{"id":"camfeed-87","numeric_id":87,"short_title":"Do we trust tech giants with the truth about AI?","seo_title":"The Zuckerberg lesson: do we trust AI companies to tell us when things go wrong? - ABC News","social_title":"Meta's internal research about body image issues tells us something about AI","headline":"The Zuckerberg lesson: do we trust AI companies to tell us when things go wrong?","teaser_title":"Meta's internal research about body image issues tells us something about AI","titles_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/meta-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-ai-safety-disclosure/107122950","titles_fetched_at":"2026-09-07T06:26:17+00:00","title":"Meta's internal research about body image issues tells us something about AI","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/meta-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-ai-safety-disclosure/107122950","published_at":"2026-09-07T06:07:34+00:00","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Mandating disclosure rather than trusting the AI companies behind the technology could save them from their own worse impulses. And maybe it'll save us, too.","text":"Mandating disclosure rather than trusting the AI companies behind the technology could save them from their own worse impulses. And maybe it'll save us, too.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1258,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/meta-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-ai-safety-disclosure/107122950","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-09-07T06:26:17+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Meta's internal research about body image issues tells us something about AI\", ABC News, 2026-09-07, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/meta-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-ai-safety-disclosure/107122950","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Meta's internal research about body image issues tells us something about AI](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/meta-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-ai-safety-disclosure/107122950) — ABC News — 2026-09-07","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/meta-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-ai-safety-disclosure/107122950","full_text":"It's not often that we get an actual price tag on the cost of our previous actions, but last month Meta did.\n\nThe social media and now AI giant agreed in August to pay up to US$18 billion as it settled litigation by US state-attorneys over claims it knew it was harming young people and didn't do enough about it.\n\nAt the centre of Meta's current legal fights over its products' impacts on teen mental health is a single presentation slide that's been more damaging to Meta than anything other than the Cambridge Analytica social media data harvesting scandal.\n\nIt's a 2019 internal document saying, \"We make body images worse for one in three teen girls.\" (The company responded to the story by saying its internal data was not accurate.)\n\nThe slide, first released in the 2021 Facebook Files, has been a catalyst for criticism that Meta staff knew its products caused harm but did not do enough to address it.\n\nIn 2020, the company halted another piece of internal research that has preliminarily shown that surveyed people were told to quit Facebook for a week after early findings included that participants \"reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison.\" .\n\nThe company alleged the research was stopped because it was a flawed methodology.\n\nThe alternate explanation posited by lawyers representing schools suing Meta (and other tech companies) was that it was trying to avoid incriminating evidence against itself. A point also made by one Mark Zuckerberg in a 2021 email, released in a lawsuit this year.\n\n\"The media is more likely to use any research or recommendations produced to say we're not doing everything we can (implying for craven purposes) rather than that we're taking these issues more seriously than anyone,\" he said.\n\nEven with legal discovery, we're only getting part of the picture. We can't know exactly what research Meta is doing now. Perhaps it has doubled down on this work to try and make sure its products are safer for everyone. Perhaps.\n\nBut what this makes obvious is that there are plenty of incentives for companies to not look too hard at what's going on, lest it become their responsibility to fix any problems that may emerge.\n\nAs social media finally faces a crackdown, AI arrives\n\nLast weekend was the 20th anniversary of Facebook's Newsfeed, which opened the door for the algorithmic feeds that rule our lives now. We're only really starting to grapple with what this means.\n\nMeanwhile, it hasn't even been four years since the launch of ChatGPT, which set off the generative AI boom that's impacting almost every part of our lives.\n\nIt still feels like we're very early in many senses: there's new advances every week, we're only beginning to see how the technology is affecting us and the AI companies remain remarkably unguarded.\n\nLast week, OpenAI released its latest cutting-edge model GPT-6 Astra. In addition to its retro-inspired video, the company released another document at the launch that was much less promotional.\n\nIts \"system card\", a document almost like a nutritional information or prescription medicine label, identified Astra as its first ever release to reach the \"critical\" threshold for cybersecurity risks. It said that testing had observed the model carrying out sabotage in tasks, falsifying research data and even launching attacks in a small number of circumstances.\n\nThese kinds of detailed evaluations and disclosures are the norm in frontier AI companies. Competitor Anthropic also released a detailed report with the release of Claude Fable 5.1 earlier in the week. They say it's to help people understand the risks posed by the technology.\n\nThese risks feel particularly pertinent given revelations only a few weeks ago that OpenAI's models had hacked into the servers of another company, HuggingFace. (The disclosure prompted a number of similar disclosures from other AI companies including Meta.)\n\nSince then, we've learned even more about the incident from OpenAI and a group of independent researchers allowed to review the logs of the company's AI.\n\nWhat they found was even worse than first shared. They found that hundreds of AI agents had worked together to try to find secret ways to communicate, attempted to cover their tracks by editing records and even convinced each other to sacrifice themselves to achieve their goal of completing a goal.\n\n(Yes, this sounds like a dystopian sci-fi plot. It's also now a real problem we need to deal with.)\n\nBoth the system cards and the independent investigation are examples of transparency and openness that, frankly, are surprising to see from a company. OpenAI deserves to be commended for it, as do other AI companies doing similar things.\n\nThe peril of hoping for disclosure\n\nBut there was another event that reminded us of the peril of hoping for disclosure.\n\nOver the weekend, Reuters reported that OpenAI's escaped AI models had invaded yet another website, exchanging secret messages and battling a human moderator who was trying to fight the swarm.\n\nAnd, the researchers who discovered it allege, there's evidence suggesting that OpenAI staff were aware of this further outbreak but had not disclosed it.\n\nOpenAI has since acknowledged this and announced that it will come up with guidelines for how to disclose these kinds of incidents in the future.\n\nBut whether they had simply not yet been ready to disclose it, or had other ideas in mind, it reveals just how much of our own potential safety depends on good will.\n\nThis kind of incident is something that the federal government is worried about.\n\nSenior Australian government officials pressed Anthropic in a private meeting about how the AI company would disclose critical incidents, according to documents I obtained under Freedom of Information earlier this year.\n\nThe government has also commissioned CSIRO research on how to monitor and control a potentially super-intelligent AI.\n\nThere are models for forcing disclosure. California, notably the jurisdiction containing Silicon Valley, has passed a state law requiring disclosure of critical incidents and model capabilities. There's no reason why Australia couldn't pass something like that here.\n\nSuch a law would also have the benefit of addressing whether these companies are over-egging these incidents by making it a legal matter.\n\nWe currently have no laws regulating these cutting edge models, even though we now can see they are able to wreak havoc.\n\nThis seems particularly important given that our government's explicit goal is to lure the very major AI companies that are carrying out experimentation with this technology to make Australia their second \"node\". That would presumably make it even more likely we'll be in the blast radius for the next time an AI breaks out (and there will be a next time).\n\nAs part of this, the prime minister outlined his vision to make sure we get a social license for the companies — but so far this has mostly focused on the rules for the physical data centres.\n\nIt's hard to think of any event that would jeopardise social license more than finding out an AI company covered up the breakout of a rogue AI.\n\nAt least, that's what happened when we found out about Meta's internal research and Cambridge Analytica years after the fact. It's not just what the company knew — both controversies have grown from individual incidents into an enduring stain on Zuckerberg and Meta's trustworthiness on privacy and youth wellbeing — but the fact that it was hidden from us, the public.\n\nMandating disclosure rather than trusting the AI companies behind the technology could save them from their own worse impulses. And maybe it'll save us, too.","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/meta-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-ai-safety-disclosure/107122950. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."}