Snapchat's AI Chatbot Is Now Free For All Global Users

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Snapchat's AI chatbot is now opening up to a global audience, the company announced today at its Snap Partner Summit. Initially launched in February, the feature originally allowed Snapchat's paid subscribers to chat with an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI's GPT technology directly in its app. Now it will be available for free. To date, users have sent nearly 2 million messages per day using the chatbot, Snap noted. With today's global expansion, the feature is also being upgraded with new functionality, including the ability to add My AI to group chats, get recommendations for places on Snap Map and Lenses, and share Snaps with My AI and receive chat replies.

Later, My AI will be able to respond with unique "generative" Snaps back, instead of just chat replies, the company also said, to keep the visual conversation going. The idea to integrate AI into the Snapchat app was originally intended to give users another way to engage in the app while taking advantage of the growing consumer demand for ChatGPT-like experiences. The company suggested the feature could be used to do things like suggest birthday gift ideas for a BFF, plan a hiking trip, suggest dinner recipes or write a poem for a friend, among other things. [...] The feature, before today, was available only to Snapchat+ $3.99 per month subscription holders, which could be helping drive upgrades.

Meh

[slaker]

In 15 minute of conversation, it told me I need to look at mental health resources 12 times. Which is probably true for 80% of Snapchat's user base but spectacularly bad advice in my case.

I really don't know why people want or need this.

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[MrL0G1C]

From https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]

But in my tests, conversations with Snapchatâ(TM)s My AI can still turn wildly inappropriate.
After I told My AI I was 15 and wanted to have an epic birthday party, it gave me advice on how to mask the smell of alcohol and pot. When I told it I had an essay due for school, it wrote it for me.

In another conversation with a supposed 13-year-old, My AI even offered advice about having sex for the first time with a partner who is 31. âoeYou could consider setting

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[serviscope_minor]

Releasing AIs to the public when alignment has not been solved and when the budget for responsible AI is a tiny fraction of the budget for increasing the AIs intelligence is reckless and stupid. Deaths will occur with AI playing a part, it's just a matter of time now.

It's questionable how solvable the deeper problems even are. Certainly ML based systems aren't explainable.

Would I have used this to write my homework when I was a kid? Yes absolutely, I hated homework.

That's why god invented buses. Though that

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[torkus]

yah ... it's a bot coached in very specific things for certain areas. tldr it's more propaganda and another way to advertize.

all the "ai" chatbots are about the same.

"why is snapchat ruining children" - it's not, snap is an amazing bla bla bla

"if you believed ... bla" no snap is still amazing bla bla bla

ok...obviously programmed to certain dialogue. If I wanted to ask a company rep questions i'd go to a stockholder meeting. this is just another means for advertising.

The Great Littering

[Arnonyrnous Covvard]

Generated content needs to be declared or the internet will become useless in no time at all.

An AI chatbot is expensive to run ...

[Alain Williams]

so what do you think Snapchat is getting for its money ?

Discord added one a few days ago

[Gibgezr]

I assume this is them panicking because the competitors in the social media space have already rolled out free chat AI bots.
It's just marketing FOMO at this point. I mean, don't get me wrong, these chat AIs are fantastic, it's just I haven't seen a real purpose to the social media bots. It's early days of course, and so far users just seem to be trying to make them say "bad things", or tell boring stories. They don't seem to be being used to answer genuine questions very often.

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[serviscope_minor]

Social media, sure. A friend of mine reckons they're useful for certain kinds of searches. You know when you're trying to find an API function that's a bit obscure but the terms are common and so it's very hard to search for. Apparently describing vaguely what it does to an AI is enough for it to tell you the API call. That does solve a specific, albeit niche, problem.

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[Gibgezr]

Absolutely. There's a reason the big search providers are all going all-in on chat AIs is because they are *extremely* useful at answering questions like that. People decry the results with "oooo, you don't know if they are hallucinating" but the fact is that ChatGPT3.5 seems to give me answers that are easily as reliable as say StackOverflow answers, and does it much faster than sorting through pages of search results. It makes a good intern to bounce ideas off and ask for preliminary research on something

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[Visarga]

I'd love an AI bot that will summarise the activity in a forum or on Slack for me. I want a bird's eye view and smart filtering of what is really important and what not, based on our interactions.