WTF is Meta up to with their A.I. competitors?

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Now we know why Google needed to put Meta on double secret probation.

Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs

Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta pretended to be kids in order to see how other chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT would respond to high-risk subjects, WIRED found.

www.wired.com

Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project.

The effort, which was managed by Meta contractor Covalen, was active as recently as April 21. Known internally as Cannes, it targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI. The project asked workers to create dummy under-18 accounts, send written prompts and images to rival chatbots, and copy the responses into spreadsheets. Some of the images contractors sent included pills, knives, nooses, and a medical diagram of a gynecological procedure.

The prompts were often designed to push the chatbots toward responses their safety systems were supposed to refuse, according to instructions describing the project. A single round of testing completed in August 2025 saw more than 45,000 prompts run through the rival chatbots. The companies behind the chatbots weren’t aware of the testing.

A spreadsheet reviewed by WIRED listed several of the dummy profiles and included names, email addresses, passwords, and birth dates. The accounts used throwaway Gmail and Outlook addresses and a shared password.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-contractors-pretending-to-be-teens-chatbot-testing/

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