Dave MuteqxMeta AI in WhatsApp is gone today - based in the UK. It's probably a staged roll-out. They'll see what the problems and the backlash are like and be finding out whether people use it and so on.
For me the integration of any AI into a messaging app is totally unwanted and should literally be illegal! That's not "optimistic" for this day-and-age, that's basic application privacy. I don't want to send their AI any data whatsoever, including friends names when I search - just search my saved contacts dammit!
Pushing unwanted AI integration on people with no way of disabling it completely just speaks volumes about Meta's general disregard for the users - we are simply their product, their guinea pigs. All of us are the test subjects of these AI corporations and the outcomes are likely to be predictably dire in the long term. AI pioneer Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
“[T]he most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’”
For me it doesn't matter that it's temporarily gone from WhatsApp. It will be back in no time and the general trajectory of WhatsApp enshittification remains the same. Needing to be in contact with friends is not a justification for creating a massive invasion of privacy on every phone! Particularly when it's Meta - a company who profit from providing social media services to fascists and who are headed by Zuckerberg, with his alt-right techbro leanings and support of the Trump regime.
It's time to ditch WhatsApp forever! There's no back-pedalling now, the trust is broken. There have to be hard consequences for companies who treat the end users with such disdain and total lack of care.
Calling it "virtue signalling" FFS Zuckerberg! Respect people's privacy or piss off!
I'm moving over to Signal messenger altogether, along with many friends, and we aren't coming back to WhatsApp or anything Meta no matter what now - this is the final straw.