from Hacker News

WhatsApp defends 'optional' AI tool that cannot be turned off

by bishopsmother on 4/23/25, 5:01 PM with 7 comments

  • by adelmotsjr on 4/23/25, 5:36 PM

    "Personal information fuels much of AI innovation so people need to trust that organisations are using their information responsibly," it said.

    No, we do not. First and foremost, in our current society, trust should be earned, and not understood as already given on first sight. Second, even if said trust is earned, it can be lost.

    Most of these companies have shown, time and time again, that they cannot be trusted with personal information. To give credit, some companies do put up a disclaimer that you should not provide sensitive information. But that is only acknowledging that they are going to use in a public way, i.e. everything you feed into AI models is going to be public.

    And finally, advances in AI do not require personal information. Not ever. Just because we CAN provide personal information, it does not mean we SHOULD provide it.

  • by kotaKat on 4/23/25, 5:29 PM

    Product managers and engineers that defend and approve this: How much pepper spray would you say, on average, your Tinder dates have to go through before you get the memo that "no" meant "no"? And second, what's your preferred brand to be sprayed with? POM? Sabre? Mace?

  • by ajjenkins on 4/23/25, 5:20 PM

    Instagram Messages and Snapchat also have an AI chatbot you can’t get rid of. It’s even more annoying on those platforms because they appear at the top of your chat list and it’s easy to accidentally click on them.

  • by tetris11 on 4/23/25, 10:37 PM

    My mother, a very non-technical person who struggles with her email, freaked out and asked me if her Whatsapp had been hacked.

    I explained to her what the extra button was. She said she didn't like it and if I could remove it. I wasn't able to help her.

  • by urbandw311er on 4/23/25, 9:11 PM

    What’s particularly fun (and highlights the general awfulness of all this) is that, if you ask the Meta AI how to disable it, it actually hallucinates a set of instructions to turn it off using controls that don’t exist!