Snap is ramping up its artificial intelligence profile, with a major adjustment to its “My AI” chatbot.
The Snap chatbot has been available to Snapchat’s three million paid subscribers for the past two months, but now the social media company is opening “My AI” to its approximately 750 million users for free.
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The “My AI” feature offers Snap users some significant new benefits, the company reported on its website on April 19.
Personalize My AI: The chatbot comes with one of the thousands of unique Bitmoji variations “and can be easily customized to make it truly your own. Design a custom Bitmoji for your AI, give it a name, and start chatting,” Snapchat said.
Bring My AI into Conversations with Friends: Users can add My AI to any conversation. Simply @ mention “My AI and ask a question on behalf of the group. It will be clear when an AI has entered the chat and includes a sparkle next to its name,” Snapchat stated.
Snapchat Recommendations: My AI now surfaces place recommendations from the Snap Map and suggests relevant Lenses. “For example, you can ask My AI to suggest weekend activities for your family or get the perfect Lens recommendation to wish a friend a happy birthday,” the company noted.
Share Snaps with My AI: The Snap community can send Snaps to My AI and receive a chat reply.
Watch It Snap You Back: “With over 55,000 Snaps created on Snapchat every second on average, Snapping is a natural way that our community stays in touch,” Snapchat added. “Soon Snapchat+ subscribers will be able to Snap My AI and get a unique generative Snapback that keeps the visual conversation going.”
In a recent interview with The Verge, Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel calls generative AI technology an “awesome creative tool”.
Spiegel told The Verge he’s personally using AI chat technology to plan birthdays and generate bedtime stories for his children.
“Just based on the way that generative AI bots work, I think they’re much more suited to creative tasks,” Spiegel said. “And some of the things that make them so creative are also the things that make them not so great at recalling specific information.”
In response to user complaints that My AI is producing harmful responses to user prompts (including highly sexual content viewable by minors), Snap has beefed up security guardrails to keep dubious content in check and to factor in a user’s age before using the chatbot.
That said, Spiegel says My AI interactions have been highly positive.
“The thing that gave us a lot of confidence is that as we monitored the way that people were using the service, we found that 99.5 percent of My AI replies conformed to our community guidelines,” he told The Verge.
