Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’
Asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal president Meredith Whittaker said, “These are not your friends. These are not sentient beings. These are not sentient conversation partners.”
Whittaker countered those comments a broader interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy and Signal. She acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to create a document here and there,” but emphasized, “I don’t ask them questions. I’m very serious in my thinking and writing, and I don’t want the process of developing an idea to […] to be shielded or overshadowed by the response of a system that averages what is already there.”
As for the CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their holiday shopping this year, Whittaker argued. This scenario – where Copilot taps into the family group chat to determine who wants it – means it “gets access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address” [and] my agenda.”
“What you just described is a system with very widespread access to multiple applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the context of Signal, it would be a kind of backdoor.”
