Snapchat rolls out new AI feature

Kate Verity

Contributing Writer

In the 21st century, we live in an era of great technological advancements and constant changes.

From smartphones to electric vehicles, the way that humans live has changed drastically in the last few decades. In terms of creating new technologies, 2023 has not disappointed. One of the biggest and most controversial advancements that this year has brought has been artificial intelligence, or AI.

ChatGPT is one of the most well-known AI systems that anybody can use. ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI. It has been available for public use since the end of November 2022, but it was not until earlier this year that it really started to gain popularity.

In response to ChatGPT’s popularity, many other companies began working to develop their own AI chat models. This includes Microsoft through Bing, Google, Meta — the mother company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — and other tech companies.

One of the most recent AI developments has put an AI chat right into smartphones across the world. Anyone with Snapchat who has updated their app since April 19 may have noticed the new feature pinned at the top of their Chat page. A chatbot called “My AI” is now available to every Snapchat user. It is powered by

ChatGPT, but it has been tweaked so that it conforms to the Snapchat community guidelines. This new chat friend is being met with mixed reviews by Snapchat users. My AI was previously only available to those who paid for Snapchat+. However, now it is the opposite: Only those who subscribe to Snapchat+ can remove My AI from their app. For anyone unwilling or unable to pay the $3.99 monthly fee, a conversation box with My AI will remain at the top of their feed. Not only are users unable to remove the chatbot, but they also cannot unpin the conversation. This means that it will forever be at the top of the screen, where users used to be able to pin any conversation of their choice.

Emily Moore is a senior political science major at GC, and she greatly dislikes the new AI. She has heard about it from her friends and has avoided updating her Snapchat to keep it off her phone. She said that if her Snapchat were to update with the new My AI system enabled, she would deactivate her account and delete the app entirely.

“Whenever it comes down to the whole Snapchat thing, being able to talk to you on that kind of level, a very personal level, I think that could be very dangerous,” Moore said. “People could self-incriminate themselves on accident, and I think that it can access things on your phone that you wouldn’t want people to have access to.”

Much of the public’s perception of AI is created from its villainous personas in science fiction. Characters like Ultron from Marvel and movies like Transformers or Terminator have helped to shape what people know about AI, and these perceptions are rarely positive.

Dr. Juli Gittinger is a professor of religion in GC’s Department of Philosophy, Religion and Liberal Studies. Many of her interests lie in studying science fiction, and she explains how today’s AI differs from the villainous AI personas we see in entertainment media.

“It’s not conscious,” Gittinger said. “Conscious means free will, volition, a sense of self-awareness. That’s what we see in science fiction, with, like, robots and androids and, you know, “Blade Runner,” things like that — where they’re robots, but they’re like people.”

Elon Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, but he resigned from the board in 2018 to avoid conflicts with his work at Tesla. Musk has been greatly politicized in recent years, but he is still inarguably one of the leading technological innovators of our time. He is very wary of AI and recently said in an interview that he believes there needs to be a government regulatory agency that looks into AI technology and sets rules for the industry.

Additionally, in late

March, Musk called for a six-month pause on the development of AI systems to give researchers the chance to introduce “shared safety protocols” for the technological community to adhere to. This letter was also signed by other big names in technology, such as Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple; Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and former presidential candidate; and Rachel Bronson, the president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.