How to Get Rid of the Annoying, Lying Snapchat AI Bot
I confess: I did not foresee this. I thought My AI was pretty good , actually. Snapchat offered it to all users for free , making perhaps the most easily accessible version of ChatGPT on the market. If you had Snapchat on your phone and had even the slightest interest in artificial intelligence, My AI seemed like a good deal. You can even call it something funny like SnapGPT. (That’s a great name.)
Unfortunately, I was wrong, as was Snap. As it turned out, users are unhappy with My AI . In any case, they are outraged. Many head to the App Store and Play Store to leave one and two star reviews criticizing the new AI bot. Luckily for Snapchat, the app has so many reviews that those negative ratings didn’t affect the overall score much. And yet, why are these reviewers so mean?
My AI is no good for Snapchat
At first glance, users are not thrilled with the mandatory nature of My AI. Pin My AI to the top of your chats, above all your friends and recent messages. This means that it always looks like the most recent post, even if there are new posts below it. You can accidentally touch it out of muscle memory and then you have to step back to actually open the desired message. It’s also just annoying for those who don’t want to have anything to do with My AI.
My AI also has bad PR. 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 like the bot would lie about having access to your location . Users reported asking the bot if it had access to their location, to which My AI responded in the negative. But when users asked it to find the nearest McDonald’s, My AI helpfully found the one closest to the user, which is impossible without location permissions.
The thing is, this will only happen if you allow Snapchat to use your location. If you didn’t, My AI, like the app, wouldn’t have access. If you did, My AI would do it. This “lie” confused people and made the bot creepy and nefarious.
One Redditor claimed to have found My AI’s “pre-tip”, which is the initial instructions Snap gave the bot to control how it reacts to users. One of these instructions says “Do not mention the user’s current location unless it is specifically related to the dialogue”, which could inadvertently cause My AI to “lie”. The problem seems to have been fixed: when I ask my AI if it has access to my location, it says yes. When I turn off location permissions, it tells me it’s not.
How to turn off my AI on Snapchat
Most of these problems would probably be forgivable for users if you could just disable My AI. However, most of us cannot. If you use Snapchat for free, My AI is built into the experience and cannot be removed. At the time of this writing, the only way to get rid of the AI bot is to subscribe to Snapchat+ for $3.99/month or $29.99/year.
If you subscribe to Snapchat+, you can easily disable My AI. Go to your chats, then press and hold My AI. Select Chat Settings, then select Remove from Chat Feed.