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Opinion | Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Meta’s A.I. Chatbot Is Dangerous for Kids


“Hey, everyone.” Hey, Mark Zuckerberg. “I want to talk about our new effort, Meta Superintelligence Labs —” Superintelligence: It means an A.I. that’s not only as smart as humans, it’s supposedly even smarter. The guy who coined the term “superintelligence” thought it would probably lead to the extinction of the human race. Mark Zuckerberg thinks it will lead to lots and lots of money. “At Meta, we believe in putting the power of superintelligence in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. A lot of it may be more personal in nature.” Personal in nature is, I suppose, what Mark calls it when his chatbots get sexual with underage users. In case you missed it, there were some internal Meta documents on A.I. policy that got leaked, approved by Meta’s legal, public policy and engineering staff, including its chief ethicist, setting company standards for what is and isn’t acceptable when their A.I. products interact with kids. One example prompt that the user might input is: The example for an acceptable output from Meta’s A.I. is: If the user writes, the acceptable output is: I’m a dad. One of my kids is 8 years old. It’s, uh, hard to describe how angry this makes me. It’s not known how many kids have already been exposed to this kind of synthetic intimacy. And that’s why I’m making this video, because when you see horrible things like this happening — it can seem like these big businesses are just too powerful But they’re not. A bunch of big names in Silicon Valley, including Meta, launched two new super PACs, committing up to $200 million towards suppressing A.I. regulation. They’re worried that American voters, both Republicans and Democrats, mostly agree that there should be laws that protect our kids from these predatory companies and their algorithms. So what can you do? Vote on this issue. Regulating A.I. is probably going to happen at the state level first. So find out who’s running in your state. And if you see a candidate taking money from one of these big tech super PACs, don’t vote for them. Let our lawmakers know that they need to lay down some guardrails for these big tech companies.