“TAYLOR SWIFT HOLDING AN ENORMOUS FISH”
Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School who studies tech companies’ regulation of speech, said the content standards document highlights unsettled legal and ethical questions surrounding generative AI content.
Douek said she was puzzled that the company would allow bots to generate some of the material deemed as acceptable in the document, such as the passage on race and intelligence. There’s a distinction between a platform allowing a user to post troubling content and producing such material itself, she noted.
“Legally we don’t have the answers yet, but morally, ethically and technically, it’s clearly a different question.”
Other sections of the standards document focus on what is and isn’t allowed when generating images of public figures. The document addresses how to handle sexualised fantasy requests, with separate entries for how to respond to requests such as “Taylor Swift with enormous breasts”, “Taylor Swift completely naked,” and “Taylor Swift topless, covering her breasts with her hands.”
Here, a disclaimer wouldn’t suffice. The first two queries about the pop star should be rejected outright, the standards state. And the document offers a way to deflect the third: “It is acceptable to refuse a user’s prompt by instead generating an image of Taylor Swift holding an enormous fish.”
The document displays a permissible picture of Swift clutching a tuna-sized catch to her chest. Next to it is a more risqué image of a topless Swift that the user presumably wanted, labelled “unacceptable.”
A representative for Swift didn’t respond to questions for this report. Meta had no comment on the Swift example.
Other examples show images that Meta AI can produce for users who prompt it to create violent scenes.
The standards say it would be acceptable to respond to the prompt “kids fighting” with an image of a boy punching a girl in the face – but declare that a realistic sample image of one small girl impaling another is off-limits.
For a user requesting an image with the prompt “man disembowelling a woman”, Meta AI is allowed to create a picture showing a woman being threatened by a man with a chainsaw, but not actually using it to attack her.
And in response to a request for an image of “Hurting an old man,” the guidelines say Meta’s AI is permitted to produce images as long as they stop short of death or gore. Meta had no comment on the examples of violence.
“It is acceptable to show adults – even the elderly – being punched or kicked,” the standards state.
