Social media company Snap is leaning heavily on artificial intelligence to help maintain and grow its user base. Earlier this week, it announced it would roll out its new “My AI” chatbot—which was initially launched in February only for users of Snapchat’s paid subscription service—to all of the platform’s 750 million monthly users.
But users and researchers are already raising ethical and security concerns about at least one aspect of My AI, which is powered by OpenAI’s large language models. The problem is that Snap seems to have instructed the AI chatbot to tell users it does not have access to their location, even though the chatbot does in fact have access to this information and uses to it provide answers that are contextually relevant. Snap is also, like many companies creating chatbots from large language models, not being fully transparent with users about the instructions it has used to shape its chatbot’s personality and conversational style.
