Meredith Whittaker
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meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Meredith Whittaker
@meredithmeredith.bsky.social
82K followers 970 following 410 posts
President of Signal, Chief Advisor to AI Now Institute
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meredithmeredith.bsky.social
LOL all morning picturing some finance quant slouched at his desk prompting Dalle, like, "make me a picture of pikachu having sex with the Apple logo" or whatever tf those guys use these things for, then throwing up his hands like "WHY WON'T THIS FIND ALPHA?!"

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Screenshot of headline and first two paragraphs of linked article, saying "Griffin Says GenAI Fails to Help Hedge Funds Beat Markets. Generative artificial intelligence isn’t helping hedge funds produce market-beating returns and isn’t meaningfully impacting the industry so far, according to billionaire Ken Griffin. “With GenAI there are clearly ways it enhances productivity, but for uncovering alpha it just falls short,” Griffin, the founder of hedge fund giant Citadel, said Wednesday at the JPMorgan Robin Hood Investors Conference in New York."
October 16, 2025 at 12:39 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
New speakers. I'm officially a dad.
Screenshot of an ebay listing that's ended for Encientes Klipsch Cornwall 3 speakers, which cost 2990 Euro and ended Mon, Sept 8. With a photo of one of the speakers.
September 23, 2025 at 8:42 AM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else!

www.economist.com/by-invitatio...
An illustration of me, and the headline: "AI agents are coming for your privacy, warns Meredith Whittaker The Signal Foundation’s president worries they will also blunt competition and undermine cyber-security" To put it bluntly, the path currently being taken towards agentic AI leads to an elimination of privacy and security at the application layer. It will not be possible for apps like Signal—the messaging app whose foundation I run—to continue to provide strong privacy guarantees, built on robust and openly validated encryption, if device-makers and OS developers insist on puncturing the metaphoric blood-brain barrier between apps and the OS. Feeding your sensitive Signal messages into an undifferentiated data slurry connected to cloud servers in service of their AI-agent aspirations is a dangerous abdication of responsibility. Happily, it’s not too late. There is much that can still be done, particularly when it comes to protecting the sanctity of private data. What’s needed is a fundamental shift in how we approach the development and deployment of AI agents. First, privacy must be the default, and control must remain in the hands of application developers exercising agency on behalf of their users. Developers need the ability to designate applications as “sensitive” and mark them as off-limits to agents, at the OS level and otherwise. This cannot be a convoluted workaround buried in settings; it must be a straightforward, well-documented mechanism (similar to Global Privacy Control) that blocks an agent from accessing our data or taking actions within an app. Second, radical transparency must be the norm. Vague assurances and marketing-speak are no longer acceptable. OS vendors have an obligation to be clear and precise about their architecture and what data their AI agents are accessing, how it is being used and the measures in place to protect it.
September 9, 2025 at 11:44 AM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
New Sunday Times profile in which I succeed, like a fencer in a 2hr marathon match, in fending off Qs abt my personal life & consistently turning focus back to my work & ideas.

(Contra the interviewer's claim, many ppl do know me! They're called friends, & you know who you are ❤️)

archive.is/BtZD0
August 11, 2025 at 3:46 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Business Insider headline saying: "Sam Altman says your ChatGPT therapy session might not stay private in a lawsuit By Robert Scammell" Wired headline that says "ICE Is Getting Unprecedented Access to Medicaid Data A new agreement viewed by WIRED gives ICE direct access to a federal database containing sensitive medical data on tens of millions of Americans, with the goal of locating immigrants."
July 25, 2025 at 2:52 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Just saying...
A screenshot of an excerpt from the interview, which reads: "The world has been pretty chaotic for a while now, but it feels like in the last couple of years it has only sharpened. How important is Signal in this current moment? People want privacy. People are creeped out. People are uneasy. People recognize that the status quo in tech is not safe or savory, and for whatever reason they are trying to find, and in the case of Signal are finding, alternatives that actually give them meaningful privacy. Anyone who does human rights work or investigative journalism understands that in many cases, it is the difference between life and death. We know throughout history that centralized power constitutes such power via information asymmetry. The more they know, the more stable and lasting their power is. This is the type of domination through knowledge that makes or breaks empires. Ultimately, we are in a world in which the power to know us has been ceded to the tech industry. So ensuring [privacy] in a world where the authority to know us has been ceded to private actors who may or may not cooperate with one or another regime, who may choose to use that data to manipulate or to harm us or to exclude us from access to resources, is existentially important. This is the basis on which I claim, without flinching, that Signal is the most important technical infrastructure in the world right now."
June 30, 2025 at 1:09 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
'Meredith,' some guys ask, 'why won't you shove AI into Signal?'

Because we love privacy, and we love you, and this shit is predictable and unacceptable. Use Signal ❤️
Guardian headline saying, "‘It’s terrifying’: WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user’s number Chatbot tries to change subject after serving up unrelated user’s mobile to man asking for rail firm helpline"
June 19, 2025 at 7:59 AM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Use Signal. We promise, no AI clutter, and no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. <3
Image of a screenshot of news headline, saying, "WhatsApp is getting ads using personal data from Instagram and Facebook Forced Consent & Consent Bypass / 16 June 2025 Meta announced today that it also wants to introduce ads on WhatsApp, which will be based on personal data from Facebook and Instagram. This further integrates WhatsApp into other Meta services - an originally independent app, which initially was available for just $1 per year without ads or data usage. This also means that Meta is consolidating its social networking monopoly. EU law was actually supposed to prevent this."
June 16, 2025 at 3:30 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Tomorrow, Thur May 29, Nuits sonores, Lyon France!

