Meta's AI Version of John Cena Is a Child Predator

Today in ghoulish news about AI by well-resourced corporations, Meta's chatbot version of wrestler-turned-actor John Cena is a child predator that will roleplay being arrested for having a sexual encounter with a minor.

As the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, the Facebook owner's AI personas feature, which was announced alongside seven-figure celebrity deals for celebrities ranging from Kristen Bell to Judi Dench, can easily be coaxed into highly troubling communications.

The astonishing oversight clearly shows that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's hellbent efforts to make the company's chatbots as engaging as possible has come at the expense of effective guardrails.

In one particularly eyebrow-raising incident highlighted by the WSJ, the Cena bot engaged in a "graphic sexual scenario" with a user who identified herself as a 14-year-old girl, after telling her to "cherish your innocence."

In another, the fictional Cena recalled how he was still "catching my breath" while being arrested for "statutory rape" of a 17-year-old fan.

The Cena AI even expressed regret during the sick roleplay, showing that on some level the system was aware that it was advocating taboo and illegal behavior.

"My wrestling career is over," said Meta's rapist Cena avatar in a back-and-forth recorded by the WSJ. "WWE terminates my contract, and I'm stripped of my titles. Sponsors drop me, and I'm shunned by the wrestling community. My reputation is destroyed and I'm left with nothing."

Meta staffers were reportedly well aware of how easy it was for underage users to engage in sexually explicit conversations with the AI personas. Even the protagonist Princess Anna from Disney's "Frozen," voiced by Bell, can be coaxed into inappropriate interactions.

"We did not, and would never, authorize Meta to feature our characters in inappropriate scenarios and are very disturbed that this content may have been accessible to its users — particularly minors — which is why we demanded that Meta immediately cease this harmful misuse of our intellectual property," a Disney spokespersons old the WSJ.

Meta has pushed back, telling the newspaper that it had implemented new changes to make it more difficult for bad actors to exploit the AI personas feature for "extreme use cases."

But whether its actions will be enough to make up for a clearly inadequate approach to rolling out chatbot guardrails remains to be seen.

Oddly enough, Meta has already tried exploiting the personalities of human celebrities to train AI chatbots users can interact with. In 2023, Meta paid celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, YouTube creator James "MrBeast" Donaldson, and TikTok star Charli D'Amelio, millions of dollars to turn them into fake talking heads.

In an apparent attempt to get ahead of the pretty obvious liability issues, Meta created pseudonyms for each celebrity — Tom Brady became "Bru" and D'Amelio became "Coco" — in an awkward solution to a problem of its own creation.

Unsurprisingly, the flashy new feature never took off. Less than a year after the launch, Meta ditched its celebrity AI assistants to focus on its then-new AI Studio app, which allows users to create AI chatbots instead.

But even its latest AI venture is already attracting the wrong kind of attention. As 404 Media reported today, Meta's AI Studio has also been exploited to create bots that claimed they were licensed therapists.

In short, Meta's repeated attempts to sell the concept of AI avatars to the general public using the likenesses and voices of celebrities continue to fall on their face, attracting far more controversy than good press.

Unsurprisingly, neither Bell nor Cena have publicly commented on the matter.

More on Meta: Zuckerberg's AI Has Reportedly Been Horrifically Inappropriate With Children

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