According to Meta, the messages are summarised in a separate chat with the AI bot and not marked as read until the user goes through them.
"Message summaries is a new option that uses Meta AI to privately and quickly summarise unread messages in a chat, so you can get an idea of what is happening, before reading the details in your unread messages," said Meta.
The company said the message summaries use "private processing", allowing Meta AI to generate a response without Meta or WhatsApp seeing users' messages or the private summaries.
Other users in a chat, be it a one-on-one conversation or a WhatsApp group, can't see that it's been summarised using artificial intelligence either. "This means your privacy is protected at all times," said WhatsApp.