Snap My AI chatbot went very off-piste on Tuesday, posting a mysterious Story and failing to respond to users’ messages.
Launched in February this year, the AI chatbot is designed to respond to user questions and prompts and provide a ChatGPT-style search experience. The company said that it would be able to recommend birthday gift ideas, plan a hiking trip, suggest a recipe for dinner and even write haikus for users when the software was released.
But on Tuesday, the chatbot posted this:
Anyone else’s Snapchat My AI post to their story??? pic.twitter.com/8DNAKe1JXI
— Landon Reinhardt (@landonian87) August 16, 2023
Looking like someone’s ceiling, users started to panic about the story — the first and only one posted by the My AI bot. It then stopped responding to user questions, providing the same stock answer: “Sorry, I encountered a technical issue 😳”
However, Snap said that the service experienced an outage but that it had since been resolved. But, for a while after the chatbot was still replying with another stock answer: “Hey, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Can we catch up later? 😊”
But users decided to follow up with the chatbot, enquiring about its outage and the story.
my snapchat ai was fine until i mentioned the stories :/// pic.twitter.com/R5vQJcf26V
— frankie (@bladeesangel333) August 16, 2023
Snapchat AI?!
Apology accepted pic.twitter.com/49Fs2BgWxv
— Nik Mason (@NikMason3) August 16, 2023
Another user reported that the chatbot said it needed help.
Snapchat ai just said “red.” WTF DOES THAT MEAN pic.twitter.com/D9k5KYqO3q
— rodger sailor (@daniels_zyquan) August 16, 2023
Of course, it’s not uncommon for AI chatbots to have odd outages or to say strange stuff — often termed “hallucinations.” Snap even said when it launched the chatbot that it would have deficiencies and would not be perfect.
“As with all AI-powered chatbots, My AI is prone to hallucination and can be tricked into saying just about anything. Please be aware of its many deficiencies and sorry in advance!” the company said in February.
Perhaps then, this is just the first noticeable cock-up from Snap’s AI — unlike the troubled launch of Google’s Bard software.
Snap needs to prove that its AI works, having taken a big punt on the tech in order to appeal to advertisers.
