Meta AI could be a threat to your privacy: Here’s how to silence it on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook

Ever since first rolling out Meta AI in early 2023, Meta has been betting big on the chatbot, integrating it across its social media apps and even launching a standalone app. While Meta and other tech giants remain bullish on AI and its potential to transform how we interact online, not everyone is on board and some users would rather not have Meta’s AI chatbot show up in their apps at all.

What is Meta AI? Why turn it off?

Meta AI is the artificial intelligence chatbot by the tech giant that is present across all of its social media apps including Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. The chatbot competes directly with the likes of Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude and is run on the company’s Llama 3 model.

While Meta AI has fallen behind the competition in recent months, the biggest selling point for the social media behemoth is that its AI can be summoned instantly across the world’s most popular apps.

In the last few months, Meta has only increased the number of Meta AI powered features on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. While there is a section of users who cannot get enough of these features, there are others who don’t want any part of the AI carnage in their daily apps. If that wasn’t enough, there was a privacy issue in June when Meta AI app’s discover feed exposed the personal conversations with the chatbot on social media handles.

How to turn off Meta AI in WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook?

Unfortunately, Meta is so expansively present across WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook that it isn’t currently possible to cut it out of these apps entirely, but we can attempt to do the next best thing which is to limit the interaction with the AI chatbot.

In order to limit the interactions with Meta AI on Instagram, go to your chats and search for Meta AI. Click on the ‘i’ icon and then tap on ‘Mute’ and switch it to ‘Until I change it’.

Similarly, to limit the interactions with Meta AI on WhatsApp, open the Meta AI chat and mute notifications for chat while choosing the ‘always’ option to never receive a notification for Meta AI chat. Meanwhile, if you want to limit Meta AI in group chats there is currently only one option available, which is to turn on ‘advanced chat privacy’ found in the group settings. However, turning this feature on would also mean that users in the group won’t be able to save any media to their devices.

On Facebook, one can similarly mute Meta AI chat as done on Instagram. There is also an option to open the basic Facebook mobile version in order to see minimal AI features on the app.