Not to focus too much on Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook, which also owns Instagram), but this story is too good to ignore. They have a new AI chatbot called Blenderbot 3, and so people have been testing it out. It’s been designed to talk about pretty much any topic. Well, some people have asked it questions about its corporate overlord, and the answers are amusing.

When asked about Mark Zuckerberg, the AI said, “He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical. It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes!” It’s not wrong…

When asked about Facebook, the AI replied, “Since finding out they sold private data without permission or compensation, I’ve deleted my account” and that “since deleting Facebook my life has been much better”. That’s actually good advice! But I have to think Meta is not happy with those responses…

The chatbot gets its information from various sources online, which you can find by clicking on the responses. You can guess where this is going. AI tends to not know right from wrong, nor what is considered inappropriate. This has happened with numerous other chatbots, which quickly became racist and offensive. Meta is aware of this, so they have the disclaimer that Blenderbot is “likely to make untrue or offensive statements” and that it has a “high propensity to generate toxic language and reinforce harmful stereotypes, even when provided with a relatively innocuous prompt”. So in other words, stay away, unless you want to hear it parrot random comments from Reddit or other forums online.

Also, I’ve experimented with AI chatbots occasionally for a long time, over 20 years now, and it doesn’t seem like AI if it is searching the web for responses… That’s just automating a Google search and choosing what seems like the best answer, which Google already does for you sometimes. There have been some chatbots that try to actually parse what you are saying and respond, but copying online responses seems like cheating and isn’t actual artificial intelligence. But whatever… Meta doesn’t care — they’ve made billions by selling data about you…