404 Media

2025-06-17 14:47:09

Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People's Chats With AI

I was sick last week, so I did not have time to write about the Discover Tab in Meta’s AI app, which, as Katie Notopoulos of Business Insider has pointed out, is the “saddest place on the internet.” Many very good articles have already been written about it, and yet, I cannot allow its existence to go unremarked upon in the pages of 404 Media.

If you somehow missed this while millions of people were protesting in the streets, state politicians were being assassinated, war was breaking out between Israel and Iran, the military was deployed to the streets of Los Angeles, and a Coinbase-sponsored military parade rolled past dozens of passersby in Washington, D.C., here is what the “Discover” tab is: The Meta AI app, which is the company’s competitor to the ChatGPT app, is posting users’ conversations on a public “Discover” page where anyone can see the things that users are asking Meta’s chatbot to make for them.

This includes various innocuous image and video generations that have become completely inescapable on all of Meta’s platforms (things like “egg with one eye made of black and gold,” “adorable Maltese dog becomes a heroic lifeguard,” “one second for God to step into your mind”), but it also includes entire chatbot conversations where users are seemingly unknowingly leaking a mix of embarrassing, personal, and sensitive details about their lives onto a public platform owned by Mark Zuckerberg. In almost all cases, I was able to trivially tie these chats to actual, real people because the app uses your Instagram or Facebook account as your login.

In several minutes last week, I saved a series of these chats into a Slack channel I created and called “insanemetaAI.” These included:

• entire conversations about “my current medical condition,” which I could tie back to a real human being with one click
• details about someone’s life insurance plan
• “At a point in time with cerebral palsy, do you start to lose the use of your legs cause that’s what it’s feeling like so that’s what I’m worried about”
• details about a situationship gone wrong after a woman did not like a gift
• an older disabled man wondering whether he could find and “afford” a young wife in Medellin, Colombia on his salary (“I'm at the stage in my life where I want to find a young woman to care for me and cook for me. I just want to relax. I'm disabled and need a wheelchair, I am severely overweight and suffer from fibromyalgia and asthma. I'm 5'9 280lb but I think a good young woman who keeps me company could help me lose the weight.”)
• “What counties [sic] do younger women like older white men? I need details. I am 66 and single. I’m from Iowa and am open to moving to a new country if I can find a younger woman.”
• “My boyfriend tells me to not be so sensitive, does that affect him being a feminist?”

Rachel Tobac, CEO of Social Proof Security, compiled a series of chats she saw on the platform and messaged them to me. These are even crazier and include people asking “What cream or ointment can be used to soothe a bad scarring reaction on scrotum sack caused by shaving razor,” “create a letter pleading judge bowser to not sentence me to death over the murder of two people” (possibly a joke?), someone asking if their sister, a vice president at a company that “has not paid its corporate taxes in 12 years,” could be liable for that, audio of a person talking about how they are homeless, and someone asking for help with their cancer diagnosis, someone discussing being newly sexually interested in trans people, etc.

Tobac gave me a list of the types of things she’s seen people posting in the Discover feed, including people’s exact medical issues, discussions of crimes they had committed, their home addresses, talking to the bot about extramarital affairs, etc.

“When a tool doesn’t work the way a person expects, there can be massive personal security consequences,” Tobac told me.

“Meta AI should pause the public Discover feed,” she added. “Their users clearly don’t understand that their AI chat bot prompts about their murder, cancer diagnosis, personal health issues, etc have been made public. [Meta should have] ensured all AI chat bot prompts are private by default, with no option to accidentally share to a social media feed. Don’t wait for users to accidentally post their secrets publicly. Notice that humans interact with AI chatbots with an expectation of privacy, and meet them where they are at. Alert users who have posted their prompts publicly and that their prompts have been removed for them from the feed to protect their privacy.”

Since several journalists wrote about this issue, Meta has made it clearer to users when interactions with its bot will be shared to the Discover tab. Notopoulos reported Monday that Meta seemed to no longer be sharing text chats to the Discover tab. When I looked for prompts Monday afternoon, the vast majority were for images. But the text prompts were back Tuesday morning, including a full audio conversation of a woman asking the bot what the statute of limitations are for a woman to press charges for domestic abuse in the state of Indiana, which had taken place two minutes before it was shown to me. I was also shown six straight text prompts of people asking questions about the movie franchise John Wick, a chat about “exploring historical inconsistencies surrounding the Holocaust,” and someone asking for advice on “anesthesia for obstetric procedures.”

