Meta has launched a new AI-powered feature for WhatsApp that allows users to catch up with messages without actually having to read them.
Users of the popular messaging app will instead be able to read an AI-generated summary of unread messages presented in a few bullet points.
“Sometimes, you just need to quickly catch up on your messages,” a WhatsApp blog post stated on Wednesday.
“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.”
Meta said that the new AI tool uses something referred to as “Private Processing technology” to ensure that a WhatsApp user’s contacts are not able to see that chats have been summarised.
Only English language users in the US will have access to the AI summaries, with WhatsApp saying that it plans to roll out the feature to other languages and countries later this year.
The new Message Summaries feature is part of Meta’s plans to roll out artificial intelligence tools across its platforms, having already introduced an AI chatbot to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
In a recent interview, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested AI bots could serve as a friend for people suffering from loneliness.
“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” he said during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder John Collison at the payment giant’s annual conference last month.
“For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI.”
Researchers have consistently warned of the dangers of developing relationships with AI chatbots due to the experimental nature of the technology.
Soren Dinesen Ostergaard, a professor of psychiatry at Aarhus University in Denmark, said that AI has given rise to a new phenomenon referred to as chatbot psychosis.
“Depending on the questions asked, generative AI chatbots may provide information that is wrong or maybe misunderstood by a person with mental illness in need of medical attention, who does then not seek appropriate help,” he wrote in an editorial for the Schizophrenia Bulletin
“I am convinced that individuals prone to psychosis will experience, or are already experiencing, analog delusions while interacting with generative AI chatbots.”
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