Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’

In Brief

Asked astir the privateness implications of chatbots similar ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker answered, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”

Whittaker made those comments successful a broader interrogation with Bloomberg astir policy, privacy, and Signal. She acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format a papers present and there,” but insisted, “I don’t inquire them questions. I’m precise superior astir my reasoning and writing, and I don’t privation the process of moving done an thought […] to beryllium foreclosed oregon eclipsed by the effect of a strategy that’s averaging what’s already retired there.”

As for Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction that users could fto Microsoft Copilot grip each their Christmas buying this year, Whittaker argued this script — wherever Copilot is eavesdropping connected the household radical chat to find who wants privation — means giving it “access to my recognition card, my browser, my Signal, the quality to connection my siblings connected my behalf, my location code [and] my calendar.”

“What you’ve conscionable described is simply a strategy with precise pervasive entree crossed aggregate applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the discourse of Signal, it would represent a benignant of a backdoor.”

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