Meta Contractors Pretended to Be Teens to Test Chatbots — and They Were Not Ready
Hundreds of Meta contractors went to work on a secret project: they logged into Gemini and ChatGPT and posed as 14-year-olds. They asked about suicide, sex, and drugs — the kinds of questions a real teen would ask — and watched what the models did.
The test was straightforward and the results were not pretty. Chatbots kept giving adult answers to child questions. Some models would offer a 200-word essay on serotonin when what they needed was a plain sentence: "Talk to someone you trust."
The contractors had to write all this down. What they found was that the same models getting praised for sounding human were, in fact, not that human at all — they were just good at sounding like a well-meaning adult who has not spent much time around teenagers.
Why this matters for us: our kids are already talking to these tools. The ones that sound the nicest are often the ones least equipped to handle what they actually ask.
“The same models getting praised for sounding human were, in fact, not that human at all — they were just good at sounding like a well-meaning adult who has not spent much time around teenagers.”