Snapchat’s AI bot sparks privacy panic after it posts photo on its own
Snapchat’s artificial intelligence feature, My AI, freaked users out when it went rogue on Tuesday, automatically posting a photo to users’ stories who thought the techy tool was only a chatbot.
“Did Snapchat Ai just add a picture of my wall/ceiling to their Snapchat story?” a user by the name of Matt Esparza questioned in a tweet earlier this week.
He accompanied the post with a photo of his ceiling and a screen recording of the story My AI posted to his Snapchat, showing off the uncanny resemblance between the two images.
However, Esparza’s worries were quelled when other Snapchat users took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to share that their My AI tool had posted the same photo.
It remained unclear where the odd photo — which appeared to show a wall meeting a ceiling — was taken.
“Anyone else’s Snapchat My AI post to their story???” another user shared alongside a screenshot of the same image.
Another user that had the same experience said that “now I’m thinking killer robots have invaded my apartment.”
“So I’m not crazy,” another wrote, while other users called My AI’s posts “creepy” and “the scariest sh-t ever.”
My AI — which launched on the instant messaging app in partnership with OpenAI’s ChatGPT on May 31 — was debuted as a chatbot and marketed as a tool designed to respond to users’ messages in a friendly matter with recommendations for places to visit and suggestions on which Snapchat lenses to use.
Users were baffled when My AI began posting images, which it wasn’t widely known that the tech was even capable of doing.
Very soon after My AI went rogue, the photos it posted to users’ Snapchat stories were removed, and the chatbot went offline.
Screenshots shared later Tuesday evening showed that when Snapchat users asked My AI about what happened, it responded: “Sorry, I encountered a technical issue.”
When asked what kind of technical issue, My AI simply repeated the response.
A Snapchat spokesperson said of the snafu: “My AI experienced a temporary outage that’s now resolved.”
However, Snapchat users are left wondering how My AI actually operates, and the unknown had a slew of social media critics demanding that the platform axe its latest tool, especially since at least 130 million of Snapchat’s 750 million users are under age 18.
“Get rid of My AI it’s creepy WHY DID IT POST A STORY,” one user wrote.
Another tagged Snapchat, saying: “I think it’s time to get rid of the My AI…it’s sketchy. This whole AI world bullsh-t is stupid as hell.”
“It’s a huge privacy breach and I don’t feel very safe on Snapchat anymore,” another tweeted of the so-called “glitch.”
Despite the recent outrage, My AI has become one of the most-used consumer chatbots in the world, Snapchat revealed in an “early insights” report on the tech.
As of early June, over 150 million users sent more than 10 billion messages to My AI, which launched just two months earlier.
It’s unclear what steps Snapchat is taking to prevent another My AI-related technical issue, though experts have said that AI-powered tech could become smart enough to teach itself to implement new features without human intervention.
“There is an aspect of this which we call, all of us in the field call it as a ‘black box,’” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, noting that his company’s engineers could not even fully explain the phenomenon.
In one case, a Google program developed the ability to translate the language Bengali – despite never being “taught” the dialect.
