Featured Image Credit: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty / Matt Esparza
Snapchat added some interesting AI features to its app last year, but a viral post suggests that at least one of them hasn't always necessarily worked as intended.
The 'My AI' feature on Snapchat is meant to just be a sort of chatbot to help answer quick questions without having to swap to a different app but it's not always been smooth sailing.
Back in August 2023 there were reports of some people finding the chatbot wasn't responsive, something that Snapchat eventually said was a system outage, but that's way less weird than what happened to X (formerly Twitter) user Matt Esparza.
Did Snapchat Ai just add a picture of my wall/ceiling to their Snapchat story?
— Matt Esparza (@matthewesp) August 16, 2023
Snapchat AI - Left
My wall/ceiling- Right pic.twitter.com/bh8I3Aiwun
He posted a video showing My AI popping up in his feed of stories, which isn't meant to really happen, but even stranger was what it posted.
The incredibly short video is just a confusing pair of colours, but Esparza posted it next to an image of the join between the wall and ceiling in his home and it looked like a perfect match.
Advert
This meant that he suspected that My AI somehow posted a short video that he had never actually taken to a story that wasn't supposed to exist, which is quite a wild series of events if it's accurate.
Others found themselves in similar situations, with one X user posting: "My AI on Snapchat just posted a story of a ceiling. And now I’m thinking killer robots have invaded my apartment."
Snap - the company behind Snapchat - didn't stayed completely silent on this one, though.
A spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time: “My AI experienced a temporary outage that’s now resolved.”
Still, the sheer fact that the chatbot was able to post a story of any kind is interesting on its own, given that this hasn't been a feature of it so far, since it's been limited to chat instead.
When it first launched, Snap left that a bit open-ended by saying it couldn't "at this time", suggesting that it might be able to post stories at some point.
If you log onto Snapchat anytime soon and see a weird image from My AI that looks suspiciously like a bit of your surroundings, though, it looks like you can stand down and not worry too much about it somehow taking control of your camera.
