• Snapchat’s AI chatbot, My AI, is not a welcome addition according to many users, with the app being scored poorly over the past week.
• In the US, it has registered a score of 1.67 out of 5.
• The negative feedback may see Snapchat change some elements of My AI, such as where it is placed in the app’s UI.

Well that didn’t last long. It has been less than a week since Snapchat made its experimental My AI chatbot available to all users, but it has received a significant amount of negative feedback.

To that end, TechCrunch reports that, in recent days, the Snapchat app’s rating has plummeted. Citing app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the publication notes that it has scored a rating of 1.67, with 75 percent of reviews being a one star rating.

For reference, the app’s score was 3.05 for the first quarter of 2023, with 35 percent of reviews being one star. As such, the drop in rating and the release of My AI are certainly related.

Adding credence to the claims is Apptopia, which notes that over the past seven days app store reviews for Snapchat were mentioned 2 973 times, with the research firm given it an “Impact Score” rating of -9.2.

While it remains to be seen how Snapchat will address this negative feedback, as TechCrunch rightly points out, it is less to do with the functionality of the AI chatbot, and more about how its implementation was executed.

To that end, My AI reportedly appeared at the top of users Chat tab without proper prior warning from Snap Inc., nor with the consent of users.

As such, despite generative AI and its use in chatbots being the only thing that anyone can talk about these days, the question that all companies need to start asking is not when they will have one of their one, but rather, should they?

Perhaps the most egregious element to the entire rollout of My AI is not the fact that it is not opt-in from the start, but rather the fact that users need to sign up to the paid version of the platform, Snapchat+ in order to remove My AI from their app.

Understandably users are upset about having to pay in order to get rid of a feature they never necessarily wanted in the first place.

Either way, Snapchat has some damage control to do, but hopefully this will serve as a lesson to other platforms looking to integrate generative AI or an AI chatbot too quickly without first gauging the interest of its users, or indeed their consent.