Meta's AI chatbot is becoming a confessional—and everyone's watching
Conversation's with META's chatbot could be public and users dont know.
Image: Supplied
A MAN wants to know how to help his friend come out of the closet. An aunt struggles to find the right words to congratulate her niece on her graduation. And one guy wants to know how to ask a girl - 'in Asian' - if she's interested in older men.
Ten years ago, they might have discussed those vulnerable questions with friends over brunch, at a dive bar, or in the office of a therapist or clergy member. Today, scores of users are posting their often cringe-making conversations about relationships, identity and spirituality with Meta's AI chatbot to the app's public feed - sometimes seemingly without knowing their musings can be seen by others.
Meta launched a stand-alone app for its AI chatbot nearly two months ago with the goal of giving users personalized and conversational answers to any question the could come up with - a service similar to those offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude. But the app came with a unique feature: a discover field where users could post their personal conversations with Meta AI for the world to see, reflecting the company's larger strategy to embed AI-created content into its social networks.
Since the April launch, the app's discover feed has been flooded with users' conversations with Meta AI on personal topics about their lives or their private philosophical questions about the world. As the feature gained more attention, some users appeared to purposely promote comical conversations with Meta AI. Others are publishing AI-generated images about political topics such as Trump in diapers, images of girls in sexual situations and promotions to their businesses.
The flurry of personal posts on Meta AI is the latest indication that people are increasingly turning to conversational chatbots to meet their relationship and emotional needs. As users ask the chatbots for advice on matters ranging from their marital problems to financial challenges, privacy advocates warn that users' personal information may end up being used by tech companies in ways they didn't expect or want.
'We've seen a lot of examples of people sending very, very personal information to AI therapist chatbots or saying very intimate things to chatbots in other settings, ' said Calli Schroeder, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
'I think many people assume there's some baseline level of confidentiality there. There's not. Everything you submit to an AI system at bare minimum goes to the company that's hosting the AI.'
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Meta spokesman Daniel Roberts said chats with Meta AI are set to private by default and users have to actively tap the share or publish button before it shows up on the app's discover field.
Still, the company's share button doesn't explicitly tell users where their conversations with Meta AI will be posted and what other people will be able to see - a fact that appeared to confuse some users about the new app.
The discover feed on Meta AI reads like a mixture of users' personal diaries and Google search histories, filled with questions ranging from the mundane to the political and philosophical. In one instance, a husband asked Meta AI in a voice recording about how to grow rice indoors for his 'Filipino wife.' Users asked Meta about Jesus' divinity; how to get picky toddlers to eat food and how to budget while enjoying daily pleasures. The feed is also filled with images created by Meta AI but conceived by users' imaginations, such as one of President Donald Trump eating poop and another of the grim reaper riding a motorcycle.
In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel that one of the main reasons people used Meta AI was to talk through difficult conversations they need to have with people in their lives - a use he thinks will become more compelling as the AI model gets to know its users.
'People use stuff that's valuable for them,' he said. 'If you think something someone is doing is bad and they think it's really valuable, most of the time in my experience, they're right and you're wrong.'
There are few regulations pushing tech companies to adopt stricter content or privacy rules for their chatbots. In recent months, a couple of high-profile incidents triggered questions about how tech companies handle personal data, who has access to that data, and how that information could be used to manipulate users.
In April, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT would be able to recall old conversations that users did not ask the company to save. On X, CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI was excited about '[AI] systems that get to know you over your life, and become extremely useful and personalized.'
The potential pitfalls of that approach became obvious the following month, when OpenAI had to roll back an update to ChatGPT that incorporated more personalization because it made the tool sycophantic and manipulative toward users.
Last week, OpenAI's chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said the company intended to keep its privacy commitments to users after plaintiffs in a copyright lawsuit led by the New York Times demanded that OpenAI retain customer data indefinitely. Ultimately, it may be users that push the company to offer more transparency.
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