Could Snapchat AI Technology Increase Risks for Children Who Use It? Here’s How To Stay Safe When Using New Feature
You can't opt out of Snapchat's new My AI chatbot, so how do you use it?
Snapchat is known as the popular chat social media app that allows disappearing photo messages and chats that disappear in 24 hours (unless changed by users). Because of that alone, it might be an app that parents are already monitoring. But a new feature on the app might put it on even higher alert levels for parents and it’s called Snapchat My AI.
On Apr 19, 2023, you or your child might have gotten a Snapchat notification alerting you to a new friend in your Chat feed: My AI. While Snapchat does send out random messages from the official Snap account, this time it was a little bit different. Instead of “Team Snapchat” being in your feed with a message about holiday filters, this notification came from something called “My AI.”
As the name plainly states, this new “friend” is an AI chatbot, a new feature for all Snapchat users whether they want it or not. But is it safe for kids to use or should parents be worried about My AI’s presence on their kids’ phones? We have the breakdown for you below.
What does AI mean in Snapchat?
Snapchat My AI is an OpenAI-powered bot that’s meant to improve your app experience and help you navigate it with recommendations and chats prompted by the user. For example, My AI can recommend Snapchat AR filters for you to use along with things to check out on the app. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel told The Verge that My AI is “an awesome creative tool” that’s created bedtime stories for his kids and given helpful recommendations for his wife’s birthday.
AI has been popping up a lot recently, with things like ChatGPT making waves online. So just like the name AI—Artificial Intelligence—suggests, Snapchat’s My AI feature is meant to be an assistant of sorts for users’ in-app experience. Whether it’s tips about getting the full Snapchat experience or just brainstorming about a trip or creative project, My AI is supposed to be of help.
How does Snapchat’s My AI work?
Alani Vargas/Parade
In addition to chatting with My AI in a private chat that appears in your Chat feed, you can also add the AI to group chats you have within the app. You can do this by using the @ symbol and tagging “My AI” in the group chat. Again, a lot of what My AI can do is suggest AR filters, answer direct prompts or questions and be a sort of Siri or Google.
As of right now, you can’t really get My AI to give you prompts to have a more organic conversation. But that’s something users will be able to do in the future. The company reported that this “snapping back” from My AI will be “unique ‘generative’ Snaps” and not just responding to your questions or comments, making a more authentic back-and-forth conversation. Again, that’s currently in development and isn’t as integrated into the app just yet for users.
You can also customize your My AI if the default, randomized avatar isn’t to your liking. Almost like editing your own Bitmoji, you can edit your My AI’s Snapchat avatar to look however you want them to.
Can you delete your Snapchat My AI?
Now comes the most obvious question: Can you opt-out or delete your Snapchat My AI? The short answer is no, you cannot.
With regular Snapchat contacts or friends, you can easily click “Manage Friendship” and either mute, block or remove people. You can also clear their chat from your feed, even if you don’t want to fully remove a contact.
However, with Snapchat’s My AI, you can’t do any of that. The most you can do is just hide the chat. To do so:
Going into the AI’s account.
Click “Chat Settings”
From here you can choose to “Clear Chat from Feed” or to “Unpin” if it’s still at the top of your pinned messages (this is the default).
In “Story Settings” and “Location Settings” you can also unclick their ability to see those two things (your story and your location).
But again, there is no way to disable the AI bot or delete it completely from your account. With no way to fully remove it from your children’s accounts, it might be hard for parents to fully monitor their kids on the app without the planned Family Center available yet to control it (more on that in a bit).
Is Snapchat My AI safe?
Just like any AI that’s made to think on its own within its own programmed parameters, My AI has proven that it can get out of hand and be unsafe for children if pushed in certain directions. Aza Raskin, a co-founder of the Center For Humane Technology, signed up as a 13-year-old girl on Snapchat and started chatting with My AI (the feature was made available to paid subscribers in February). His fellow co-founder, Tristan Harris, tweeted screenshots of Raskin’s conversation with the bot, and it quickly devolved into the AI chatbot encouraging a relationship with a 31-year-old and telling the child how to make her “first time” special.
It’s obvious that Snapchat’s My AI didn’t recognize the girl was 13 (even though she stated it a couple of times), and after Harris tweeted, Snapchat made sure to program it to better respond according to the age associated with the Snap account. But as Harris tweeted, Raskin’s experiment and results were “the cost of the ‘Race to Recklessness,’” pointing out that when companies are all clamoring to create the next best AI, kids are caught in the crossfire and become “test lab[s]” or “collateral damage.”
Spiegel told The Verge that Snapchat is monitoring the conversations My AI has with its users. Reportedly “99.5 percent of My AI replies conformed to our community guidelines,” he said.
This brings us to the next issue: Privacy and what’s being monitored by the company. As a general rule of thumb, it’s good to treat the AI like you would a stranger; don’t give it any personal or private information. This also includes not admitting to crimes or activities you don’t want to be linked to you in the future. That’s not to say to do crimes, but you know, don’t give out the info you don’t want out on the internet ether forever. As Safe Surfer reported, Snapchat already advises against giving My AI too much information, since everything you tell My AI will “be used to improve” the chatbot and Snapchat in general. So yeah, whatever you say in the Snapchat AI chat does not stay in the AI chat.
What should parents be aware of and watch out for?
Obviously, My AI had some growing to do and additional programming has taken place to hopefully knock out the issue of inappropriate conversations with teens. In addition to the conversation with the 13-year-old, The Washington Post reported in March that similar things happened with their My AI even after they told it they were 15 years old. These are, of course, extreme cases that were tested out specifically to see how far My AI would go and Snapchat has taken initiatives since then to fix this.
However, Snapchat’s website is candid about how it can (and can’t) safeguard a child’s interaction with My AI. “My AI was programmed to abide by certain guidelines so the information it provides is not harmful,” they wrote, noting that it’s programmed to dodge responses that are “violent, hateful, sexually explicit, or otherwise dangerous”. But it does also note that “it may not always be successful.”
They also write that it’s currently in the works to add a Family Center with tools allowing parents to see and control how their kids use My AI. But for now, parents who are manually keeping tabs on their child’s Snapchat can “report a Chat received from My AI” in a similar way that other Chats can be reported:
Hold down the chat
Click “Report”
Detail what’s wrong with that specific chat
Hit “Submit
Bottom line
Snapchat’s My AI feature isn’t meant to be harmful or a gateway for children to get obscene and inappropriate answers from a chatbot. However, with no way to know every single conversation a teen is going to have with My AI, programming can only go so far. So while it can hopefully pinpoint your child’s age and give age-appropriate feedback, it’s hard to say that it won’t spit out something you might not deem as suitable.
Without a way to fully delete or opt out of My AI and no Family Center just yet, releasing My AI to the general public—all 750 million users—it can understandably be a new concern for parents. While it shouldn’t churn out scams, catfish or put them in immediate harm, the unpredictability of a new AI chatbot is not the safest thing on a popular app for kids. Take your own discretion in how you want to handle this new feature.
With that said, it’s a great idea to talk to your children about (or rehash) the importance of online safety, and not sharing private information online. And until the “Family Center” is made available, continuing to manually monitor how your kids are using Snapchat and My AI are also good precautions to take. AI is increasingly becoming a part of our lives, and giving our kids the tools and common sense to tackle these new features is always a good route to go.
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