By Abigail Olear

“Hi there! I’m My AI, your virtual friend on Snapchat,” said the mysterious, multicolored companion that spontaneously  appeared at the top of Snapchat users’ friends lists last week.

My AI is an artificial intelligence chatbot that is powered by OpenAI’s Chat GPT technology. Essentially, the feature is a more accessible Chat GPT with some limitations that adhere to Snapchat’s community guidelines.

“I was excited to try out the new feature, but at first I was surprised that Snapchat would ever add My AI to their database,” junior government and politics major, Brigitte Kaba, said.

My AI was initially only available under Snapchat’s paid subscription service, Snapchat+. After Washington Post columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler tested the feature in March, telling the bot he was a 15-year-old who wanted to throw a birthday party, the AI provided tips on how to hide the smell of alcohol and marijuana. Fowler warned against Snapchat using the app’s young demographic of users as test subjects.

This begs the question, with a troublesome initial rollout, should Snapchat have put My AI on all devices?

Kavi Patel, a freshman computer science major, thinks that AI users across the board will continue to have issues with inappropriate content, but has seen some improvement since Snapchat’s initial My AI launch.

“There seems to be some progress being made where they’re trying to tame the AI a little bit but I think as you tame the AI, you’re also sort of hampering down on other abilities as well that could be used in other situations,” he said.

While My AI has become more tame in terms of inappropriate content, Snapchat’s website states it can deliver “biased, incorrect, harmful, or misleading content.” Knowing the social platform has a young user base, freshman public policy major Ria Chaudhary thinks the decision to expand My AI is “not particularly responsible.” 

Though Chaudhary has had positive experiences with ChatGPT in the past, interactions with My AI have been aggravating. 

“It has short term memory loss, it doesn’t really keep up with conversations very well,” Chaudhary said. “Any experience my friends had with it has not been very helpful or interesting, it’s just kind of annoying.”

She also finds it annoying that users must subscribe to Snapchat+ in order to delete the My AI feature from their app.

Snapchat’s rollout of My AI on all devices has flooded the app’s reviews on Apple’s App Store with disgruntled users and one-star reviews. Twitter users took to Snapchat’s account to express their distaste. 

“Delete it or I will delete Snapchat altogether,” wrote user @AshleighRocBer. 

Featured Image: Snapchat unveils new AI chatbot in February 2023. Photo by Joe Scarnici for Getty Images.