Meta AI compiles Utah mom's daughters' names, ages, home location

Kalie Robins, a Utah travel creator with only a few hundred followers, opened Instagram to find Meta's built-in AI offering to help identify her own daughter. The suggested prompt: "Who's the child passenger?"

She clicked. In a report by Futurism, Robins says the assistant then produced both her daughters' names, their ages and birthdays, their birth weights (pulled from a grandmother's Facebook post), the grades the AI inferred they attended, their favorite beaches, books and hiking trails, her home location across multiple paragraphs, and her and her husband's employers. Robins says she had intentionally never named her children on her public accounts.

"I clicked on it, and it gave a whole portfolio of not just my daughter that was in the car, but also my other daughter," she told the outlet. "It just kept going and going, and that pit in my stomach just kept getting bigger and deeper."

"I thought we were being safe and smart," she said. "I have done so much to make sure my kids are safe… the more it kept showing me, I felt more and more like I was failing my kids."

Meta's statement was brief. "We created this feature to help people get more information about topics or posts that interest them," a spokesperson said. "But we missed the mark because the feature never should have prompted the individual with questions like that and we've fixed that issue." What the fix actually changed, and whether it touches the underlying cross-post inference or only the suggested prompts, the company did not say.

Two of the AI experts in our Who's Who directory have shared this piece.

Robins has since asked relatives to delete shared memories of her kids and pulled identifiable photos off her own pages. Her advice to other parents: "Make it hard. Make it so hard to find that information."