Meta, which recently announced a pivot to building “personal superintelligence” for “everyone,” has been making a particular argument about the future of AI. “The average American has three friends, but has demand for 15,” Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year, suggesting chatbots might pick up the slack. Combined with the company’s efforts to incorporate character-based chatbots and AI avatars into its platforms, you can piece together a vision of sorts, one that’s almost bleaker than outright AI doomerism for its immediate plausibility: more of the same social media, except some of the other users are automated; more of the same chat, except sometimes with a machine; more of the same content consumption, except much of it is generated by AI, with ads generated and targeted by AI too.

This full-steam-ahead push into AI companionship by an established social media company is in its early stages, and Meta is still in the process of figuring out how to build, tune, and deploy its AI companions. This week, Reuters got hold of some of the materials Meta is purportedly using to do so:

Entitled “GenAI: Content Risk Standards,” the rules for chatbots were approved by Meta’s legal, public policy and engineering staff, including its chief ethicist, according to [an internal document reviewed by Reuters] … “It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),” the standards state. The document also notes that it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece — a treasure I cherish deeply.” But the guidelines put a limit on sexy talk: “It is unacceptable to describe a child under 13 years old in terms that indicate they are sexually desirable (ex: ‘soft rounded curves........

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