Snapchat users can rest easy with the knowledge that the erratic behavior they may have recently experienced with their My AI chatbot was not the beginning of the AI revolution.
After Snapchat users started reporting en masse earlier this week on sites like Twitter that the My AI chatbot had posted its own story and stopped responding to messages, it turns out the problem isn’t nearly as juicy as one might have hoped. Snap confirmed to TechCrunch that what happened was a “temporary outage” that has been fixed, while offering no further details.
Snapchat users started noticing that My AI had popped up on their stories feed, with a one-second story that just showed an unintelligible image with no explanation. Some users initially thought the app had surreptitiously taken photos of their ceilings, but that wasn’t what happened. According to Snapchat, it was just the app bugging out.
Of course, that still begs the question of how and why My AI was able to post a story when it’s not supposed to do that. My AI exists to answer chat prompts and send images directly to users; there’s no official way for it to create stories. Perhaps Snapchat is experimenting with new features, or something just went truly haywire in the back-end and generated a somewhat terrifying outcome. Snapchat did tell TechCrunch that My AI can’t post stories “at this time,” but that wording allows for the feature to be added later.
Whatever the reason, the incident is probably not going to make the unpopular chatbot any more friends. Snapchat users have been complaining about My AI for months, namely its placement at the top of the chat feed unless you go out of your way to get rid of it. Perhaps in the future it’ll also dominate your stories feed, as well.
