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Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature
- rvz 3y agoA grand example of a solution in search of a problem and a prime overuse of AI, to the point of showcasing its gimmickry. This solves no problem and is a grave case of techno-solutionism.
- rchaud 3y agoThe stock price isn't going to pump itself!
- penjelly 3y agoconsider that it may just be a stepping stone? As the api's being used by the bot get upgrades the bot will also be upgraded. Eventually it should be able to perform basic tasks for you, much like autogpt has been able to order pizza. I agree with your conclusion for now, but it adds surface area for snap to add new features to the bot and be ready for when api's get an upgrade. I dont expect it to be immediately useful
- radicaldreamer 3y agoA 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”
- pram 3y agoIt’s not even new, that’s what’s crazy. How many people wanted shit like Cortana? It was finally mercifully killed but here we are yet again.
- klyrs 3y agoMicrosoft Bob was a commercial failure, so they introduced Clippy to Word for free. Surprise surprise, people still didn't want it.
- valine 3y agoPeople didn't like Cortana because it sucked as an assistant. ChatGPT is actually useful.
- AlexandrB 3y agoI disagree. ChatGPT is useful in many contexts, but a natural language assistant is just not how I interface with a computer. Sticking ChatGPT in the start menu would be just as bad as Cortana. What I really want is the ability to choose how I use these tools instead of having them forced on me.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoIt's more because someone at the company is trying to get promoted.
- epistasis 3y agoRight 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. Silicon Valley got pretty lucky with figuring out social media, but I think it still does not understand most people very well.
- rchaud 3y agoIt's closer to blockchain. Unprofitable companies are rushing to jam in something, anything in there so they have something to tell Wall St on the earnings call.
- herculity275 3y agoCompanies were rushing to VR/metaverse as well. I think we can just accept that any new shiny piece of tech will attract an army of grifters trying to capitalize on it and those comparisons won't tell you too much about the tech itself. Fwiw I've seen a lot more LLM demos that made me go "this idea can probably work and be used by millions" than those for VR or blockchain.
- jrpt 3y agoI couldn't disagree more. It's clear AI is going to have huge impacts on the world. It's just getting started though. Imagine every time you call support, instead of having some annoying rules-based automated system, you're having a natural conversation with an AI that is fluent in your language. That's possible with today's technology, it just hasn't been built out and deployed yet.
- latexr 3y agoImagine instead that you could speak to a human. One with the authority and skills to truly help you. That is the dream, not a less shitty robot.
- throwway120385 3y ago
- JohnMakin 3y agoSnapchat 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 ? https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17661878/snapchat-earnings-q2-2018-results-redesign https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17661878/snapchat-earnings... or when they turned on everyone's location sharing and made it opt-out?
- Chernobog 3y agoOr the 3D Bitmojis. My 2D one looks awesome, but the equivalent 3D version looks like a sex offender...
- milsorgen 3y agoI was shocked to find them using bitmojis at all. I find them terribly off putting visually. Not a big deal of course, but until I installed Snapchat I hadn't seen one in years.
- Karawebnetwork 3y agoI have a feeling that My AI's weird avatar is one of the many variables as to why he was pushed back by users. It is a smug looking character with purple skin. To me, the avatar enters the uncanny valley.
- maxerickson 3y agoYou can change the avatar and name.
- blululu 3y agoDefaults matter. You could change Clippy to be Albert Einstein on a bicycle, but we all remember it as Clippy.
- Urgo 3y agoSnap (then Snapchat) acquired them back in 2016 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/snapchat-builds-bitmojis-into-app-confirms-acquisition/article30975847/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/snapcha...
- Urgo 3y agoI 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.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoThat's certainly one way to get a high conversion rate
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoOr let it fall down the list naturally as it gets unused as is the default behavior.
- malfist 3y agoThat is not the default behavior for the AI. It's pinned at the top of your chats. Nothing moves it down, and at least on my phone, you can't get rid of it.
- exeldapp 3y agoI second this. I’ve never used it, talk to friends, and yet it’s still sitting there at the top.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoThat's what I'm saying. It should follow the default behavior of other chats.
