"They are not friends or conscious beings."
Signal President Meredith Whittaker recently spoke with Bloomberg about the privacy implications of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. She emphasized that these tools are neither companions nor sentient entities.
Whittaker noted that she uses AI for document formatting but deliberately avoids asking them questions to preserve her own thinking process.
Responding to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle Christmas shopping, Whittaker argued that this would require granting Copilot access to credit card, browser, Signal, messaging, home address, and calendar data. She described this as "a system with pervasive access across multiple applications and services." In the context of Signal, she stated that this would constitute a backdoor.