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

2025-06-09 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.”

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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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