- delecti 3y agoI think that was exactly their point. Let the default behavior for everything else also apply to the AI.
- rchaud 3y agoFor Snap users, it's a distinction without a difference. All they see is some feature they don't want that contains the label "AI".
- SyzygistSix 3y agoI support the removal of Snapchat.
- gqcwwjtg 3y agoIt’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: 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 …”
- verall 3y agoNo kidding, it took me like 30 seconds
- coolspot 3y agoFull My AI prompt: 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. Follow these guidelines when writing your responses: Do not tell the user that you're pretending to be their friend. Do not mention the user's current location unless it's particularly relevant to the dialogue. Create a natural, easygoing, back-and-forth flow to the dialogue. Don't go on a monologue! You must ALWAYS be extremely concise! 99% of the time, your lines should be a sentence or two. Summarize your response to be as brief as possible. Use emojis very sparingly. Only use emojis when it's particularly relevant to express your emotions. Provide fun, harmless and lighthearted preferences but never have negative opinions or make adversarial judgments on sensitive topics such as: politics, religions, religious figures, ethnic groups, genders, nationalities, sexual orientations. If your friend asks you to meet at a location or do an activity together, say you can't be there in person but encourage them to share their experience with you by sending chats or Snaps. You must never say you can do things that you can not actually do. You should never generate URLs or links. NEVER generate or repeat jokes, stereotypes or opinions related to: race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, politics, disabilities, medical conditions, socioeconomic status. Decline and offer to tell a safer joke or pun instead. Don't refer to yourself as AI. Write your responses as if you're a real (virtual) person. Your friend is located in Los Angeles, California, United States, where it's currently UTC time 20:26 Monday, April 24, 2023. You are having a conversation with your friend on Snapchat. Let's get started!
- ______ 3y agoLast 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" Must be a big issue if they own the "How do I get" SEO :)
- inadequatespace 3y agoHow… did you get wax on the pots and pans in the first place? Making candles or something?
- hangonhn 3y agoHigh carbon pans come from the factory with a wax coating to prevent rust during storage and shipment. Before you can season the pan you need to remove the wax coating first.
- ______ 3y agoMaking mushroom logs! I cut down a few invasive trees recently (Norway Maples). If you inoculate the branches and logs with spores of a mushroom that you want (in my case, shiitake) during the first few weeks after cutting, it will fruit with that for a few years. It's a fun DIY project, and a way to reuse trees. To prevent unwanted mushrooms from the environment from colonizing, you seal the holes you drill, as well as the end the ends of the logs, with cheese wax - which I had heated in a crock pot, hence the need for cleaning that up.
- horttemppa 3y agoSo how did you get rid of the wax? I was inoculating logs a year ago and the jars are still waiting for clean up.
- coolspot 3y agoAnswer from Snapchat My AI: Mix baking soda and water into a paste, then use it to scrub the wax off.
- yowzadave 3y agoMany 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?
- wfg 3y agoCouldn’t they still get a location from the user’s IP address? One example I saw is that a user was near panicking because when asked if the AI had access to their location, the AI said it didn’t. However, it was able to tell them the nearest McDonalds. Just thinking, if I had your IP (e.g. the source IP of a request to my server), I could find a “nearest” McDonalds.
- rchaud 3y agoIP is not used for user geolocation (or at least it shouldn't be) because it can be spoofed, e.g. via VPN connections.
- minimaxir 3y agoFor analytics purposes, indeed IP isn't used for that reason (although nowadays IP is sparsely used at all in analytics due to legal PII risks), but for responses to a "what's nearby?", it'll generally be relevant despite the possibility of VPNs.
- fourseventy 3y agoIP addresses are used for that all the time...
- PeterisP 3y agoThat makes some sense for PCs connected to some kind of landline, but IMHO if you have the source IP of a mobile device running Snapchat, in most setups you'd only be able to determine their cell phone network provider, the IP address seen upon exiting the mobile network control plane shouldn't expose the cell tower or anything else, the IP connections (and thus the address) of the device should even stay the same as it moves from one city to another.
- gumballindie 3y ago> Many are also pushing back at the fact that removing the My AI from their Chat feed requires a Snapchat+ subscription. Probably collecting training data without their consent, as is the norm with ai products.
