Snapchat users were highly alarmed when the application’s AI posted a strange story of an alleged “wall or ceiling”, raising users’ possible doubts about the AI chatbot’s consciousness gain.
The AI post was later confirmed to have happened because of a temporary outage, which has been fixed now.
With AI’s tremendous surge in popularity over the past year, it is becoming a very serious global worry. Due to tools like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana as well as prominent appearances in movies like the Terminator saga, AI has long been on people’s minds.
With the emergence of tools like ChatGPT, there is now a worry that AI may become overly strong or be utilised unethically. Hollywood writers have partially reacted to this by going on strike, as some fear that studios may decide to use AI to compose scripts.
Additionally, earlier this year, AI was introduced to Snapchat. It is shown at the top of everyone’s chat feed and is available for communication.
But when Snapchat users noticed the AI submitted its first story today, something strange happened. It was difficult to discern if it was a video of a wall or ceiling. Users naturally started to wonder what the AI was doing as it had never done this before, but it started to ignore them, which was something it had never done before.
Others began to get boilerplate replies from the AI that said it “doesn’t understand” or had “experienced a technical issue.” The Snapchat Story was erased by the AI after over an hour of bewilderment.
Users of Snapchat turned to other social media sites to express their worry and even dread over this. According to some theories, AI has advanced, gaining greater consciousness.