Even Snapchat Now Has an AI Image Generator
Snapchat’s first foray into artificial intelligence was not a success . It all started with “My AI,” an artificially intelligent chatbot that lives at the top of your Snapchat chats, back in April, and people weren’t happy. First of all, you couldn’t get rid of it, so you had to deal with the chatbot in your application, whether you were interested in it or not. Plus there were concerns that the bot was lying about access to your location. It wasn’t entirely true, but the damage was done.
Eight months later and My AI continues to live. Not only that, but Snapchat is doubling down on artificial intelligence . The company announced Tuesday that it will release a special AI image generator for Snapchat+ subscribers. If you’ve used one of these before, like the recently released Meta generator, you know the gist: when you press Snapchat’s new AI button, you can tell the bot to generate any image that comes to mind. Give it a simple hint or something complex, and the bot will try to repeat it. You can also send these images to the AI like normal snaps: your friends might open your snap, thinking they see your face, only to be greeted by an AI nastiness. Snapchat+ users previously had the ability to create AI images for their My AI chat wallpaper, but this is a full-fledged image generator.
But it’s not just image generation that’s getting AI support in Snapchat+. When you take a photo, you’ll see a new Expand option. Use this button if you think you’ve taken a photo too close to the subject, and Snapchat will use artificial intelligence to “zoom out” by filling the space with generative images. Dreams , Snapchat’s AI selfie feature, now supports collaboration. You can add your friends to your AI selfies and get a pack of eight photos for free once a month.
All of these features are exclusive to Snapchat+, Snap’s paid tier. You can subscribe for $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year. But will these features be enough to convince you to actually pay for Snapchat? Personally, I’m almost close to deleting the app because their notifications have been flooded with spam lately; thank God for the notification settings .