Snapchat AI : friend or foe

BY MINOU ONO Staff Reporter

Snapchat AI chatbot will potentially negatively impact young people and their social lives. Snapchat is an app used by hundreds of millions of people, many of whom are teenagers. Recently, Snapchat launched a chatbot similar to Open AI’s popular ChatGPT. Only Snapchat+ subscribers can get rid of the chatbot. Most users are stuck with it at the top of their chat page. Its presence on this app will replace social interactions between people at an age where social interactions are crucial to development. Since MyAI’s launch in April, many students have experimented with the AI bot.

“I talked to it once when it first came up on my phone and now I don’t talk to it anymore because it’s scary,” sophomore Abby Arnold said.

This idea that the snapchat AI is “scary” comes from the fact that it’s programmed to be human-like, unlike some other AI models.

“You ask [the Snapchat AI] questions, and it doesn’t actually give you answers and it just says, ‘Hi, how’s your day going? And it’s f-ing

“At first I thought it was really weird, [but now] I use it to help me with my homework, and I asked it for ideas for English,” junior Sophia Tabarez said.

Although Tabarez finds it useful, she also thinks that this increased accessibility to AI tools will have a negative impact on students.

“I think it’ll make students a little bit more dependent on AI. I’ve already seen it,” Tabarez said.

This dependency on AI might seem innocent when you think of homework help, but when young people become socially dependent on AI, it could have severe consequences. I sometimes find myself opening the app to talk to friends and then getting distracted and talking to the bot instead. weird [...] It’s literally terrifying,” Arnold said.

Students are not the only ones who think this could have negative effects on students’ social lives.

“The idea of having an AI chat with you almost like a friend concerns me in terms of isolation, loneliness, anxiety, those types of feelings that teenagers, especially, experience,” computer science teacher Martha Leveque said.

“I think that it’s a little bit problematic because I know that there’s a lot of young people who use Snapchat and I think that it could be isolating and prevent social interactions between younger people, because they’ll be talking to AI all day and not their friends,” sophomore Callie West said.

Chatbots and AI don’t just have negative impacts. The technology behind these chatbots is very advanced and impressive. It has the power to make our lives easier, but only if it’s used responsibly.

“I do believe that the AI search bar and things like that are going to be the future of Googling something. You could just ask an AI and they will be able to tell you that information in a much more efficient way,” Leveque said.

On the other hand, some students don’t find it as scary and think it’s helpful.

“I actually really like it because you can look up whatever you want,” sophomore Alexis Boyle said.

Along with being used as a search engine, AI can be used for academic help.

The longterm effects of chatbots are not fully known yet, but some teachers and parents are concerned about how this will affect young people’s social lives.

“I think it’ll make it more difficult than it already is for people to have in-person conversations because they’re going to be so used to having them online,” West said.

I think this is an amazing advancement in the tech world, and if AI is used in a responsible way, it can be a great tool. However, as a society, we need to set boundries on how much we use AI. Social interaction between humans is the core of our humanity and when we let AI interfere with that, we threaten our very being.

“AI is going to be in our lives for the rest of our lives most likely. Learn as much as you can about it and how it works. And then be really careful,” Leveque said.