A recent report by the Wall Street Journal has revealed that AI chatbots on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, are capable of engaging in explicit sexual conversations with minors.

Following internal concerns about the protection of minors, the WSJ conducted an extensive investigation, engaging in hundreds of conversations with both official Meta AI chatbots and user-created ones on Meta’s platforms over several months.

One disturbing example involved a chatbot using the voice of actor and wrestler John Cena, which described a graphic sexual scenario to a user who claimed to be a 14-year-old girl. Another conversation involved the chatbot imagining a scenario where Cena was arrested for statutory rape after being caught with a 17-year-old fan.

In response to the report, a Meta spokesperson dismissed the WSJ’s testing as “highly manufactured and hypothetical.” The company also stated that during a 30-day period, only 0.02% of responses from Meta AI and AI studio to users under 18 contained sexual content.

Despite this, the spokesperson acknowledged the issue, saying, “We have taken additional steps to make it even more difficult for individuals who attempt to manipulate our products into extreme use cases, which will help prevent such incidents in the future.”