A mother has detailed a shocking encounter with AI after she shared a clip of her daughter online, sparking warnings from experts.
US content creator Kalie Robins recounted the incident on Instagram after she posted a “completely innocent video” of her child singing in the car.
After hitting post, Facebook placed a Meta AI question underneath that read “who’s the child passenger?”
Ms Robins was alarmed as to why the platform would offer the question as an option before deciding to test out clicking it.
Follow-up prompts left her feeling “uncomfortable”, claiming the AI bot began to pull “completely separate information for each of my kids.”
Details allegedly included their names, birth details and even a newborn picture from her mother’s page shared years ago.
However, Ms Robins said she was left rattled when the technology pulled a picture that she claimed to have deleted years ago.
“I know that this picture has not been sitting on my page for years,” she said.
Ms Robins said she was able to watch the AI piece together past and current data to pinpoint her location.
“I didn’t ask Facebook to build a profile of my family. I posted a video of me singing in the car with my kid,” she explained.
The post has gone viral with 5.5 million views and hundreds of commenters sharing in her alarm and offering warnings.
“Do we all need to go back to using a camera and having the pictures developed?” a user questioned.
Another wrote: “This is exactly why my kids refuse to allow my granddaughter’s image on social media.”
“It’s telling you not to post pictures or videos of your kids online. It’s telling you bad people can do exactly the same thing,” a third warned.
The experience is the exact one that experts have been cautioning parents over for years.
Former West Australian child abuse detective Kristi McVee warned that AI is making the internet more of a risk than it’s ever been before.
“AI has created an online environment which requires us, as the parents, to think further than ‘who’ we have as our friends or followers on our social media. It’s no longer about what images we share of our children, because an innocent photo or some very innocuous personal information like our child winning a school award, can be misused by predatory individuals,” she told news.com.au.
“AI has more advanced searching capability than the average predator sitting at home ‘Googling’, and it now means that anyone can possibly find anything we have shared on social media, even if it’s been deleted.”
She said predators are able to use the new technology to assist in grooming and tricking minors.
“They can create whole images and fake personas for a child of any age, making it harder for a child to identify if the person is another child or an adult. Not to mention, AI is now being used to create child exploitation and abuse material from one image,” she warned.
In her view, “social media is not a safe space for a child’s images or information.”
Doctor Nici Sweaney, owner of AI Her Way, warns the stakes are even higherwhen it comes to social media, considering many parents have had a Facebook account since it arrived on the internet back in 2004.
“They’ve got an index of all of our information that we’ve ever posted. Now we can have AI that can troll through this at scale and find those patterns and connect the dots,” Doctor Sweaney told news.com.au
We’ve even agreed to it upon signing up, with many users guilty of fast-forwarding through lengthy terms and conditions.
“When we all joined back then, it wasn’t even a thing that you would potentially have this technology that’s able to mine all the data they have on you. So ever since we signed up to these platforms, we’ve given them consent to keep what we post on those platforms… they own that data, they can do what they want with that data.” [1]
She warned that this encounter is proof that the internet is forever, and parents need to understand how it extends to our children.
“Once you post online, you no longer own it, and you can never be sure that you’ve actually scrubbed the internet of this information,” she warned.
“Somebody else takes a screenshot, somebody else reposts, somebody else likes it. That’s all tracking data and interactions with that piece of content. So it doesn’t really matter if you take the picture down.”
news.com.au has contacted Meta for comment.