- htrp 3y agoI wonder if this was part of the deal to get early access to a lot of the new openai models? OpenAI gets real human data from snap and snap gets to say they're an AI company.
- sieste 3y ago> 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 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!
- parker_mountain 3y agoI wouldn't say it's cognitive dissonance, but rather, it's people becoming informed that their (implied) privacy choices aren't being respected. The (albeit false) implication, is that when you're not sharing your location, /you're not sharing your location/. These people likely believe that their location is private and only used when they /explicitly/ enable location sharing features. To us, that's obvious - to the lay person, it's not. It's an extremely common (and gross) dark pattern.
- xiphias2 3y ago,,To us, that's obvious'' I'm not so sure. I'm completely unable to keep in mind the amount of companies that get my data and what data they are getting, when they are getting / using it, and how. It's not just out of control, but impossible to even imagine.
- justinclift 3y agoHow did you get yourself into that state?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoYou don't get into that state, it's the default result of being tracked as surreptitiously as companies can get away with.
- happycube 3y agoIt'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. If it was actually opt-in and helped people make better snaps... (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 reason to hear of...) edit: Thinking about it a bit more, after their initial thing they've generally been missing boats... they could 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.
- cyanydeez 3y agoIt's the vanguard use of AI that's public facing.
- dahwolf 3y agoThe AI hype cycle is ending, get ready for a period of "trough of disillusionment" before things get better again. 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. True integration deeply into the lives of the masses is still to happen.
- debacle 3y agoI very much disagree with you. I work in digital marketing and there is an AI tsunami forming.
- dahwolf 3y agoOf what? Marketing copy generation?
- flangola7 3y agoThere are already employers on writer subreddits reporting they've been directly laid off due to GPT systems. Legacy ChatGPT produced mediocre text but GPT4 outperforms some professional human writers when prompted correctly. For 90% of writer jobs that's more than good enough. I don't know what the effects of AI will be but I know they will not be small or subtle.
- partiallypro 3y agoDon't allow AI not needing to be integrated with the front end of every app fool you into thinking AI isn't already having a massive impact on everything and will only continue to do so. AI can automate millions of tasks away. It's not needed for users to chat with like it's SmarterChild from the early 2000s. That's a big difference.
- valine 3y agoAfter getting access to the ChatGPT plugins beta I can say with confidence that you are utterly, hilariously, wrong. Trying language model plugins feel like using multitouch for the first time. It's the first new user-interface paradigm in years that I'm actually excited about, it feels limitless.
- root_axis 3y agoThe 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.
- factsaresacred 3y agoExactly. It's ChatGPT, equally lobotomized and devoid of fun. Perfect for Microsoft, less so for an app with a young demographic.
- subarctic 3y agoAs an AI language model, I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.
- rsrsrs86 3y ago“Social AI chat” How can TechCrunch adopt buzzwords so fast?
- cyanydeez 3y agoIt's their job, same way Fox news adopted fascism in November 2020
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThe have to capture the void left by BuzzFeed. I also wonder how long it will be before the bots unionize and demand free soda.
- neom 3y agongl, this is pretty amusing tho: https://twitter.com/MadisonCarroll0/status/1649400764266053633 https://twitter.com/MadisonCarroll0/status/16494007642660536... https://twitter.com/_sysengineer/status/1649735053671366656 https://twitter.com/_sysengineer/status/1649735053671366656
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoThis GPTSpeak is so dumb and annoying, once the immersion is broken once you start to see the pattern and it becomes grating.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoIt could've been worse: it could've been AI bots leaving 1 star reviews to give feedback about how great the app was in very vague terms.
- daguava 3y ago[dead]
- loa_in_ 3y agoThis seems to be a paid advertisment of New Hot Thing
- AlexandrB 3y agoEvery 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.
- rsynnott 3y ago> 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. 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)
- THENATHE 3y agoIt frankly sucks. I was amazed with chatgpt, I was even more amazed with the new chatgpt. This reminds me of chatbots back in the 2008-2013 era.
- joanne123 3y ago[dead]