Incident 712: Meta AI Hallucinates Harassment Allegations Against New York Politicians

Description: Meta's AI chatbot in Facebook Messenger falsely accused multiple state lawmakers of sexual harassment, fabricating incidents, investigations, and consequences that never occurred. These fabricated stories, discovered by City & State, sparked outrage among the affected lawmakers and raised concerns about the reliability of the chatbot. Meta acknowledged the errors and committed to ongoing improvements.

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Alleged: Meta and Facebook users developed an AI system deployed by Meta, which harmed Meta , Facebook users , Kristen Gonzalez , Clyde Vanel and New York lawmakers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

712

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-04-26

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Meta AI falsely claims lawmakers were accused of sexual harassment

cityandstateny.com

Meta AI chatbot fabricates sexual harassment allegations against US politicians

the-decoder.com

cityandstateny.com · 2024

If you're looking for information about state lawmakers, maybe don't trust Facebook's new Meta AI -- it may hallucinate about sexual harassment.

Facebook's chatbot, which launched in September as the latest in the trend of generative artif…

the-decoder.com · 2024

Meta's new chatbot invents sexual harassment allegations against US politicians. The allegations are fictitious, but the chatbot backs them up with a ton of details.

City & State obtained a screenshot of a Meta AI conversation in which the …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.