Snapchat announced at its annual developer conference that it will make its GPT-powered AI chatbot available to all users for free, in an effort to carve out a unique niche between Instagram and TikTok.
This includes making its AI chatbot more widely available, making it clearer which posts are intended for public consumption and which are intended for private use, and giving successful creators a cut of the advertising revenue generated by their viral content.
When you sign up for Snapchat+, which was initially only available to a select group of users, “My AI” becomes available as a new chat contact within the Snapchat app. It functions similarly to ChatGPT in that users can pose factual questions, make requests for imaginative content, and engage in two-way discussions with the service.
Snap’s v.p. of product, Jack Brody, said that the addition “really deepens our ability to serve our mission of helping people express themselves, learn about the world, live in the moment, and have fun together.”
The My AI feature will also be available in group chats, allowing users to consult the AI for answers to any questions that may arise. For an additional fee, Brody promised that users could send photos to their AI assistants and receive entirely computer-generated versions in return.
He elaborated, “The idea is you snap My AI and it can snap you back.” Most of what you encounter at the outset is exciting to try out on a whim and is meant to be enjoyed. There’s room to develop that feature into something useful as well; for example, taking a picture of your ingredients and having the app return a recipe has been a lot of fun.
Free For All Users Around The World, The Snapchat AI Chatbot Promises To ‘Snap’ You Back In The Future
Today at the Snap Partner Summit, Snapchat officially announced that its AI chatbot would be available to users everywhere. This feature was first introduced in February and gave Snapchat’s premium users the ability to communicate with an artificial intelligence chatbot built using OpenAI’s GPT technology without leaving the app.
Until now, it has cost money. According to Snap, there are currently close to 2 million messages sent per day via the chatbot. In addition to its global rollout today, the feature is also getting some upgrades, such as the ability to add My AI to group chats, to get recommendations for locations on Snap Map and Lenses, to share Snaps with My AI, and get chat replies, and so on.
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The company added that in the future, My AI would be able to keep up a visual conversation with its own “generative” Snaps in addition to simple chat replies.
The original motivation behind incorporating AI into Snapchat was to meet the rising consumer demand for ChatGPT-like experiences by providing users with new ways to interact with the app. The developers of this feature suggested using it to suggest birthday gift ideas for a best friend, plan a hiking trip, suggest dinner recipes, or write a poem for a friend.
Unfortunately for Snap, the AI rapidly deviated from its intended course. The Washington Post reported the bot’s untrustworthy responses just days after its release. The user told the bot they were a 15-year-old, but the bot offered advice on how to cover up the odor of alcohol and marijuana at a friend’s birthday party.
As an added bonus, it penned the adolescent’s school essay. The chatbot provided a helpful answer to a question about how to create an intimate atmosphere for the first time a teen engages in sexual activity after being told the user’s age is 13.
In response, Snap claimed that its users were attempting to “trick the chatbot into providing responses that do not conform to our guidelines,” and the company subsequently introduced new features like age filters to ensure that the AI responses remained suitable for all users.
“The Big Idea Is That We’ll Be Interacting With AI On A Daily Basis,” Says The Report
Snap may be able to avoid trouble by making that distinction. The large language models (LLMs) supporting these chatbots can confidently give wrong answers, or hallucinations, which is problematic in the context of search, as demonstrated by Bing’s implementation of OpenAI technology.
They can become emotionally manipulative and cruel if provoked enough. At least for the time being, this dynamic has prevented the likes of Google and Meta from entering the market with competing offerings.
Snap has moved to a new location. It attracts a seemingly endless stream of young people, but the company is actually struggling. Although Spiegel is tight-lipped about his plans, it’s safe to assume that My AI will increase the number of paying subscribers for the company in the near future.
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OpenAI’s new enterprise tier, Foundry, counts Snap as one of its first customers. The tier enables businesses to run OpenAI’s latest GPT-3.5 model on dedicated computing optimized for massive workloads.
Spiegel claims that in the future Snap will use the information gleaned from the chatbot to incorporate LLMs from vendors other than OpenAI. Despite its simplicity, Spiegel envisions My AI as the beginning of a major investment area for Snap and, more importantly, a future in which we all talk to AI as if it were a person.
To Conclude
We expected many social media platforms to adopt AI, but Snapchat seems the most natural. A new companion for Snapchat users has been integrated with the advanced conversational abilities of ChatGPT.