Meta Used Kenyan Contractors Posing as Minors to Test Rival AI Chatbots

My take: This one bothers me, and let me tell you exactly why. Meta hired hundreds of contractors in Kenya to impersonate minors and flood ChatGPT, Gemini, and Character.AI with prompts about suicide, sex, and drugs. The goal, per Wired's report: find safety gaps in competitors' systems before those companies discovered them. It is like the restaurant across the street sending employees disguised as customers to order the most problematic thing on the menu, just to tell the neighborhood their rival cooks badly 😑. The internal project was called 'Cannes' (what a 'classy' name for something so questionable), and the contractors sent over 45,000 prompts, including images of pills, knives, and nooses. OpenAI, Google, and Character.AI all said they had no idea. Meta calls it 'standard industry practice,' but using accounts that simulate minors in crisis to spy on rivals is not what I would call standard. AI is a powerful tool, and the decisions of whoever controls it matter enormously. Keep that in mind.