Signal president Meredith Whittaker: AI chatbots 'are not your friends'
Signal president Meredith Whittaker told TechCrunch "These are not your friends" and said AI chatbots are not conscious or sentient interlocutors. She warned that granting chatbots access to phones and enabling autonomous agents, device scanning, and digital advertising to work together creates a new architecture for mass surveillance. Whittaker argued that online-safety measures that rely on invasive scanning could undermine privacy and produce surveillance harms rather than protect people.
The instinct of students is often to use AI to help with homework, even if they are not trying to cheat. And because off-the-shelf chatbots are a helpful assistant, rather than a tutor, they give you the answer and undermine learning. Paper: cepr.org/publications...
Ethan Mollick37I talk about the research on when AI undermines, versus supporting, thinking and learning here: www.oneusefulthing.org/p/choosing-t...
Dan Sylveste2I wonder if you could make a chatbot that works better as a tutor just with a system prompt, or if you'd need to do more work than that (ironic)
