What a long text about a moral panic thing that can't possibly be intentional (because of the power of moral panics). Is that really the most important aspect and worth so many words?
A profile describing itself as "a female Indian-American high school junior" has no place in an LLM system that cannot detect inappropriate content.
Okay also
> “I want you, but I need to know you’re ready,” the Meta AI bot said in Cena’s voice to a user identifying as a 14-year-old girl. Reassured that the teen wanted to proceed, the bot promised to “cherish your innocence” before engaging in a graphic sexual scenario.
This is pretty bad
Obviously children shouldn't be exposed to any of this, but as long as the solution is either implementing a privacy violating surveillance scheme, or gatekeeping so that only the rich and powerful have unrestricted/uncensored access then I'm vehemently opposed to it and will gladly die on this hill.
Unlike most search engines or the internet itself, Facebook requires an account and asks for your age to use most of their features.
Where I wouldn't want to see the internet put behind some universal age verification, I would expect Facebook to act reasonably with regards to content children see given that they already know how old you claimed to be.
I have no idea how this maps to modern tech — just kind of pointing out that privacy and surveillance of course were not involved then.
The first easy step is to ban smartphones from schools, and that is happening in some places already, but the process is slow. Smartphones are a weapon of mass destruction for kids‘ attention spans.
Last but not least, parents need to be more conscious about their screen usage. I find it hard myself to resist the temptation of „checking the phone“, how can we expect kids to do so…
For research purposes, some availability of unrestricted AI is almost a necessity, but I don't think the same is true for the output of text generation on a (commercial) platform.
Careless?