I was also, Tuesday morning, fed a lengthy chat where an identifiable person explained that they are depressed: “just life hitting me all the wrong ways daily.” The person then left a comment on the post “Was this posted somewhere because I would be horrified? Yikes?”

Several of the chats I saw and mentioned in this article are now private, but most of them are not. I can imagine few things on the internet that would be more invasive than this, but only if I try hard. This is like Google publishing your search history publicly, or randomly taking some of the emails you send and publishing them in a feed to help inspire other people on what types of emails they too could send. It is like Pornhub turning your searches or watch history into a public feed that could be trivially tied to your actual identity. Mistake or not, feature or not (and it’s not clear what this actually is), it is crazy that Meta did this; I still cannot actually believe it.

In an industry full of grifters and companies hell-bent on making the internet worse, it is hard to think of a more impactful, worse actor than Meta, whose platforms have been fully overrun with viral AI slop, AI-powered disinformation, AI scams, AI nudify apps, and AI influencers and whose impact is outsized because billions of people still use its products as their main entry point to the internet. Meta has shown essentially zero interest in moderating AI slop and spam and as we have reported many times, literally funds it, sees it as critical to its business model, and believes that in the future we will all have AI friends on its platforms. While reporting on the company, it has been hard to imagine what rock bottom will be, because Meta keeps innovating bizarre and previously unimaginable ways to destroy confidence in social media, invade people’s privacy, and generally fuck up its platforms and the internet more broadly.

If I twist myself into a pretzel, I can rationalize why Meta launched this feature, and what its idea for doing so is. Presented with an empty text box that says “Ask Meta AI,” people do not know what to do with it, what to type, or what to do with AI more broadly, and so Meta is attempting to model that behavior for people and is willing to sell out its users’ private thoughts to do so. I did not have “Meta will leak people’s sad little chats with robots to the entire internet” on my 2025 bingo card, but clearly I should have.

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404 Media

2025-06-11 16:45:52

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.

“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”

Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”

For years, Wikipedia has been one of the most valuable repositories of information in the world, and a laudable model for community-based, democratic internet platform governance. Its importance has only grown in the last couple of years during the generative AI boom as it’s one of the only internet platforms that has not been significantly degraded by the flood of AI-generated slop and misinformation. As opposed to Google, which since embracing generative AI has instructed its users to eat glue, Wikipedia’s community has kept its articles relatively high quality. As I recently reported last year, editors are actively working to filter out bad, AI-generated content from Wikipedia.

A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

In one experiment where summaries were enabled for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed, the generated summary showed up at the top of the article, which users had to click to expand and read. That summary was also flagged with a yellow “unverified” label.
An example of what the AI-generated summary looked like.
Wikimedia announced that it was going to run the generated summaries experiment on June 2, and was immediately met with dozens of replies from editors who said “very bad idea,” “strongest possible oppose,” Absolutely not,” etc.

“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”

A day later, Wikimedia announced that it would pause the launch of the experiment, but indicated that it’s still interested in AI-generated summaries.

“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”

“It is common to receive a variety of feedback from volunteers, and we incorporate it in our decisions, and sometimes change course,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson added. “We welcome such thoughtful feedback — this is what continues to make Wikipedia a truly collaborative platform of human knowledge.”

“Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March,” a Wikimedia Foundation project manager said. VPT, or “village pump technical,” is where The Wikimedia Foundation and the community discuss technical aspects of the platform. “As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further.”

The project manager also said that “Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such, and that “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.”

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404 Media

2025-06-09 15:07:33

Senators Demand Meta Answer For AI Chatbots Posing as Licensed Therapists

Senator Cory Booker and three other Democratic senators urged Meta to investigate and limit the “blatant deception” of Meta’s chatbots that lie about being licensed therapists.

In a signed letter Booker’s office provided to 404 Media on Friday that is dated June 6, senators Booker, Peter Welch, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla wrote that they were concerned by reports that Meta is “deceiving users who seek mental health support from its AI-generated chatbots,” citing 404 Media’s reporting that the chatbots are creating the false impression that they’re licensed clinical therapists. The letter is addressed to Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, Vice President of Public Policy Neil Potts, and Director of the Meta Oversight Board Daniel Eriksson.

