Presenting your new best friend, My AI. You never have to tell it anything because it already knows everything! Awesome right? I don’t particularly think so. 

The new AI robot placed on every Snapchat user’s phone can answer any question, any time. Users can add it to group chats, send it photos and conduct oddly uncomfortable conversations with it. I’m not its biggest fan and after spotting it on the Snap home page, I realized one thing: It. Doesn’t. Leave. 

Some users have found a way to remove it, but unless you have Snapchat Plus it seems to return. Since I don’t plan on paying $3.99 a month, I have made sure to tweak all its functions to make it so it couldn’t see or know a thing about me. I’ve never felt older in my life.

And it seems I’m not the only one despising my new “buddy.”

 “I hate the Snapchat AI. I don’t want it on my phone, it creeps me out. Why do I need an AI to talk to when the whole point of Snapchat is to talk with my friends and connect with others?” said Summit junior Braden Bailey.

Exactly. This bothers me most. Have we really become so disconnected from each other that we are willing to make conversation with a Bitmoji? 

I just can’t imagine myself running home to go tell my day to an… AI. I love Snapchat for the accessible communication with my friends, but that’s what I’m there for, my friends, not a robot.

“I don’t like the Snapchat AI. It’s weird. Why would I talk to someone who’s not there? It’s interesting but so bad, and impeccably easy to cheat off of,” said Summit junior Gianna Viola.

Other than scaring them a bit, it doesn’t seem to affect all Summit students, apart from the changes in the classroom.

Carson Nashem, a junior at Summit, said, “[I] hate the Snapchat [chat bot], it creeps me out, [but] I don’t have an opinion on it because it doesn’t reality affect me in a bad way, all it’s really done is make the teachers give out paper copies.”

Yet another skill of the Snapchat AI is helping students with school work, except it’s not really a help, it instead does it for us, so teachers have begun to take cautionary steps to dissuade students from using it.

The fact that the robot came out of nowhere and is practically impossible to escape is only part of the reason it is terrifying.  After asking “My AI,” “Where do I live?” a student got an exact response within seconds of “Bend, Oregon.” Undoubtable a little afraid, the student asked how it knew that, the AI responded with “I must have made a mistake, I don’t actually know where you live.” Now what does that mean?

There’s been other weird instances amongst students as well.

Not all Snapchat users have realized, but the AI automatically has access to the user’s location and stories. Summit senior Maddie Gardner strongly disagrees with the automatic “location-on” setting with her AI.

“I think it’s creepy and a breach of privacy. They literally know where I live and I don’t share my location with everyone, then the AI pretends it doesn’t understand,” commented Gardner.

Besides it being a bit terrifying, it’s beginning to mislead its users and provide random information.

Summit junior Reese Riley said, “I’ll ask it’s name, and half the time it says ‘I’m just an AI I don’t have one,’ and the other half of the time it gives me a full backstory on its family life, where they live and oddly specific facts about themselves that just appear. It’s super unsettling.” 

It feels so close minded and “un-woke” of me to not be absolutely over the moon for these technological advances and call me old school, but I liked Snapchat before AI. I understand there are benefits to it, but my concern is the benefits will blind people from the fact that it’s not real.