If you’ve noticed a new light-blue circle appear in your WhatsApp chats recently and wondered what it was, Meta has recently expanded its implementation of Meta AI into new markets—and now it’s in yours.
While it began rolling out in the US and Canada in 2023, more recently it has started arriving on devices across countries in Europe, including the UK, as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India.
In fact, the artificial-intelligence-based chatbot is rolling out across the entire Meta ecosystem, including Messenger and Instagram, and provides a few basic features like answering questions, generating text, or creating content. Its appearance has also raised privacy concerns with users, however, and questions as to whether it can be turned off. Here’s what you need to know.
What Does the Meta AI Button in WhatsApp do?
The new button on WhatsApp appears above the icon to start a new chat in Android and in the bottom-right corner in iOS. It allows users to interact directly with the Meta AI assistant. Users can also tag @Meta AI in their chats to ask it questions, plus it’ll appear in their personal contact lists.
The chatbot is based on Meta’s large and open source language model Llama 3.2. As was the case with ChatGPT when it first arrived on WhatsApp, Meta AI has started with a smaller number of features based on what it believes users want most, helping them generate and improve text or to search the web for answers to questions. More features are expected to roll out later.
But what happens with that data? Meta says its assistant can’t access or read the content of your messages unless you ask it for help, but even then the content of your messages remain end-to-end encrypted, and any details will not be linked with other Meta accounts, like Facebook or Instagram.
It’s an important distinction to note that while the content of private messages are encrypted, interactions with Meta AI are not. Meta warns that anything you send to Meta may be used to improve its AI models, so users shouldn’t “send messages … with information you don’t want it to know.” It does promise to make chats with Meta AI “visually distinct” so users can easily tell the difference.
Photograph: Meta
How to Remove Meta AI on WhatsApp
So, what if you are not interested in this feature? At the moment there is no way to disable or delete Meta AI from WhatsApp. You can ignore it and choose not to use it, but the button will stay in the app.
If you have used it but prefer you hadn’t, you can, however, reset Meta AI at an individual chat level or across the board. Deleting a chat with Meta AI will not be enough to do this, you will need to use the reset commands below.
