Snapchat’s AI personality, powered by ChatGPT, is now available to all app users. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed during the company’s Partner Summit event that an enhanced version of “My AI,” the in-app chatbot that was previously exclusively available to Snapchat+ subscribers, is now available to everyone.
Snapchat’s AI features
My AI now has various additional Snapchat-specific features as a result of the expansion. Based on what’s popular in the Snap Map, it can promote restaurants and other activities to Snapchat users, as well as augmented reality glasses. Users can also include the AI in group discussions and give the AI a unique name and avatar (through Bitmoji).
My AI can now respond to photo and video captures as well. While it can only respond to text messages for the time being, it will soon be able to respond to snaps using AI-generated art. That function, however, will be restricted to Snapchat+.
Despite its limited availability, My AI has proven popular among Snapchat users, with the chatbot currently receiving 2 million messages every day.
According to The Washington Post, Snap’s deployment of OpenAI’s technology has also been criticised for inappropriate interactions and questionable counsel offered to researchers acting as kids.
To address these concerns, Snap has included extra moderation technology that temporarily restricts users who abuse the service.
To avoid hazardous chats, the AI has also been trained to assess the age of the individual with whom it is conversing.
Furthermore, Snap’s parental management function, Family Centre, will allow parents to monitor how much time their children spend speaking with My AI. Despite this, Snap appears to be aware of My AI’s flaws, which it previously described as “prone to hallucination.”
Even Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who has claimed that interacting with AI like ChatGPT will become an everyday habit, was cautious in his support, saying, “My AI certainly makes plenty of mistakes, so you can’t rely on it for advice, but it’s definitely entertaining.”
The OpenAI-powered chatbot is also being added to group conversations, where it will be able to recommend AR filters and will soon be able to generate photographs inside Snapchat.
Snap is making its “My AI” chatbot available to all 750 million monthly Snapchat users for free, less than two months after the OpenAI-powered bot was originally made available to the app’s more than 3 million premium members.
My AI is also becoming a more important component of Snapchat. It may now be added to group chats by using the @ sign, and Snap will allow users to customise the look and name of their bot with a custom Bitmoji avatar.
Furthermore, My AI may now suggest AR filters to apply in Snapchat’s camera or places to visit via the app’s map page.
And Snap intends to soon allow users to visually message My AI and receive produced responses; an example exhibited today at the company’s annual conference showed a photo of tomatoes in a garden causing the bot to respond with a generated image of gazpacho soup.
While Microsoft and Google race to incorporate generative AI into their search engines, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel regards the technology as “an awesome creative tool.”
He gave personal instances of utilising My AI to compose bedtime stories for his children and organise a birthday itinerary for his wife, Miranda Kerr, in a recent interview. My AI is already handling over 2 million chats every day, he claims.
He calls Snap’s connection with OpenAI, which provides the underlying large language model for My AI, a “close partnership.”
Spiegel clearly cares about the initiative and sees My AI as an important component of Snap’s future.
While he declined to share the cost of running the chatbot, I’ve heard that Snap has been surprised by the cost-effectiveness of running it at scale.
Spiegel is also mum on My AI’s possible impact on Snap’s advertising business, which has suffered significant growth hurdles.
He concedes that utilising My AI’s interactions for ad targeting could be an opportunity, but he refrains from going into detail, hinting to potential developments in the near future.
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