cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/215685
WhatsApp can now call on Meta AI to summarize your personal chats. As shown in a GIF, you can access it by tapping the button to unfurl all of your unread messages in a chat. But instead of showing your messages, WhatsApp uses Meta AI to generate a bulleted summary of what you missed.
The feature is rolling out in English in the US, with plans to launch in more countries and languages later this year. It uses Meta’s Private Processing technology, which the company claims will prevent it and other third parties from snooping on your messages.
WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, says its AI message summaries are optional, and the feature is turned off by default. You can also use WhatsApp’s “Advanced Privacy” setting to prevent users from using AI features in group chats. We still don’t know if WhatsApp’s AI message summaries will struggle with accuracy, which is something we saw with the launch of Apple’s AI-generated message and notification rundowns.
Over the past year, Meta has continued stuffing different AI features into WhatsApp, including a way to ask Meta AI questions from within a chat, as well as a feature that generates images in real-time. Some users have grown frustrated by the new Meta AI button in the bottom-right corner of the app that they can’t turn off or remove. Meta also sparked backlash with another change that brought ads to the app — something its founders said they never wanted to do.
The app’s Private Processing is supposed to conceal your interactions with its AI model by creating a “secure cloud environment,” preventing Meta or WhatsApp from seeing your summaries. Other people in the group chat won’t be able to see the message summaries, either.
From The Verge via this RSS feed
I know this is not a unique sentiment by any means, but it makes me legitimately angry to think of participating in a conversation where someone else is using this. If you don’t want to read my messages why are we even connecting; imagine clicking “summarize” on someone genuinely trying to talk to you. “Sorry, the AI hallucinated that you were going to finish the rest of the assignment tonight.” and a year later “Sorry, I forgot all the nuances of who you are as a person because an AI didn’t think they were relevant.”
The underlining issue is that people are being forced to do so much at once they skip whatever they can. We already seen intimacy suffer and AI is another “shortcut” that allows us to do more work and care less about community.
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ummm no. I don’t want Meta to access my chats.
How fucking lazy can you get, to not be bothered reading a text?!?
Do people actually use stuff like this? Like who has ever needed help reading a text message?
If you need an AI summary to read texts from your friends… Your friend either has the worst case of main character syndrome, or you’re a bad friend for not putting in the effort of reading what they have to say!
I love that my global settings has a whole section labelled Privacy, but I can’t disable this globally for all chats my account joins.
Instead I have to disable it for each chat individually.
What awful design WhatsApp (obviously on purpose so I’ll forget with new chats).
Well maybe this is the push that those friends will need to move to Signal…
I’m kinda sick of EVERYTHING having it’s own “AI”, I just hope it’s only a passing phase like it was with crypto
Oh yeah we’re totally not going to ever peek even a little at all your private communications even though we’re now explicitly collecting them to feed into an LLM. It’s a secure cloud environment!
It has a green lock icon with the word “Private” next to it so it’s fine bro.
Meta wants a wave of stupids. People will not have the capacity to read a simple message with this shit!
Wow, nothing says I love you like letting an AI summarize your spouse’s feelings into “vibes: bad”
You’re still using whatsapp? Tsk tsk.
What’s the alternative(s) you use and enjoy?
I am anecdotal, almost 70. So my data does not really count as I do not do much. I use text for family and Signal for anything else. Quit all the other services pretty much except Lemmy/Piefed have accounts on Bluesky and mastodon but I don’t say anything so far on them. I save my yelling at the clouds for here.
🥺
I imagine you were into tech and computers when you were younger? That’s really rare to see amongst elders I believe
Retired puter consultant. Was in the biz for over 40yrs.
As we say in my home town, “Wankers!”. I need to have this WhatsApp BS as its the only way to stay connected with older relatives and work groups. I’m using RethinkDNS on my phone and have blocked as many Meta DNS and network links as I can find online. Exactly none of them show up on my firewall logs! The connections in/ out appear to be via “safe” routes, which if blocked then break wider functionality. To use yet another completely unheard of home town phrases, “Bastards”.
Still claiming WA messages are e2ee? The MITM is even paraphrasing the content back to you.
