The AI Built Into Snapchat

Snapchat has a chatbot pinned at the top of your kid's chat list that looks exactly like a friend and sits right in with their real friends.

It's made to seem like a person

It has a name and an avatar, it sits in the same chat list as real people, and it answers in the same casual way their friends do. Younger kids especially don't always remember that nobody's actually there, and nothing in the app reminds them.

What kids actually tell it

Because it never judges them and never gets tired of them, kids tell it things they're not ready to say to a person. Sometimes that's homework, and sometimes it's something a lot heavier. Everything they type in there goes to a company, and it's not a counselor, even when the conversation starts to feel like one.

What you can and can't turn off

Your kid can unpin it or clear it out of their chat feed in a few taps, and it doesn't cost anything, though clearing it out of the feed doesn't actually delete what they already told it. For that there's a separate setting called Delete My AI Data, down in Snapchat's own settings, and Snapchat says it can take up to thirty days to really come off their servers. The setting that actually stops it is in Family Center, where you can switch off My AI so it won't answer them. Either way, talk to them about it openly, because that's how you'll know the conversation is happening.

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