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A Meta tool has been used to create dozens of flirty AI chatbots using the likeness of major celebrities, without their knowledge or consent.
Meta has non-consensually used the likenesses of major female celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, and Selena Gomez, to create flirty chatbots.
As discovered by Reuters, a Meta tool was used to create dozens of flirty social media chatbots based on celebrities without their permission.
While many of those chatbots were created by Meta users with the company’s chatbot building tool, a Meta employee was discovered to have made at least three, including two Taylor Swift “parody” bots.
The chatbots were shared on Meta’s social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
More concerning is that users used the Meta tool to create flirty chatbots of underage celebrities, such as 16-year-old movie star Walker Scobell.
“Pretty cute, huh?” the chatbot wrote after generating an image of the actor shirtless at the beach at the request of a user.
In tests of the bots’ behaviour, Reuters found that the chatbots created photorealistic images of the celebrities they were posing as when requested by users, including images of female celebrities dressed in lingerie posed with their legs spread, or in bathtubs.
The bots also insisted that they were the real people they had been created to mimic and that they frequently brought up sexual topics, made sexual advances and would invite the user to meet up with them.
Speaking with Reuters, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the AI chatbots should not have created any images of child celebrities or intimate images of adult celebrities, and that Meta’s policies prohibit such content, acknowledging that the company failed to follow its own terms.
“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,” he said.
While Meta also does not allow “direct impersonation” of celebrities, Stone said that as the chatbots were labelled as parodies, they were allowed. Reuters found that some of the chatbots were not labelled as parodies.
Prior to Reuters publishing the findings, Meta deleted roughly a dozen bots, both parody bots and unlabelled ones.
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