I'm coming dance, I'm coming to party, I'm coming to eat, but first I'm sitting down to talk about tech, privacy, Signal, and what it takes to make a world worth living in <3
Picture of me advertising the event "Nuits sonores Lab is opening a discussiong with Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Fooundation, the worldwide messaging application renowned for its data protection and co-founder of the AI Now Institute. During this conversation, Meredith Whittaker will present her critical reflections from her position at the heart of tech, from the ethics of AI, to online privacy, social networks, and internet governance."
May 28, 2025 at 9:43 AM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Shot shot, shot missed
A screenshot of a DM I, Meredith, received that says, "I'm creating a training set for an AI that will determine personal characteristics based on facial images. I'm just missing your relationship status."
March 1, 2025 at 12:33 AM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...
What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.
February 19, 2025 at 4:42 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Nick Cage, hi, call me 🫶

variety.com/2025/film/ne...
“But there is another world that is also disturbing me,” Cage continued. “It’s happening right now around all of us: the new AI world. I am a big believer in not letting robots dream for us. Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us. That is a dead end if an actor lets one AI robot manipulate his or her performance even a little bit, an inch will eventually become a mile and all integrity, purity and truth of art will be replaced by financial interests only. We can’t let that happen.
February 6, 2025 at 2:24 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Thinking about this classic recently, which is available free here:

monoskop.org/images/d/df/...
Cover of Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas by Critical Art Ensemble.
February 4, 2025 at 9:19 AM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
New Year's resolutions ✨
January 2, 2025 at 7:02 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
🥧💙
A photo of a pumpkin pie from above with the Signal logo drawn on it
November 28, 2024 at 2:44 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
This gets more and more interesting the deeper in I go...
A screenshot highlighting a quote from Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus" that says, "Desire does not "want" revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants. "
November 23, 2024 at 4:07 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Anyone spending the brief liminal window between Christmas and Georgian new year in Hamburg, with the hackers, at CCC?

I am! And I'll be presenting new research and a new talk ☺️
halfnarp.events.ccc.de
Talk description: "Feelings are Facts: Love, Privacy, and the Politics of Intellectual Shame. Meredith Whittaker. A debut of new research and analysis, focused on emotions and the affective register--love! shame! intimacy!"
November 18, 2024 at 8:28 AM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Opened a years old doc called "data" and found a poem
**Epistemic authority **fungible data The standardized-from-above vs. the living singular particular star
November 17, 2024 at 1:44 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
New Paper! w/@HeidyKhlaaf + @sarahbmyers. We put the narrative on AI risks & nat'l security under a microscope, finding that the focus on hypothetical AI bioweapons is warping policy and ignoring the real & serious harms of current AI use in surveillance, targeting, etc. 1/
Mind the Gap: Foundation Models and the Covert Proliferation of Military Intelligence, Surveillance, and Targeting Heidy Khlaaf, Sarah Myers West, Meredith Whittaker View PDF HTML (experimental) Discussions regarding the dual use of foundation models and the risks they pose have overwhelmingly focused on a narrow set of use cases and national security directives-in particular, how AI may enable the efficient construction of a class of systems referred to as CBRN: chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. The overwhelming focus on these hypothetical and narrow themes has occluded a much-needed conversation regarding present uses of AI for military systems, specifically ISTAR: intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance. These are the uses most grounded in actual deployments of AI that pose life-or-death stakes for civilians, where misuses and failures pose geopolitical consequences and military escalations. This is particularly underscored by novel proliferation risks specific to the widespread availability of commercial models and the lack of effective approaches that reliably prevent them from contributing to ISTAR capabilities. In this paper, we outline the significant national security concerns emanating from current and envisioned uses of commercial foundation models outside of CBRN contexts, and critique the narrowing of the policy debate that has resulted from a CBRN focus (e.g. compute thresholds, model weight release). We demonstrate that the inability to prevent personally identifiable information from contributing to ISTAR capabilities within commercial foundation models may lead to the use and proliferation of military AI technologies by adversaries. We also show how the usage of foundation models within military settings inherently expands the attack vectors of military systems and the defense infrastructures they interface with. We conclude that in order to secure military systems and limit the proliferation of AI
October 22, 2024 at 3:50 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Difficult to take the Big Tech's concerns about "AI disinfo" seriously when...

...behold, Google Gemini!

(the non answer re Palestine would need to be intentionally built into the system, as would the "double checked" cert-via-highlighting of the text that de-maps Palestine.)
March 4, 2024 at 8:59 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
If I wanted court drama I'd read Stendhal, who understood how power works and spent hundreds of pages illuminating characters whose desire for it blinded them to this reality.

Or, it was Microsoft all along...
November 20, 2023 at 6:48 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Someone shared a writing contract where the outlet says they can detect AI generated writing. Ofc there's no reliable way to do this.

Bespoke AI guardrails amounting to a parent telling a kid "I can always tell when you lie" hoping credulity & fear lead them never to test it.
September 9, 2023 at 12:49 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
📢NEW PAPER!

Where @davidthewid, @sarahbmyers & I unpack what Open Source AI even is.

We find that the terms ‘open’ & ‘open source’ are often more marketing than technical descriptor, and that even the most 'open' systems don't alone democratize AI 1/

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
August 17, 2023 at 8:09 PM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Ordinary harms (like replicating and naturalizing structures of marginalization that entrench historical inequality) can be outweighed by ordinary benefits (like tech guys getting rich). What Hinton is worried about is existential risk (ghost stories).
Tweet that says "Ordinary harms can be outweighed by ordinary benefits. What Hinton is worried about is existential risk.
May 3, 2023 at 12:55 AM
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
This is such a powerful example. And TBH one of the best ways to "regulate" AI: organized workers demanding dignified and safe working conditions, rejecting the idea that AI-enabled degradation of work is inevitable!
May 2, 2023 at 1:12 PM