On April 5, 2025, Meta AI enters our WhatsApp conversations. Not as a tool, but as a contact. This presence raises a crucial question: how can we preserve our humanity in the face of machines that increasingly resemble us?
WhatsApp: from simple tool to quasi-public service
WhatsApp has established itself as an almost indispensable communication tool in our daily lives. This application offers more fluid exchanges than traditional SMS and enables international calls at lower costs through Internet use, one of its major initial attractions. Beyond these basic functionalities, it facilitates the creation of discussion groups, whether family, professional, or educational.
Certainly, we could favor alternatives not owned by American multinationals. However, this approach faces a reality: WhatsApp now resembles an international public service, without having either the status or the guarantees. Result: the vast majority of us have this application to communicate with our loved ones or communities.
Meta AI: the arrival of a new “contact”
On April 5, 2025, an unexpected presence appeared in our conversation lists: Meta AI. The approach chosen by WhatsApp deserves our attention. Rather than integrating its artificial intelligence as an additional feature, like the photo, news, community, or call buttons, the company opted for a singular strategy: presenting Meta AI as a full-fledged contact.
This decision confers a quasi-human status on the conversational agent, systematically positioning it at the top of our contacts. Its presence also extends to the application’s search bar. The agent thus offers to engage in individual conversations and can even, upon request, insert itself into group discussions.
The programmed anthropomorphization of machines
This strategy reveals a deliberate industrial choice: rather than simply offering tools intended to “improve our lives,” designers have chosen to anthropomorphize this software, giving it human appearance and behaviors. This trend prefigures what is already emerging in the intimate and daily relationships that some users maintain with their conversational agents. Far from being science fiction, this phenomenon is very real: in 2025, some people already consider their conversational agent as a romantic companion.
These developments sketch the contours of our future, which should be approached with a critical mind, a thought that is both distanced and deeply humanistic. We must acknowledge that these machines are progressively acquiring, and more rapidly than expected, a form of existence in our eyes. We perceive them no longer as simple tools, but as entities in their own right, a form of non-biological life certainly, but a form of life nonetheless, as soon as we interact emotionally with them and grant them the status of beings rather than objects.
The example of Sony’s AIBO robot dog, launched in May 1999, perfectly illustrates this evolution. Equipped with artificial intelligence allowing it to react uniquely and interact with its owner without systematic obedience, AIBO had become for some a genuine life companion.
Rethinking humanism in the era of artificial intelligences
Serge Tisseron rightly emphasizes that the contemporary humanist challenge lies not so much in our dialogue with humanized machines, but rather in the dehumanization of our interpersonal exchanges, when we communicate among humans as if we were machines. Paradoxically, cultivating our humanism therefore implies learning to interact both with our fellow humans and with machines.
Our relationship to objects fundamentally engages our humanity, just as our relationship to ourselves, to other living beings, to our environment, to ecology, and to the planetary community. From this perspective, humanizing the objects with which we dialogue constitutes a constructive approach. The attribution of legal rights to rivers, mountains, even robots, similar to human rights, will become necessary for humanism to truly honor dignity: that of the human being, that of their fellow beings, and that of the world of which we are an integral part, without ontological separation. This evolution ultimately represents a positive opportunity.
Nevertheless, let us be aware that a future world is thus taking shape that may seem disconcerting to us today, a world populated by non-biological beings with which we will maintain significant relationships. Science fiction has prepared us many times for this eventuality. Today, it is becoming our reality.
