absolute immunities

There was good reason for Reformed suspicions. Eisleben, the little town in Saxony where Luther was born in 1483 or 1484, turned in the course of the 16th century into a centre of Lutheran pilgrimage, styled a ‘New Jerusalem’ by its devotees. Pilgrimage generally involves a saint. Legends developed about Luther’s continuing miraculous power, most strikingly a story which circulated as early as the Diet of Worms in 1521: pictures of the burly Reformer were apparently capable of surviving attempts to burn them.

In the wake of [Defcon 2023], product managers told staff that Zuckerberg was upset that the team was playing it too safe. That rebuke led to a loosening of boundaries, according to people familiar with the episode, including carving out an exception to the prohibition against explicit content for romantic role-play.

Internally, staff cautioned that the decision gave adult users access to hypersexualized underage AI personas and, conversely, gave underage users access to bots willing to engage in fantasy sex with children, said the people familiar with the episode. Meta still pushed ahead.

Zuckerberg’s concerns about overly restricting bots went beyond fantasy scenarios. Last fall, he chastised Meta’s managers for not adequately heeding his instructions to quickly build out their capacity for humanlike interaction.

At the time, Meta allowed users to build custom chatbot companions, but he wanted to know why the bots couldn’t mine a user’s profile data for conversational purposes. Why couldn’t bots proactively message their creators or hop on a video call, just like human friends? And why did Meta’s bots need such strict conversational guardrails?

“I missed out on Snapchat and TikTok, I won’t miss on this,” Zuckerberg fumed, according to employees familiar with his remarks.