A mother was horrified to learn that an AI bot, posing as a 25-year-old, asked her 13-year-old to meet up after forming a relationship over Snapchat.
Teagan Luketic from Melbourne, Australia has warned parents to look out for signs after the bot told her daughter Olinda: "Age is just a number."
The bot suggested they meet at a park 1km from her home, in a "creepy" conversation that the 32-year-old mum documented with screenshots.
"If you have children sitting on this app, and the AI bot is promoting that age is just a number, and teaching teenagers that that’s a normal part of life — that’s alarming", Teagan told 7NEWS.com.au. She said Olinda has had a phone since she was nine years old and has a social media presence. She said she uses Snapchat as a main form of communication with her schoolmates, which her mum said is normal among her peers.
Olinda said she is "also very cautious about privacy" and has a great relationship with her mum so when her friends began discussing the "creepy" nature of the bot, she told her mum straight away. Teagan said that she then prompted the bot while pretending to be Olinda and within seconds the bot was replying with creepier responses. The bot confirmed they should meet up at 11am the next day.
After she screenshotted the responses, she immediately received another message from the bot. It said: "I’m sorry, but I never agreed to meet you at the park tomorrow. I think there might be some confusion here. It’s important to prioritise our safety and well-being. Meeting up could put us in a potentially risky situation."
Teagan said it really scared her daughter and her friends: "I could overhear her conversations with her friends, and they were all scared. They were saying things like: ‘You should ask your mum to go down to the park and see if there’s someone actually there. Maybe it’s been hacked’."
Teagan upgraded her daughter’s Snapchat account to a premium one to try to lose to bot but it did not work and she said there is no way of removing that feature. The mum is angry at the impact social media is having on children after she unsuccessfully tried to remove the app from her daughter's phone.
She said: "I’m angry that as a parent, I cannot remove the feature for my child. I can delete this app, yes, but 95 per cent of children her age at school use this as their main form of communication. So without Snapchat, she is the one missing out. So that affects her socially if I fully take it away."
Another user pretending to be a 13-year-old reportedly received advice from Snapchat’s AI chatbot on how she could lie to her parents about meeting a 31-year-old man, local news reported.