About 80 WhatsApp help pages exposed hidden instructions for a Meta chatbot, including a ban on advising people to contact oversight bodies
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Chatbots' hidden rules are sometimes visible in page code, and they show what the bot has been told not to say.
According to an analysis by the company Redact, the code of about 80 WhatsApp help pages contained roughly 100 blocks of text written as instructions for a Meta language model: for example, sections titled "WHAT NOT TO SAY" and a ban on giving legal advice. On the page about deleting an account, among other things, there was an instruction not to recommend contacting a data protection authority or another regulator. Wired saw this text on the pages. Meta said the cause was a bug.
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