The name game.

This week Snap announced it is rolling out its OpenAI-powered chatbot, My AI, to Snapchatters globally with brand new features including (per the press release):

1. Personalize My AI: Your AI comes with one of thousands of unique Bitmoji variations and can be easily customized to make it truly your own. Design a custom Bitmoji for your AI, give it a name, and start chatting. 

2. Bring My AI into Conversations with Friends: It’s easy to bring My AI into any of your conversations with friends. Simply @ mention My AI and ask a question on behalf of the group. It will be clear when an AI has entered the chat and includes a sparkle next to its name. 

3. Snapchat Recommendations: My AI surfaces place recommendations from the Snap Map and suggests relevant Lenses. For example, you can ask My AI to suggest weekend activities for your family or get the perfect Lens recommendation to wish a friend a happy birthday.

4. Share Snaps with My AI: Our community can send Snaps to My AI and receive a chat reply.

5. Watch It Snap You Back: With over 55,000 Snaps created on Snapchat every second on average, Snapping is a natural way that our community stays in touch. Soon Snapchat+ subscribers will be able to Snap My AI and get a unique generative Snap back that keeps the visual conversation going!

Snap has also made it clear that My AI is “far from perfect,” sharing how the company has focused on improving it to adhere to community guidelines, mitigate harmful content, integrate moderation tech, and implement design to integrate My AI into Snap’s parental tool offerings. As other platforms (cough Google, Microsoft) are focused on integrating AI into the search experience, Snap seems to be focused on AI-driven creativity-focused experiences. Which, given the issues we currently have with Generative AI-provided answers to questions (e.g., overconfidence in wrong answers, potential bias incorporated into answers), creativity feels like a savvy (though not always lower stakes) space to play and learn in.

Now I can’t help but wonder...what would the consumer, brand, and marketplace response have been if Snap had removed AI from the product’s name, and simply touted its enhanced abilities to offer a more personalized experience with a platform that ‘gets’ its users more and more over time and use? Snap isn’t the first, nor will it be the last, to tout AI-powered offerings to the general marketplace as consumers’ fascination with tangible uses for AI continues to grow. Obviously for the technology to evolve and improve, Snap (and any AI-based tool) needs users testing alongside the developers to figure out its opportunities, limitations, and much-needed guardrails. 

As brands and marketers race to put ‘AI’ at the top of their agendas, how many of those same people are taking time to utilize AI-driven tools like ChatGPT or My AI in everyday, creatively driven lower stakes ways to understand the tech as a general consumer? What can you do today to tap into the evolving power of these tools to enhance your creativity and work in safe (remember – never share proprietary data and details in your prompts!) ways? How can you leverage these tools to provide sparks for your next brainstorm? An upcoming presentation? The next time you interview a potential candidate? How you focus on building your team’s culture?

Would love to hear about your successes (and lessons – some of you call these ‘fails’) as you test the boundaries of what AI-based assistance can provide to your professional and personal lives.