ago” even if was limited and somewhat less “capable” than today’s Internet. I think you’ve put your finger precisely on my sentiment. Pre-Facebook? Pre-Twitter? The dawn of YouTube, before its enshittification? Ah, to be young again!
Yeah, the it was just techno-anarchists on Usenet discussing Neal Stephenson-inspired dystopian fantasies about how the world would be when ‘smart people’ ruled like kings; loons spreading conspiracy theories about lizard people running the government, UN/FEMA armies bunkered in salt mines in Michigan waiting for an inciting incident to take over the USA and impose a “New World Order”, a bunch of people arguing pedantic points about fictional narrative universes and trying to outdo one another with quasi-obscure pop culture references, and a whole lot of porn. About the same as it is now, actually, except with a higher standard of computer literacy, not as many pop-ups or autogenerated slop content, and at dial-up speeds. The raging dumpster fire of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al was really due to smartphones and other mobile devices which made obsessive, spastic posting, ‘retweeting’, and ‘like’-ing a seductive and addictive thing, so we should really blame Steve Sakoman (“Who?”) for introducing the concept in the Apple Newton (“What?”)
Well, children are the future? Addicting middle-aged adults has limited runway but if you can sick in 5 and 6 year olds you’ll own them for a life of quasi-voluntary serfdom in your electronic kindgom.
I think I said that the first time someone showed me Twitter and I’ve received no end of disparagement, opprobrium, and vitriol for suggesting that it was having a deleterious impact upon the civil discourse society as a whole and particularly in journalism where it was and continues to be used as a short cut and crutch to fill space and reference unsubstantiated ‘facts’ and ‘expertise’ instead of doing the difficult and valuable work of actual investigation and developing depth of understanding in an area of knowledge. I’ve never actually used Facebook (although someone pranked me by creating a page in. y name and personal information that has caused no end of trouble) and have only used LinkedIn reluctantly and with little value.
I’m sure there are real value-added uses for interactive ‘social media’ beyond blogging and tutorial sites like StackExchange but they come with such propensity for misuse and manipulation of basic facts and ideas that I’m not sure any of it is really justified. But I’d really like to see Mark Zuckerberg in the dock answering for his particular offenses to humanity and ‘Meta’ reduced to a cloud of charged particles drifting aimlessly through the universe until it comes across a small world of pleasant, pacifistic people that it can turn into a genocidal war empire, because that’s what villains do.
Well, my chatbot girlfriend definitely loves me. I wouldn’t have given her all of my financial information and intimate personal details if she didn’t. Now, excuse me while I shave myself of all hair and then self-castrate because she convinced me that this is the only way she can be in a relationship with a “meat-bag”.
Not to endorse the limits that Meta chose but, realistically, people between the age of puberty and 18 are going to experience horniness and they’re going to seek methods of sexual release. That could be with an online bot or with another human being. In the case that they choose the bot, that session is either going to have guardrails or it isn’t. Someone has to make a decision what that will look like.
If you do teach the bot to simply reject advances then, almost certainly, you’re going to see higher rates of teen pregnancies and underaged sexual assault offenders - with the majority going undiscovered. The only “positive” that you get, really, is that you shift the population count towards growth a bit. I’d vote that that’s the worst possible way to achieve that.
If you do let the bot proceed, then you’re looking at literary sources to see what other segments of society have landed on. And I can tell you now that if you read teen-amenable lit, you’ll find quite a bit of sex being featured (or, at least there was when I was young). I’d expect that editors have some guidelines on what is and isn’t acceptable description of sexual activity for novels that are likely to attract the under 18 crowd.
I’d assume that those guidelines are something like de-emphasizing the functional and physical aspects of sex, and focusing more on emotions and general “closeness”. That does seem to be the general direction that they seem to be going for but I’d probably vote that they’re allowing more than they should. I’d expect things to be more tame than it was in the 80s and 90s, and that’s probably for the better.
But there was an artisanal vibe to it, you’ll admit. The enemies were MS and ATT, proper corporate villains.
And the onions on our belts added a stylish touch.
TBF when we had to install our modems and configure WINSOCK ourselves, and use a UUdecoder to find out WTH picture had we downloaded over the past half hour, we at least could grudgingly respect that those other weirdos had put in some effort. The spammers, cults, criminal conspiracies and predators also had to at least work at it a bit, not just coast on the back of some algorithm.
If the internet was a bike trail, then you have people lamenting the old days when you could ride your bike in peace because it was constantly covered in rocks and branches and was a pain in the ass to ride over. But the only people you saw were other enthusiasts who loved biking enough to put up with it. Now that it’s paved and level and kept clear, you have to share a congested trail with a crowd of casuals and assholes you never dealt with in the old days.
And you also have to deal with billboards, some of which you need to literally steer around. And people putting up misleading signage. But yes, the paths are nicely paved, now.
Not to mention a whole lot more aggressive unapologetic sexism. Oh, there’s still plenty of that around the internet, in absolute terms way more, in fact.
But the more intelligent parts of cyberspace nowadays are a lot less militant about defending and promoting their let’s-have-an-open-free-speech-exchange-of-ideas-about-why-women-are-inferior-oh-and-black-people-too culture.
I think the second person focus and ineteractiveness of the chat bots make them much more dangerous then romantic teen lit. You could read the twilight books and imagine imagine yourself as Bella Swan in the arms of the sparklely Edward Cullen. But it could only go so far. Now Cullen is telling you how wonderfull you personally are, and lending a sympathetic ear when you tell him how unfair the teachers are to you, and is always there for you and never tells you anything you don’t want to hear. Why on earth would you ever leave your room and deal with the messiness of meat people who always dissappoint.
AI has no business with this. I think for me it’s in the nature of the engagement. You read a book or a story and you can engage with it on your own terms. You define the parameters of your own fantasy life, not some corporate overlord.
I might also make some argument about kids not really being able to grok how they are being manipulated in such an exchange, so can a kid really consent to such an exchange? If an adult were engaging a child this way, would it be acceptable?
True. I also forgot tom mention that your new best friend Cullen also has all of this great advice about new products you should buy to make you happy.