A hot new bombshell has entered the group chat: ChatGPT.
OpenAI announced a new plugin for Apple Messages on Thursday. On a Mac, ChatGPT can now search your text messages, draft replies, and hit send. The company suggested using prompts to look for birthday or spam messages to delete.
The launch cracked open a debate: how human should your text chats be?
Some made it clear that they considered AI texts crossing a line. “If I find out that AI has been texting me on your behalf, I will never speak to you again,” one X user wrote.
The OpenAI texting launch
OpenAI’s new launch is available in Codex and ChatGPT Work on desktop.
Romain Huet, OpenAI’s head of developer experience, gave some use cases: “Ask it who you talk to most, what you talk about, or what you forgot to follow up on!”
The company has been expanding its slate of features — and the data it requests access to. Last week, the company rolled out Computer History, which lets ChatGPT learn from the actions you take on some apps and websites. Like the messages feature, Computer History is off by default.
Ironically, the messaging feature looks a lot like Apple’s new Siri update, which is slowly rolling out. In July, Apple filed a trade-secrets lawsuit against OpenAI over the development of its hardware device. One wonders how the company feels about this new feature.
As for texting, let’s face it: the group chat has already grown artificial. People are drafting their messages with chatbots and adding their OpenClaw agents to the chat. The OpenAI launch is a ramp-up of what’s already been in motion.
And yet, as emails become more AI-ified, texting has largely remained a communication channel with undeniable humanity. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian said as much: “I think we’ll see a next generation of social media emerge that’s verifiably human, because it’s all going down in the group chats now.”
Fighting for the group chat
The launch immediately caught backlash. One user said that he was “never going to talk to you again” if you used the feature. Another said she’d block your contact.
“If anyone AI emails or texts me I hope you know youre effectively dead to me,” one X user wrote. “I dont have the energy or time for a relationship with someone who invests no effort.”
Danisha Carter called the feature an “open-book ‘are you an idiot’ test.”
Not everyone was feeling so gloomy. Creative Strategies analyst Max Weinbach wrote that it was a “game changer” with the amount of work he does over text. Yana Welinder wrote that she will “actually be able to find things in the black hole of iMessage now.”
There’s also the privacy question. The feature must be explicitly installed and enabled, an OpenAI representative said, and does not index on users’ messages. ChatGPT will only read a text message when the user prompts, they said.
Still, users seemed on edge.
“Is nobody else semi-weary about giving ChatGPT unfettered access to EVERYTHING?” Stephen Diedrich asked. Tom Goodwin said that he generally has a “very very relaxed sense of security,” but that using the feature seemed “incredibly naive.”
“I hope all my messages about how much I hate ChatGPT hurt its feelings,” wrote Jacqueline Smith.
Are AI-generated texts fair game or a turn-off? Let us know your view in the comments below:
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