‘I hate this’: The WhatsApp feature leaving users disgruntled
27 April 2025 10:00am BST
When Facebook first introduced the “news feed”, the reaction from its early users was furious.
The feature, appearing for users of the social media website as a stream of posts, pictures, videos and news stories from friends, was viewed as an invasion of people’s privacy.
One group called the feed “too creepy, too stalker-esque”. Hundreds of thousands of people called for a boycott.
Back then, in 2006, such a backlash was enough to prompt a personal apology from Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder. Still, the feed was going nowhere.
In the years since, it is an approach that Zuckerberg has repeated, foisting a series of unwanted updates on users of his social media apps, regardless of initial frustrations.
The latest of those has come in the form of a new Meta AI button, which has popped up on WhatsApp for British users of the messaging app in recent weeks.
“I hate this button,” fumed one Reddit user, sharing a picture of the glowing blue circle that suddenly appeared in the bottom right corner of millions of WhatsApp feeds. Another branded the tool “bug-ridden rubbish”.
The way Meta AI works is that users can tap a button in the messaging app to be taken to a conversation with the tech giant’s digital chatbot.
Much like ChatGPT, it can answer questions in plain English and engage in back-and-forth conversations. Users can also type “@MetaAI” within their personal chats to ask the bot questions, while it has also infiltrated the search bar at the top of WhatsApp where it says users can “ask Meta AI”.
After launching overseas, this AI chatbot has started to appear on WhatsApp for millions of Britons, having already been lurking for some time within Instagram’s private messaging function.
Like many AI tools, Meta AI – which is powered by the tech giant’s Llama 4 algorithm – has several quirks that may prompt some to question its usefulness.