I tell you what, Meta must be very confident that its AI system is smart enough to understand a broad range of contexts in spoken language, because this new summary option in WhatsApp could cause many headaches if it’s not.
Today, WhatsApp has announced Message Summaries, which uses Meta AI to summarize the key notes of your collective messages in a chat.
As you can see in this example, now, rather than having to catch up on a chat by reading every messages that’s been sent since you last logged in, Meta AI will be able to give you the cliff notes, by reading and analyzing those DMs for you.
Which I doubt that anyone really wants.
As explained by WhatsApp:
“We’ve all been there – rushing between meetings, catching up after a flight without Wi-Fi, or simply having too many chats to catch up on. Sometimes, you just need to quickly catch up on your messages. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Message Summaries, a new option that uses Meta AI to privately and quickly summarize unread messages in a chat, so you can get an idea of what is happening, before reading the details in your unread messages.”
That’ll no doubt freak a lot of people out, and to be honest, I’m not really sure why WhatsApp is even taking the risk in adding this feature, which I doubt many users have been asking for.
Because WhatsApp is for your private chats and conversations, its whole appeal is privacy, and ensuring that no one else can read what you’re sharing.
As such, having an AI system scan and interpret such seems highly problematic.
Which is why WhatsApp’s going to expanded effort to explain itself:
“Message Summaries uses Private Processing technology, which allows Meta AI to generate a response without Meta or WhatsApp ever seeing your messages or the private summaries. No one else in the chat can see that you summarized unread messages either. This means your privacy is protected at all times.”
Yeah, I’m not sure that explanation is going to assure jittery WhatsApp users, who may already be a little spooked by the app recently being banned on U.S. House staff phones, due to questions about message privacy.
WhatsApp has also been accused of sending user data to Israel, while there have also been questions raised about potential vulnerabilities within its encryption process, which could expose limited details about user interactions in the app.
So right now, there are already a few concerns being raised about the app’s rock-solid privacy process, so it seems like maybe not the right time to also be like: “Hey, our AI is also reading your messages and summarizing the key points, cool right?”
Yeah, if anything, I think Meta should have delayed this one, or just shelved it outright, because I don’t think the benefits outweigh the broader risks, and questions that this feature will raise.
I mean, even though it is secure, as per Meta’s assurances, the fact that you’ll be getting an AI summary that mentions the key points of your private chats seems slightly unnerving, and implies that Meta’s systems are keeping a log of your interactions.
The saving grace here is that Message Summaries is optional, and will be turned off by default. So Meta’s not going to suddenly spring them on you, which will definitely reduce the impact.
But either way, I don’t see this being a popular addition, and I don’t know that many WhatsApp users will welcome the update.
