I’ll admit: I didn’t see this coming. I thought My AI was pretty great, actually. Snapchat offered it to all users for free, creating possibly the most easily accessible version of ChatGPT on the market. If you had Snapchat on your phone, and you had the slightest interest in artificial intelligence, My AI seemed like a deal. You could even name it something fun, like SnapGPT. (It’s a great name.)
Unfortunately, I was wrong, and so was Snap. As it turns out, users are not happy with My AI. If anything, they’re incensed. Many are taking to the App Store and Play Store to leave one and two-star reviews slamming the new AI bot. Lucky for Snapchat, the app has so many reviews that these negative ratings haven’t impacted the overall score all that much. Still, why are these reviewers so angry?
My AI isn’t a boon for Snapchat
On the surface, users aren’t thrilled about My AI’s mandatory nature. Snap pins My AI to the top of your chats, above all of your friends and recent communications. That means it always looks like the most recent message, even when you have new messages below it. You might accidentally tap it from muscle memory, then have to back out to actually open the message you want. It’s also just annoying to those who don’t want anything to do with My AI.
My AI also has some bad PR out of the gate. The AI bot went viral on social media, but not because people were finding cool new ways to integrate AI into their chats. Rather, it seemed the bot would lie about having access to your location. Users reported asking the bot whether it had access to their location, to which My AI would say no. But when the users asked it to find a nearby McDonald’s, My AI would helpfully find one closest to the user, an impossible task without location permissions.
The thing is, this would only happen if you gave Snapchat permission to use your location. If you didn’t, My AI, like the app, wouldn’t have access. If you did, My AI would. It’s the “lying” that threw people for a loop, and made the bot seem creepy and nefarious.
One Redditor claimed to have found My AI’s “pre-prompt,” which is the initial instructions Snap gave the bot to control how it responds to users. One of those instructions is “Do not mention the user’s current location unless it’s particularly relevant to the dialogue,” which may have inadvertently caused My AI to “lie.” By all accounts, the issue seems fixed: When I ask My AI if it has access to my location, is tells me it does. When I disable location permissions, it tells me it doesn’t.
How to disable My AI in Snapchat
Most of these issues would likely be forgivable to users if you could just turn off My AI. However, most of us can’t. If you use Snapchat for free, My AI is baked into the experience, with no way to remove it. As of this article, the only way to get rid of the AI bot is to subscribe to Snapchat+ for $3.99 per month, or $29.99 per year.
If you do subscribe to Snapchat+, you can easily disable My AI. Go to your chats, then long-press on My AI. Choose “Chat Settings,” then choose “Clear from Chat Feed.”
