Snapchat’s chatbot My AI sits inside the Snapchat app. It was released earlier this year and has been both a success and a flop, depending on which kid you ask.
Designed to be a friend to people who use SnapChat, it can have human-like conversations. Kids can tell the AI problems, they can ask it for help with their homework, and they can also bully it which of course, is cause for concern.
Mostly though, the AI is designed to speak with younger people like it is their friend. Well, it tries.
But earlier this week, in a strange event, Snapchat’s AI seemed to go rogue. It posted a story (a short video that lasts 24 hours before disappearing), seemingly all by itself, of what looked like someone’s ceiling.
One user said, My Snapchat AI posted a random 1 second story and isn’t replying to me AND IM FREAKED OUT.
The Snapchat AI is coming alive.. or is it?
Most people didn’t even know the Snapchat AI could post stories, and they soon found out that the bot was glitching hard afterwards. This of course fired up the rumour mill about the bot “waking up”.
Was Snapchat’s AI bot posting a story like it was a real person?
Here’s how it looked.
The image was very obscure, but many Twitter/X users decided that it looked like a ceiling meeting a wall.
A Snapchat staffer told Mashable that their AI had indeed experienced a glitch, but since then it has been fixed.
Once the AI was back online, users of the AI went HAM, probing it about what happened.
Some people even claimed it was their very own ceiling that the AI had recorded.
A Twitter/X user declared, I swear I thought that was my wall specially the way I’m seating in my living room,
A different Twitter/X user wrote, IT LOOK EXACTLY LIKE MY WALL I ALMOST DIED.
Others also decided that it looked way too much like their wall. Whose wall was it???
Was this just a glitch? Was it just Snap engineers playing around and trying out some things that they would like the bot to do in the future? Either way, it still caused many people to freak out.
Was this an AI becoming aware and posting stuff? Or are we all paranoid in this brave new world? Will this story age well? Let’s hope so.
