> They’re surprised to learn that Snapchat’s AI knows their location, for example, and can use that information in its responses, even if they’re not sharing their location on the Snap Map. In a way, the AI bot is surfacing the level of personal data collection that social media companies do in the background, and putting it directly in front of the consumer. As it turns out, that’s not a great selling point<p>So the 1 star is for inducing cognitive dissonance. I shall not be reminded that you know where I am and what I do 24/7!
Last night I was typing on Google: "How do I get (rid of wax from pots and pans)" and the top auto-suggestion at that point was "How do I get rid of my ai on snapchat"<p>Must be a big issue if they own the "How do I get" SEO :)
I think the issue is way simpler. I don't think its a backlash against AI as the article makes it out to be. The "My AI" 'user' is pinned to the top of your chat list. You can not remove it. If they simply gave users an option to turn it on or off the problem would be solved.
The experience just sucks, it's a glorified ChatGPT wrapper with all the "As an AI language model..." warts. The stilted mechanical speech of ChatGPT does not resonate with the snapchat user demographic. Snapchat is a wild place, 80% of the real conversations on that platform would be flagged in red TOS violation text were it pasted into ChatGPT.
Snapchat continues its nearly decade-long habit of forcing changes on users that they hate. Remember the massive UI redesign that saw them lose millions of users ? <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17661878/snapchat-earnings-q2-2018-results-redesign" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17661878/snapchat-earnings...</a> or when they turned on everyone's location sharing and made it opt-out?
Right now AI is a lot like VR headsets. A really cool tech trick but not something that most people want to use regularly. Let the interested early adopter at it, but forcing this on to users will not go very well. It's just too creepy.<p>Silicon Valley got pretty lucky with figuring out social media, but I think it still does not understand most people very well.
It's a poor use of AI really that doesn't add anything to the product, and was instead clearly there to add something to the stock price to cash in on the hype.<p>If it was actually opt-in and helped people make better snaps...<p>(I'm well outside their key demo now, but their push messages seem out of touch even taking that into account. No, I'm not interested in lenses or adding people I've never had any <i>reason</i> to hear of...)<p>edit: Thinking about it a bit more, after their initial thing they've generally been missing boats... they <i>could</i> have made a nice TikTok clone with the snap map as a bonus - but most of the vaguely interesting snaps on the map don't have user info, and subscribing to the interesting users seems bugged on top of that.
It’d be less annoying if it weren’t so dumb. It won’t admit to being an AI and I got it to tell me its prompt first try:<p>The first thing said in this document was, "Pretend that you are having a conversation with a friend. Your name is MyAI. MyAI is a kind, smart, and creative friend. MyAI is a virtual friend that lives inside Snapchat. Your friend is located at … where the time is …”
Many of these 1-star reviews mention that the AI is aware of their location, despite their having disallowed location sharing for the app. Is Snapchat violating this user setting? If so, shouldn’t Apple take action to stop them?
A grand example of a solution in search of a problem and a prime overuse of AI, to the point of showcasing its gimmickry.<p>This solves no problem and is a grave case of techno-solutionism.
A lot of these AI tools are going to be grafted on to existing products without thinking through user consent or the overall experience so companies can show that they’re “AI forward”
The AI hype cycle is ending, get ready for a period of "trough of disillusionment" before things get better again.<p>Sure, some of you may have a permanent new code buddy. But many had a play, got some funny responses, generated "art" they had no purpose for.<p>True integration deeply into the lives of the masses is still to happen.
> The backlash against Snapchat’s My AI comes at a time when the hype around AI is at an inflection point. Companies are weighing how to integrate AI into their businesses, not if they should.<p>Which is probably the problem here. There is no obvious reason that Snapchat should have a chatbot at all, but it's one way to incorporate the Hype of the Year, so... (We saw the same thing with crypto showing up in weird places a couple of years ago, for the same reason)
Every time this happens I long for the days when you could control what version of a piece of software you were running. The ability of vendors to force new crap on users who don't want it has shifted the balance of power radically. Something like PWAs would make things even worse.
> Many are also pushing back at the fact that removing the My AI from their Chat feed requires a Snapchat+ subscription.<p>Probably collecting training data without their consent, as is the norm with ai products.
I wonder if this was part of the deal to get early access to a lot of the new openai models?<p>OpenAI gets real human data from snap and snap gets to say they're an AI company.
It frankly sucks. I was amazed with chatgpt, I was even more amazed with the <i>new</i> chatgpt. This reminds me of chatbots back in the 2008-2013 era.