WhatsApp rolls out AI-generated summaries for private messages
WhatsApp rolls out AI-generated summaries for private messages
More AI in WhatsApp.
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.
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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".
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...
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'm kinda sick of EVERYTHING having it's own "AI", I just hope it's only a passing phase like it was with crypto
ummm no. I don't want Meta to access my chats.
Meta wants a wave of stupids. People will not have the capacity to read a simple message with this shit!
How fucking lazy can you get, to not be bothered reading a text?!?
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."
Hardly an AI problem though. Many people talk just to hear themselves talk rather than care to listen. Many will stare at their phone when in a real world conversation.
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.
not that we should accept this, but all mainstream social media does this already. i "lost" quite a bunch of "friendships" when i noticed it. and im glad i did.
Are you not in any group chats with 50 people trying to organize something? They become a cluster fuck.
For direct chats, totally agreed. I'd be seriously insulted if you used an ai to talk in a 1:1 conversation.
That really seems like a structural problem to me. Break it out into more-focused teams, signify important people whose messages you should pay attention to, or use threads to consolidate topics. If those things aren't being done and there's just 50+ people dumping information then the information can't be deemed important. Adding AI to patch the issue is poor management at best and introducing poisoned information at worst.
OSX already does this so many will be. I don’t use it when I’m texting something but it helps me follow group chats id usually ignore or if my wife has texted me a bunch of stuff I’ll see a quick summary including ‘make sure to do x’
Wow, nothing says I love you like letting an AI summarize your spouse's feelings into "vibes: bad"
Still claiming WA messages are e2ee? The MITM is even paraphrasing the content back to you.
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.
The worst part is that I know people that will use this regularly and also know people I'd be tempted to use it with because of their walls of text that I usually ignore.
Would you be more offended by someone using AI to decipher your wall of text then if they ignored you?
I'm not sure which one is worse, either tells me that they didn't bother reading the message. It is hard for me to relate because I try to do my best to not send ted talk to a group chat.
Maybe I'd rather be ignored if they're not interested.