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 A broader 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 working process to be blocked by an idea (…) or obscured by the response of a system that averages out what’s already there.”

As for the CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleiman’s predictions That users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping this year, Whittaker argued that this scenario — where Copilot eavesdrops on a family group chat to determine who wants — would mean giving him “access to my credit card, my browser, Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, 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.”