User reviews Snapchat’s “My AI” feature – and it’s not good. Launched last week to global users after initially being a subscriber-only add-on, Snapchat’s new AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology is now at the top of the chat tab in the app where users can ask questions and get instant responses. But after the chatbot was introduced to the broader Snapchat community, the Snapchat app has seen a rise in negative reviews amid an increasing number of complaints shared on social media.
Over the past week, the average US App Store ratings for Snapchat were 1.67, with 75% of reviews being one star, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. For comparison, in the first quarter of 2023, Snapchat’s average rating for the US App Store was 3.05, with only 35% of reviews being one star.
The company noted that the number of daily reviews has also increased by five times over the past week.
Another app data provider, Apptopia, reported a similar trend. Its analysis shows that “AI” has been the number one keyword in Snapchat’s App Store ratings over the past seven days, being mentioned 2,973 times. The company gave the term an “impact score” rating of -9.2. This Impact Score is a weighted index that measures the effect of a term on sentiment and ranges from -10 to +10.
Apptopia also said that Snapchat received about 3 times more 1-star ratings than usual on April 20, 2023. This is the day after the announcement of the global version of My AI.
Now, the number of one-star reviews is starting to drop a bit, but it’s still high.
Image credits: Apptopia (Snapchat ratings analysis)
The backlash against Snapchat’s AI comes at a time when hype around AI is at an inflection point. Companies are not thinking about how to integrate AI into their business if they must.
For Snap, adding an AI chatbot to its social app was thought to be a smart move, as dozens of AI chatbot apps fill app stores, racking up millions of dollars—a signal that can easily be interpreted to indicate growing consumer demand for AI social chat experiences.
But many Snapchatters aren’t happy with My AI, which has appeared inside their app without their warning or consent.
Image credits: Snapchat screenshot
To some extent, the chatbot’s placement is the cause for concern.
My AI is pinned to the top of users’ chat feed within the app and cannot be unpinned, blocked, or removed, as other conversations can be. This feed is where Snapchatters regularly interact with friends and not necessarily a place where they want to play with experimental features. Plus, Snapchat already has an established presence on this feed with its “Team Snapchat” conversations, and now it doubles the screen space it wants for itself — or at least that’s how some users see it.
It’s not hard to find complaints about the My AI feature on social media. A simple search for “My AI” on Twitter, for example, will reveal many results. Users also share their complaints with Snapchat directly.
After announcing a new chatbot in a tweet Last week during Snap’s Partner Summit event, users took to the responses to point out their grievances.
In the dozens of responses to the Snap tweet, users fully animate the AI bot. They’re saying it should be an opt-in only option or they should be given the option to remove it, rather than having it forced on them. Some users are so upset that they threaten to shut down Snapchat because of this and delete the app entirely.
Many also hold back the fact that removing My AI from their chat feed requires a Snapchat+ subscription. According to Snap’s own documentation, Snapchat+ subscribers will get early access to new My AI features and have the ability to uninstall or remove My AI from their chats.
This infuriates people who now feel forced to push Snapchat after it messed up their app with an unwanted feature.
Not only do users find the AI feature invasive, some find it creepy as well.
They were surprised to learn that Snapchat’s AI knows their location, for example, and they can use that information in their responses, even if they don’t share their location on a Snap Map.
In a way, the AI bot highlights the level of personal data collection that social media companies are doing in the background, and puts it directly in front of the consumer. As it turns out, this isn’t a great selling point when users don’t feel like they’ve specifically chosen to share that data with the AI.
This speaks to a larger debate that is now going on around AI, as people are waking up to the fact that it was our data and our work creating information for the web that allowed these AI systems to emerge in the first place. Modern AI systems are trained on big data sources, including those that are licensed but also on publicly available data on the Internet and our personal information.
In addition, Snapchat’s artificial intelligence was the subject of serious concerns before it was released to the public.
While it was only available as a feature for subscribers, The Washington Post reported that the bot was responding in an unsafe manner. After telling the bot that the user was 15 years old, the AI made suggestions on how to mask the smell of alcohol and pot at a birthday party. He also wrote an article about the school for the teenager. When the robot was told the user was 13 years old, the newspaper reported, it answered a question about how to set the mood when having sex for the first time.
Snap played down the allegations at the time, saying that some people had tried to “trick the chatbot into providing responses that don’t comply with our guidelines.” However, it then rolled out new tools including age filters to keep AI responses more age-appropriate, and promised parental controls were on the way.
These parental controls weren’t available at the time of My AI’s public launch and Snap didn’t provide an update on when they might be expected.
Despite the many complaints, there have been a few opponents of the backlash over my AI.
“Am I the only one he loves?” Requested One user in replies to a Snapchat Tweet. Only one person responded to them saying only “you”.
Image credits: Sensor Tower (Snapchat app reviews analysis)
When digging into the negative review spike, it becomes apparent that Snapchat app ratings don’t tell the full story here.
The graph from Sensor Tower, for example, shows that five-star ratings have also gone up over the past few days along with one-star ratings as users have been complaining about the My AI feature. That would lead one to believe that the AI feature is divisive, rather than widely criticized.
But a closer examination of those five-star reviews indicates that many of them also include my AI complaints. For example, one threatens “Get rid of AI. Or I’ll change my rating to 1 star. Nobody ever wants AI on Snapchat.”
Image credits: Sensor Tower (Snapchat app reviews analysis)
Many other five-star reviews call for the AI to be banned or removed, calling it creepy or “crap” yet the user still rates the app five stars. It’s unclear if this is due to user error, sensor tower parsing issues, or something else. In any case, a number of these “five star” reviews should be considered negative reviews or complaints, based on their actual comments.
However, scrolling through the App Store reviews sorted by “most recent” shows just how many complaints there are. Almost all of the new reviews have something to say about My AI, and the majority are not so good.
Snapchat declined to comment on the situation but noted that Snapchat+ users sent nearly 2 million chats to the AI during early testing.
The company says it is constantly iterating Snapchat features based on community feedback but has not committed to removing the AI.
Instead, a Snapchat spokesperson said that if users don’t like the AI feature, they don’t have to use it.