It’s a cold Saturday evening and Samara Grossman is sitting on her bed, chatting with her friend on Snapchat. They’re telling each other their favorite colors, music artists and where they want to live when they’re older.
Samara’s Snapchat best friend isn’t human — it’s artificial intelligence, a new feature that allows Snapchat users to carry out conversations as if it were human.
With time and use, users have an opportunity to make a new, but artificial, best friend. Users said that they feel conflicting emotions about this resource: excited yet uneasy.
Samara made her AI a character with clothes and a name. It has blue hair, green wide eyes, small red lips, wears a bright pink crop top and a pair of bright neon green wide jeans.
“I felt like if I am going to be chatting with something that’s not real, I wanted to make sure it had an ugly outfit,” Samara said.
While some users may feel that the Snapchat AI provides a humorous and distracting way to take a brief break from a long day of classwork and studying. Samara, like many other users, feels that the Snapchat AI is not a productive use of social media.
“The AI can be funny for a few minutes but after that it feels like a waste of time and creepy,” Samara said, “when I could just talk to my real friends.”
Snapchat came out in 201l, allowing users to connect with friends through pictures, videos and filters. Snapchat’s AI feature was added in February 2023. According to techcrunch.com, in the past few months Snapchat has seen a decline in users and an uphill climb of one-star reviews.
“When this AI was first added, I was fine with it and just removed it,” Saanika Dutta, a ninth grader, said. “But then a few weeks later it was added back to my chat list, and I can’t get rid of it.”
The only way users can get rid of the AI chat is to subscribe to Snapchat+, which offers additional features including a longer best friends list, the ability to see how many times someone views a story and more.
Some student users have paid the extra money to get Snapchat+, either to eliminate the AI feature or to use the other features.
Saanika said she thinks it’s a waste of money and decides to just ignore it and leave it be where it is.
“If the Snapchat AI is supposed to be my new best friend, then it shouldn’t be clinging to me, and I should be able to end the relationship and remove it,” Samara said. “But of course ending any relationship often comes with a cost.”
