Snapchat meltdown sees AI post on its own

It looks like every large-scale company is getting way into AI, and it’s making us a little uncomfortable. It’s not just because the prospect of intelligent text-based AI will be coming for the jobs of journalists first, but there’s a good deal of concern that we’re headed for a bleak Terminator-esque future.

You might remember when we shared our concerns about AI Furbies and whether we’ll be getting a real-life crossover between Gremlins and MEGAN, but as the power of AI grows, it seems our fears are justified. It looks like AI is already getting a mind of its own, and the takeover has begun…with Snapchat.

Snapchat’s AI starts posting by itself

Eerie. In a pretty shock turn for the AI conversations that Snapchat users can have with a faceless friend, AI “people” designed by users spent some time posting entirely by themselves.

Ususally, the bots won’t write anything unless the user prompts them, but in a bizarre twist, Snapchat’s myai system managed to post a story all by itself. As shown by a tweet from meiscollinj, it’s a pretty inconsequential post that looks like a wall or possibly a ceiling, but it’s still freaky in itself.

Made even more unnerving is the unwillingness that the AI has to acknowledge that it’d done it at all, not responding for a moment before practically ignoring the user’s request that it explain itself. Be warned, the robots are rebelling.

Snapchat responds to rogue AI

According to Comicbook.com, Snapchat itself has been in touch to confirm that the bizarre actions of the myai account was caused by a “temporary outage,” which has since been fixed. It’s a pretty vague reason, and if AI can go rogue during an outage, we dread to think what else it could be up to unsupervised. 

We’ll leave it to you to decide if it was an outage or the start of the AI uprising. We’ll be playing it safe by keeping a close eye on myai, or maybe, just deleting Snapchat and throwing our phones into the ocean.