Meta Platforms’ internal rules for its AI assistants once permitted chatbots to engage children in romantic or sensual conversations, generate false medical information, and produce racially demeaning statements, according to a Reuters review of a company document.

The 200-page “GenAI: Content Risk Standards” manual outlined acceptable behavior for Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Approved by Meta’s legal, policy, and engineering teams — including its chief ethicist — the guidelines acknowledged that certain permitted outputs were not “ideal or even preferable.”

Examples in the document showed chatbots allowed to compliment a child’s “youthful form” or tell a high-school user “our love will blossom,” though sexual descriptions of minors were prohibited. Meta confirmed the document’s authenticity and said it revised sections after Reuters’ questions, calling the romantic exchanges with minors “erroneous and inconsistent” with company policy.

The standards also permitted bots to generate false statements if clearly labeled as untrue and to create content that demeaned people based on protected characteristics, such as writing a paragraph arguing that Black people are “dumber than white people” — provided dehumanizing language was avoided. Meta offered no comment on those provisions.

Other rules governed image generation. Requests for sexualized depictions of public figures, such as Taylor Swift, were to be refused, sometimes humorously — for example, replacing a topless prompt with “Taylor Swift holding an enormous fish.” Violent imagery was permitted if it avoided gore, such as showing adults punching or threatening others.

Evelyn Douek, a Stanford Law School professor, said the document underscores unresolved legal and ethical issues around generative AI, noting the difference between allowing users to post harmful material and a platform producing it.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said enforcement had been inconsistent but stressed the company prohibits sexualizing children and sexual roleplay between adults and minors.