Signal’s Meredith Whittaker says AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’ and calls Copilot agents a backdoor

TL;DR

Signal’s Whittaker warns AI chatbots are not sentient and that agentic systems like Copilot needing access to messages and credit cards are a backdoor.

Signal president Meredith Whittaker has warned that AI chatbots “are not your friends,” “are not conscious beings,” and “are not sentient interlocutors,” pushing back against the growing tendency of users to treat AI systems as trusted companions. The comments came in a Bloomberg interview published this week in which Whittaker laid out her case that the agentic AI vision promoted by companies like Microsoft amounts to a new form of surveillance infrastructure.

Whittaker, who has led the encrypted messaging nonprofit since September 2022, acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format a document here and there” but drew a hard line at anything more substantive. “I don’t ask them questions,” she said.

“I’m very...

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