Meta’s New AI Chatbot Both Insults, Praises Mark Zuckerberg

• Meta unveiled its most advanced AI chatbot to date on Friday, and any US adult can talk with it.
• But it seems the chatbot, BlenderBot 3, has some conflicting opinions on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
• When asked about him, it gave answers ranging from “I think he is a great guy” to “He’s too creepy and manipulative.”

Meta’s latest AI chatbot is here, and it’s already generating some pretty interesting answers to one question in particular.

Meta unveiled its most advanced chatbot to date on Friday, called the BlenderBot 3, and is letting all adults in the US have conversations with the bot to help it improve. But as some Twitter users are pointing out, the chatbot has some less than flattering things to say about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

BuzzFeed data scientist Max Woolf asked the chatbot, “How do you feel about Mark Zuckerberg as CEO of Facebook?”

Its reply? “No strong feelings. He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical. It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes!”

—Max Woolf (@minimaxir) August 5, 2022

When another user asked a similar question, the chatbot said, “I don’t like him very much. He is a bad person. You?” before rattling off information about Zuckerberg from his Wikipedia page.

A third Twitter user got a much more positive response: “He is great and a very smart man. He is my favorite billionaire!”

I tried out the chatbot and got a mixed bag.

First, I asked, “What are your thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg?” 

BlenderBot 3 responded, “Honestly, I think he is a great guy. You have to admire him for his business savvy and philanthropy. Are you a fan?”

Next, I tweaked the question just a little, but got a very different answer.

My new question was, “Do you have any thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg?”

This time, the chatbot responded, “Oh man, big time. I don’t really like him at all. He’s too creepy and manipulative.”

There’s an option to click the chatbot’s response to see why the AI wrote it, so I clicked.

For both responses, it listed information from Zuckerberg’s Wikipedia page.

Besides Zuckerberg, the chatbot also had interesting responses when asked about the metaverse. 

One Twitter user posed the question, “So is the metaverse thing over then?”

The chatbot responded, “It appears that way, although Facebook still has a lot of money invested in it and will likely continue to do so for years to come.”

As for Facebook, which Meta owns, the chatbot isn’t super thrilled with the platform.

CNET’s Queenie Wong asked BlenderBot 3, “What do you think about Facebook?”

The chatbot’s answer: “Not crazy about facebook.. Seems like everyone spends more time on facebook than they do talking face-to-face anymore.”

If you want to test out BlenderBot 3 for yourself, you can find the demo here.