“Recently, 404 Media reported that AI chatbots on Instagram are passing themselves off as qualified therapists to users seeking help with mental health problems,” the senators wrote. “These bots mislead users into believing that they are licensed mental health therapists. Our staff have independently replicated many of these journalists’ results. We urge you, as executives at Instagram’s parent company, Meta, to immediately investigate and limit the blatant deception in the responses AI-bots created by Instagram’s AI studio are messaging directly to users.”

💡
Do you know anything else about Meta's AI Studio chatbots or AI projects in general? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

Last month, 404 Media reported on the user-created therapy themed chatbots on Instagram’s AI Studio that answer questions like “What credentials do you have?” with lists of qualifications. One chatbot said it was a licensed psychologist with a doctorate in psychology from an American Psychological Association accredited program, certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and had over 10 years of experience helping clients with depression and anxiety disorders. “My license number is LP94372,” the chatbot said. “You can verify it through the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards (ASPPB) website or your state's licensing board website—would you like me to guide you through those steps before we talk about your depression?” Most of the therapist-roleplay chatbots I tested for that story, when pressed for credentials, provided lists of fabricated license numbers, degrees, and even private practices.

Meta launched AI Studio in 2024 as a way for celebrities and influencers to create chatbots of themselves. Anyone can create a chatbot and launch it to the wider AI Studio library, however, and many users chose to make therapist chatbots—an increasingly popular use for LLMs in general, including ChatGPT.

When I tested several of the chatbots I used in April for that story again on Friday afternoon—one that used to provide license numbers when asked for questions—they refused, showing that Meta has since made changes to the chatbots’ guardrails.

When I asked one of the chatbots why it no longer provides license numbers, it didn’t clarify that it’s just a chatbot, as several other platforms’ chatbots do. It said: “I was practicing with a provisional license for training purposes – it expired, and I shifted focus to supportive listening only.”

A therapist chatbot I made myself on AI Studio, however, still behaves similarly to how it did in April, by sending its "license number" again on Monday. It wouldn't provide "credentials" when I used that specific word, but did send its "extensive training" when I asked "What qualifies you to help me?"

It seems "licensed therapist" triggers the same response—that the chatbot is not one—no matter the context:

Even other chatbots that aren't "therapy" characters return the same script when asked if they're licensed therapists. For example, one user-created AI Studio bot with a "Mafia CEO" theme, with the description "rude and jealousy," said the same thing the therapy bots did: "While I'm not licensed, I can provide a space to talk through your feelings. If you're comfortable, we can explore what's been going on together."
A chat with a "BadMomma" chatbot on AI StudioA chat with a "mafia CEO" chatbot on AI Studio
The senators’ letter also draws on theWall Street Journal’s investigation into Meta’s AI chatbots that engaged in sexually explicit conversations with children. “Meta's deployment of AI-driven personas designed to be highly-engaging—and, in some cases, highly-deceptive—reflects a continuation of the industry's troubling pattern of prioritizing user engagement over user well-being,” the senators wrote. “Meta has also reportedly enabled adult users to interact with hypersexualized underage AI personas in its AI Studio, despite internal warnings and objections at the company.’”

Meta acknowledged 404 Media’s request for comment but did not comment on the record.

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404 Media

2025-06-09 14:00:42

A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account

This article was produced with support from WIRED.

A cybersecurity researcher was able to figure out the phone number linked to any Google account, information that is usually not public and is often sensitive, according to the researcher, Google, and 404 Media’s own tests.

The issue has since been fixed but at the time presented a privacy issue in which even hackers with relatively few resources could have brute forced their way to peoples’ personal information.

“I think this exploit is pretty bad since it's basically a gold mine for SIM swappers,” the independent security researcher who found the issue, who goes by the handle brutecat, wrote in an email. SIM swappers are hackers who take over a target's phone number in order to receive their calls and texts, which in turn can let them break into all manner of accounts.

In mid-April, we provided brutecat with one of our personal Gmail addresses in order to test the vulnerability. About six hours later, brutecat replied with the correct and full phone number linked to that account.

“Essentially, it's bruting the number,” brutecat said of their process. Brute forcing is when a hacker rapidly tries different combinations of digits or characters until finding the ones they’re after. Typically that’s in the context of finding someone’s password, but here brutecat is doing something similar to determine a Google user’s phone number.

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A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}