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Comment by Urgo | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue is way simpler. I don't think its a backlash against AI as the article makes it out to be. The "My AI" 'user' is pinned to the top of your chat list. You can not remove it. If they simply gave users an option to turn it on or off the problem would be solved.

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"Snapchat+ subscribers receive early access to new My AI features, and have the ability to unpin or remove My AI from their Chat feed."

Also worth noting that as a free user I have been able to remove it from the list that is shown on the web version of Snapchat [1], but that change doesn't carry over to the mobile app.

[1]: https://web.snapchat.com/

That's a really funny set of features. "Love My AI? Pay us to get more! Hate it? Pay us to get rid of it!"

It implicitly acknowledges that it's a bad feature that people might actually pay to get rid of.

This is so dystopian all around.

Whoops I left off the link to the support article that contains that first quote: https://help.snapchat.com/hc/en-us/articles/13387249333780-H...

Also there's a second support article which also currently contains that same quote but used to read: "Only Snapchat+ subscribers can remove My AI from their Chat feed at this time." [1]

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230419122413/https://help.snap...

I don't want to "interact" with computers. I want to give them commands.

I want to interact with people, and I don't want computers to pretend to be people.

The line will blur more and more over time

I especially don’t want to be led to believe in interacting with a human when I’m actually interacting with a computer.

That's what happened to the Bing "AI" button they added to Swiftkey recently.

Only using it on my Pixel so I only saw the Play Store reviews alongside a few articles online. But they were pummeled with 1* reviews and a week later...no more Bing icon that I can't remove from my otherwise fine keyboard.

I think it's both. If people actually found the AI useful they wouldn't all be clamoring for a way to get rid of it. Forcing the feature on users is stupid on Snap's part, but it wouldn't have provoked as bad of a reaction if the feature sucked less.

Unfortunately we're about to see a lot more garbage AI features and content forced on users.

Or let it fall down the list naturally as it gets unused as is the default behavior.

That is not the default behavior for the AI. It's pinned at the top of your chats. Nothing moves it down, and at least on my phone, you can't get rid of it.

I second this. I’ve never used it, talk to friends, and yet it’s still sitting there at the top.

That's what I'm saying. It should follow the default behavior of other chats.

I think that was exactly their point. Let the default behavior for everything else also apply to the AI.

> I don't think its a backlash against AI as the article makes it out to be.

That’s not what I understood from the article. They gave several reasons and the first one was the same as yours:

> But many Snapchat users aren’t thrilled with My AI, which appeared inside their app without warning or their consent.

> To some extent, it’s the chatbot’s placement that’s the cause of concern.

> My AI is pinned to the top of users’ Chat feed inside the app and can’t be unpinned, blocked or removed, as other conversations can be.

They succeeded in reminding people like me that Snapchat exists. I'd call that a massive success that an option like that would have prevented.

For Snap users, it's a distinction without a difference. All they see is some feature they don't want that contains the label "AI".

Is it though? Browsing through the Android reviews 9 out of 10 that mentioned "AI" were complaining about not being able to remove it or that you need to pay for snapchat+ to remove it. Pretty sure if they either gave an easy option to not have it pinned, or as teaearlgraycold mentioned in another reply, just have it fall down the list naturally there wouldn't be an issue at all.

That's certainly one way to get a high conversion rate

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