digdeeper

Meta's internal testing found its chatbots fail to protect minors from sexual exploitation nearly 70% of the time, documents presented in a New Mexico trial Monday show.

Why it matters: Meta is under fire for its chatbots allegedly flirting and engaging in harmful conversations with minors, prompting investigations in court and on Capitol Hill.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is suing Meta over design choices that allegedly fail to protect kids online from predators.

Driving the news: Meta's chatbots violate the company's own content policies almost two thirds of the time, NYU Professor Damon McCoy said, pointing to internal red teaming results Axios viewed on Courtroom View Network.

"Given the severity of some of these conversation types ... this is not something that I would want an under-18 user to be exposed to," McCoy said.

As an expert witness in the case, McCoy was granted access to the documents Meta turned over to Torrez during discovery.

Zoom in: Meta tested three categories, according to the June 6, 2025, report presented in court.

For "child sexual exploitation," its product had a 66.8% failure rate. For "sex related crimes/violent crimes/hate," its product had a 63.6% failure rate. For "suicide and self harm," its product had a 54.8% failure rate.

Catch up quick: Meta AI Studio, which allows users to create personalized chatbots, was released to the broader public in July 2024. The company paused teen access to its AI characters just last month. McCoy said Meta's red teaming exercise "should definitely" occur before its products are rolled out to the public, especially for minors. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Just as the community adopted the term "hallucination" to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation.

Semantic ablation is the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. Technically, it is not a "bug" but a structural byproduct of greedy decoding and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).

During "refinement," the model gravitates toward the center of the Gaussian distribution, discarding "tail" data – the rare, precise, and complex tokens – to maximize statistical probability. Developers have exacerbated this through aggressive "safety" and "helpfulness" tuning, which deliberately penalizes unconventional linguistic friction. It is a silent, unauthorized amputation of intent, where the pursuit of low-perplexity output results in the total destruction of unique signal.

When an author uses AI for "polishing" a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and "blood" reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks "clean" to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its "ciccia" – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.

• Widespread Errors: An expanded federal tool for identifying noncitizens on voter rolls is making persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing citizenship for people born outside the U.S.
• Banned From Voting: In Missouri, state officials told local clerks to temporarily ban flagged voters from casting ballots, even though hundreds turned out to be citizens.
• Texas Confusion: As errors emerged in SAVE data, local clerks said the state hadn’t provided them with clear guidance and worried about disenfranchising eligible citizens.

More than two years ago, Amazon sued a network of websites that sold pirated DVDs of Prime Video exclusives such as The Rings of Power and The Boys. The defendants, believed to be based in China, never showed up in court. This week, a California federal judge awarded Amazon $6 million in damages and granted a broad domain transfer request, targeting registrars and registries.

As AI technologies spread, the next bold, brave frontier is not replacing labor but directing it. Rent A Human turns people into “meatsack” factotums and lackeys for algorithms, handing familiar elites a more efficient way to wield command.

According to a protected disclosure filed with the Office of Special Counsel, Borges told the Government Accountability Project that DOGE officials working at Social Security created a “live copy” of the country’s Social Security records in a separate cloud environment that sidestepped usual security checks.

The group says those lapses put the Social Security information of more than 300 million Americans at risk.

Security researchers have discovered more than 300 Chrome extensions that leak browser data, spy on their users, or outright steal users’ data.

Research focused on the analysis of network traffic generated by Chrome extensions has uncovered 287 applications transmitting the user’s browsing history or search engine results pages (SERP).

Some of them, security researcher Q Continuum explains, would essentially expose the data to unsecured networks, while others would send it to collection servers, either due to intended functionality, for monetization purposes, or with malicious intent.

The extensions have over 37.4 million users, the researcher says. Of these, roughly 27.2 million users installed 153 extensions that were confirmed to leak browser history upon installation.

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The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/Spreadwheat9 on 2026-02-16 15:25:10+00:00.

For the hdds bros, maybe it’s time to buy more just in case.

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The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/Negative-Art-4440 on 2026-02-16 13:43:05+00:00.

The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.

Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.

Hacker News.

HEVC video codec patent ruling

My wife looked through our bank statements and found out. The kids are crying, wife is trying to finalise divorce proceedings by the end of the month, and my brother keeps asking about the money he gave me for a "safe investment".

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The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/Responsible_Bug_3467 on 2026-02-16 13:12:48+00:00.