Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’

Signal President Meredith Whittaker cautions that AI chatbots are not sentient and raises privacy concerns about giving them pervasive access to personal data and services (credit cards, browser, Signal messages, calendar). She says using such access to act on users' behalf would amount to a backdoor; she personally uses AI only sparingly for formatting and avoids relying on it for substantive thinking.