WhatsApp Found Another Way to Cram AI Into Your Chats

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has been adding more and more AI features into its apps as of late, whether you asked for them or not. WhatsApp in particular has received a lot of Meta’s AI attention in recent times, with the addition of a dedicated Meta AI button in the app and the search bar doubling as a place to ask Meta AI to generate text, advice, or jokes. The company continues to push AI into the heart of WhatsApp, as it’s now added an optional feature that lets you summarize your conversations in the app. 

WhatsApp calls this feature Message Summaries, and it’s currently rolling out in the U.S. in English. Once it rolls out to you, you’ll be able to access it via a Summarize privately button at the top of your chat. The company says it’s designed to help you catch up with tons of messages without reading every single one of them.

In theory, this is a good idea. If you’re a part of group chats, you’ll know that some of them can absolutely spiral out of control. I’m a part of a few such groups, where people post non-stop during Apple events, sports games, or when we want to discuss a fun topic. There have been times when I’ve woken up to hundreds of unread texts, and I don’t always have the time or energy to go through each of these messages myself. For times like these, WhatsApp’s AI summaries could help.

In practice though, there are some legitimate accuracy and privacy concerns here. First, as with all AI, there’s always the risk of hallucination, so you might have to double check your summaries anyway. On the privacy front, while WhatsApp is famously end-to-end encrypted, Meta’s AI features so far haven’t had the same level of security. Given the company’s long history of collecting user data, as well as surprises like the recent move to bring ads to WhatsApp, it’s natural to be skeptical.

For what it’s worth, though, Meta says that the Message Summaries feature does not allow it or WhatsApp to see your messages or the summaries Meta AI generates. “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,” the company says in its blog post announcing this feature. You can read more about how Private Processing works in Meta’s engineering blog and technical whitepaper.