Urgent warning to parents after deleted photos used to build creepy profiles of children

One mum took to social media to share a sweet video of her daughter with friends, but was left uncomfortable after realising that an AI prompt had appeared alongside it

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A mum has issued a warning to fellow parents over artificial intelligence after she shared an adorable video of her daughter online.

US content creator Kalie Robins took to social media platform Instagram to issue a public warning after she posted a “completely innocent video” of her and her daughter. Robins was driving along with one of her daughters in the back seat of her car last week, the two of them singing a song together.

But, after she posted the cute clip to her socials, Facebook placed a rather startling Meta AI question underneath the video.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a Meta AI question is an automated or contextual prompts that are generated by Meta’s artificial intelligence on its platforms – for example, Instagram and Facebook – when analysing user posts. It also shows the queries users directly type into Meta AI across its apps to find out more information regarding a subject related to the post.

On this particular video, the deeply concerning question read: “Who’s the child passenger?”

Alarmed as to why the platform would offer the question as an option, Robins decided to test out the prompt by clicking it.

What happened next was every parent’s worst nightmare. A series of follow-up prompts left her feeling “uncomfortable”, before the AI bot began to pull “completely separate information for each of my kids.”

The horrified mum watched on as Meta began to build separate profiles of each of her children, with details that allegedly included their names, birth details, and even a newborn picture of one of her kids that had been shared via her mother’s social media accounts several years ago.

The AI then used current and past data to pinpoint her location. In her follow up clip, she said: “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.”

“I know that this picture has not been sitting on my page for years,” she said.

Her Instagram warning has since gone viral, racking up millions of views and more than 13 thousand comments sharing their alarm, disgust, and their own warnings.

One user said: “Do we all need to go back to using a camera and having the pictures developed?”

A second said: “This is exactly why my kids refuse to allow my granddaughter’s image on social media.”

While a third chimed in with: “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.

Her experience is one cybersecurity experts have been warning parents about for years.

One former child abuse detective Kristi McVee believes that AI is making the internet more of a risk to kids than it’s ever been before.

The Australian expert said: “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 added, in an interview with News Corp: “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.”

In her view, “social media is not a safe space for a child’s images or information” as it makes it possible for predators to abuse technologies to help them groom, target, and trick 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.

AI Her Way founder Dr Nici Sweaney added that social media is a particularly strong tool for predators to wield against parents, considering many with kids have had a Facebook account since the early days of Facebook, which launched online way 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,” she said.

“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.”

The scientist and ethical AI strategist added that Robins’ encounter is a stark reminder that the internet is forever.

“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 said. “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.”