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

In a recent discussion with Bloomberg, Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, highlighted the significant privacy concerns surrounding AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. She stressed, "These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors,” emphasizing the limitations of these technologies. Whittaker shared her own approach to AI, revealing that while she utilizes such tools occasionally to assist in formatting documents, she refrains from engaging them for deeper inquiries. She stated, "I’m very serious about my thinking and writing, and I don’t want the process of working through an idea to be foreclosed or eclipsed by the response of a system that’s averaging what’s already out there.” Her comments also addressed the implications of AI's expanding role in everyday life. Responding to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's projection that users could delegate their holiday shopping to Microsoft Copilot, Whittaker raised alarm over the potential for invasive data access. She noted that allowing such a system to monitor family chats and manage personal tasks would mean granting it extensive access to sensitive information, including credit card details, messaging capabilities, and personal schedules. "What you’ve just described is a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services," she warned. In reference to Signal, she added, "It would constitute a kind of a backdoor."