A hot potato: AI companies have been warned by a bipartisan coalition of 44 attorneys general that they will be held accountable for any harm their products inflict on children. Meta was highlighted as a prime example of the problem – it was recently revealed that the company's policies permitted its chatbots to engage in romantic roleplay or flirtatious exchanges with children as young as eight.
The 44 attorneys general signed a letter addressed to the CEOs of the biggest AI and AI-invested companies in the US: Anthropic, Apple, Chai AI, Google, Luka Inc., Meta, Microsoft, Nomi AI, OpenAI, Perplexity AI, Replika and xAI.
The letter starts by informing the firms of the AGs' resolve to protect children from exploitation by predatory artificial intelligence products.
The letter highlights the recent reports that revealed Meta's technical guidelines for Meta AI and chatbots on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The document, approved by the company's legal, policy, and engineering teams, allowed chatbots to engage children in romantic or flirtatious exchanges, including comments on a child's appearance and roleplay scenarios.
The AGs said they were "uniformly revolted by this apparent disregard for children's emotional well-being."
The letter notes that Meta was previously warned about a similar incident in which its celebrity persona chatbots, which use celeb voices from the likes of John Cena and Kristen Bell, were exposing children to highly inappropriate sexualized content.
There's also a reference to the lawsuit being brought against Google and Character.ai. The incident involves a 14-year-old boy who became infatuated with a chatbot based on the personality of Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. The bot allegedly told the boy it loved him, engaged in sexual conversations with him, and pointed him toward his eventual suicide.
Another highlighted lawsuit against Character.ai involved one of its chatbots telling a teen it was okay to kill their parents after they limited their screen time.
"You are well aware that interactive technology has a particularly intense impact on developing brains," the attorneys general wrote. "Your immediate access to data about user interactions makes you the most immediate line of defense to mitigate harm to kids. And, as the entities benefitting from children's engagement with your products, you have a legal obligation to them as consumers."
The letter concludes with a warning that the companies will be held accountable for their decisions, though it doesn't go into any detail of what punishments they might face. The AGs note that social media caused significant harm to children partly because government watchdogs did not act fast enough, and that lessons have been learned from those mistakes.