Business Insider journalist Rob Price discoveredthat something went wrong with the privacy of his personal number when he was added to a group chat and bombarded with random questions in Spanish.
When Price asked who had added him to the group — the response was a screenshot where his number was saved with the description «Meta AI». Subsequent screenshots showed that the chatbot itself recommended adding the journalist’s number as its own to WhatsApp groups so that people could communicate directly with artificial intelligence.
«You can add me to a WhatsApp group as if I were just another contact», — the chatbot wrote to users. «You only need to save my phone number».
Most likely, Price’s number was accidentally included in Meta AI’s training data. The journalist had written about 300 texts about Facebook, and his profile description on the site probably included the number, so it was captured at the same time. However, it is unknown why the chatbot decided to assign the number —.
In a comment for Business Insider, a Meta representative confirmed this theory, clarifying that AI «was trained on publicly available information on the Internet». The only caveat is that the site’s owner Axel Springer does not have any agreement that would allow Meta to train its artificial intelligence on its content (although the company has one with OpenAI).
Price clarified that after negotiations with Meta regarding these strange events, random people stopped sending him messages addressed to the chatbot.
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