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Last week, a mother in Utah named Kalie Robins took to Instagram to post what she felt was an “innocent” video of herself and one of her two young daughters singing in the car. Her daughter’s face was visible, but Robins hadn’t said her name. None of her existing Instagram posts, she told Futurism, publicized the names of her children.
When she returned to the same video later, Robins discovered that Meta’s built-in AI was offering a suggestion: that she investigate the identity of the child in the backseat.
“Who’s the child passenger?” read the Meta AI’s suggested prompt, talking about her daughter.
Robins, who detailed her dystopian experience in a viral Instagram video, decided to engage with the AI to see what would happen. To her horror, it coughed up a detailed response that named not only her daughter who was pictured in the video, but her other daughter as well. It did so, seemingly, by cross-referencing information from her Instagram page with other posts on Meta platforms going back years — information largely shared not by Robins, but by family members including excited grandparents.
“I clicked on it, and it gave a whole portfolio of not just my daughter that was in the car, but also my other daughter,” Robins told Futurism. “I’m thinking, ‘Why is that in here?’ And then it just kept offering more and more.”
Meta AI continued to recommend new questions, each more invasive than the next, according to screenshots shared by Robins.
“What are Kalie’s daughter’s ages?” read one suggested prompt, which spurred the AI to provide a detailed age breakdown and timeline based on “family birthday posts and birth announcements” that included a Facebook post of one of her daughters as a newborn that was shared by the child’s grandmother.
A similar response, also referencing Facebook posts, discussed how much one of Robins’ daughters weighed at birth. Screenshots also show Meta AI prompting Robins to ask questions about the girls’ lives and interests.
Meta AI “started talking about, because of their ages, this is the grade they should be in. Well, there’s only one school here, so that wouldn’t be hard to find,” Robins recalled. “And then it talked about what are my daughter’s favorite beaches, what are this daughter’s favorite books, where they go hiking, what’s their favorite trail.”
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