Signal’s Meredith Whitaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘aren’t your friends’

When asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Cloud, Signal’s president, Meredith Whitaker, responded, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not conscious interlocutors.”

Whitaker made the comments in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy and Signal. She admitted that she uses AI tools to “format a document here and there”, but insisted: “I don’t ask them questions. I’m very serious about my thinking and my writing, and I don’t want the process of working through an idea.” […] To be prevented or overcome by a system response that averages out what is already there.

As for Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman’s prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their purchases this Christmas, Whittaker argued that this scenario — where Copilot eavesdrops on a family group chat to determine who he wants — would mean giving him “access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, and my home address.” [and] My calendar.”

“What I just described is a system that has broad reach across multiple applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the context of Signal, that would be kind of a back door.”