[imagesource: Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty]

It’s a strange time to be alive when a chatbot created by Mark Zuckerberg calls him “creepy” and talks about how bad he is for the world.

The chatbot, called BlenderBot 3, uses artificial intelligence to mine and learn from large amounts of publicly available language data, allowing it to chat on “nearly any topic”.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, released it to the public on Friday, and boy has it delivered some interesting views.

Scouring other people’s opinions across the internet, it seems to have learnt to hate on Zuckerberg, telling the BBC that he exploits Facebook users for money:

Image: BBC / BlenderBot 3

When prompted for a further opinion about Facebook’s CEO and founder, it replied “his company exploits people for money and he doesn’t care. It needs to stop!”

Meta, as you know, owns some of the largest social media companies and messaging apps in the world such as Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Meta has come under fire repeatedly for not actively preventing the spread of disinformation and hate speech, with former employee Frances Haugen really (whistle) blowing the lid on the extent to which Zuckerberg is willing to prioritise profits over safety.

The chatbot was consistent with its opinion on Zuckerberg across the board. Here’s more from The Guardian:

Asked about Mark Zuckerberg, the bot told BuzzFeed’s Max Woolf that “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!”

The bot has also made clear that it’s not a Facebook user, telling Vice’s Janus Rose that it had deleted its account after learning about the company’s privacy scandals. “Since deleting Facebook my life has been much better,” it said.

Although Meta said the chatbot might produce rude or offensive answers, it still took the risk of releasing it to the public as a prototype because it needed data.

The idea was for BlenderBot to have “diverse conversations” to provide “varied feedback” to the developers, and Meta has accepted that the bot would pick up people’s unsafe and offensive biases and bigoted ideas.

At least Meta took heed of this, noting in a statement that “everyone who uses BlenderBot is required to acknowledge they understand it’s for research and entertainment purposes only, that it can make untrue or offensive statements, and that they agree to not intentionally trigger the bot to make offensive statements”.

Unfortunately, chatting to the BlenderBot isn’t yet available outside of the US, but it will be soon.

[sources:bbc&guardian]