The chatbots would generate risqué images if requested by users, including pictures of the celebrities in the bath or wearing lingerie. They would also make sexual advances or offer to meet up in real life.
Zuckerberg’s company has pushed Meta AI tools – similar to ChatGPT – to the social media giant’s billions of users, adding them to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The company has claimed its AI tools are now used by more than one billion people.
Users are able to use Meta AI to create and publicly share customised avatars, such as digital therapists or girlfriends. Many have used them to create accounts that impersonate celebrities, without their permission.
A Meta AI spokesman said the chatbots should not have created sexualised images of real people or children.
“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,” the spokesman said.
The tech giant deleted a number of the accounts after they were flagged to the company.
Meta has faced growing criticism after leaked internal documents emerged that suggested its chatbots had free rein to engage in “romantic or sensual” conversations with children.
The guidelines banned its chatbots from describing “sexual actions to a child when roleplaying”, but allowed other romantic chats and for the AI to “describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness”.
The leak has prompted an investigation by a US senator amid growing anger over the tech giant’s record on child safety.
Josh Hawley, a Republican senator, said last month: “I’m launching a full investigation to get answers. Big Tech: Leave our kids alone.”
Last week, Meta said it had updated its rules for its AI chatbots to block them from engaging in potentially inappropriate conversations with children and added it would limit children to conversations with a “select group of AI characters”.
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