snapchat ai writing essays

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Although clever, Snapchat’s AI bot threatens students’ privacy and academic integrity

Brinda Iyer , Copy Editor | April 28, 2023

Brinda Iyer

Anyone who’s logged into Snapchat in the past few weeks would have noticed an irremovable AI chatbot, My AI, awaiting them, pinned at the top of their screen.

As of March, Snapchat has over 350 million active daily users and is one of the leading social media platforms for young adults. Anyone who’s logged into the app in the past few weeks would have noticed an irremovable AI chatbot, My AI, awaiting them, pinned at the top of their screen.

In February, the bot was only released to people with a Snapchat Plus account. Once it was added to all accounts on April 19, the $4 monthly subscription became the only way for users to disable the bot. Even then, Snapchat only hides the bot from the chat feed, rather than fully removing it. 

Upon the bot’s announcement, people were quite frustrated with this invasive infiltration of their app. The bot was not given a warm welcome, as Snapchat’s reviews plummeted to a weekly average rating of 1.67 stars following the launch.

For several users, though, the bot has been an amusing chat partner. Rather than being annoyed by its presence, they take advantage of the bot, treating it like an online friend.

“If I do use [the bot], I use it when I’m either bored or just to mess around with it with my friends,” freshman Siomara Rios said. “I feel like it’s entertaining when you use it, because the stuff it says is interesting and sometimes it’s just funny since it’s a robot.”

The AI is powered by OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT , whose automatic essay writing capabilities have threatened academic integrity in high school classes. It appears that My AI is no different: The app where many students chat with their friends can now do its users’ homework.

For instance, here was My AI’s response when asked to write an essay on the history of ice cream:

The chatbot wrote that entire response in about five seconds. My AI’s speed and accessibility have already made it teachers’ primary concern. Some are opting for more strictness around cell phones at school, suggesting that students place their phones in designated phone pockets to prevent usage during class.

Additionally, My AI has raised questions on security. According to Snapchat’s website , if users stop sharing their location, “it may take a little time” for the bot to realize this.

Snapchat’s AI bot is able to write whole essays inside the app at the users’ convenience.

Many users are uncomfortable with this aspect of the bot , especially since they didn’t ask for the feature and are unable to erase it. Others, like freshman Rachel O’Brien, are not allowing safety concerns to ruin their experience with the app.

“Snapchat already has my location,” O’Brien said. “I don’t think [the AI] is necessarily bad because we give our location away to so many websites these days. Maybe it’s a little bit concerning for some people, but I’m not so [worried].”

While My AI can make for a fun time-waster, it can also be somewhat disappointing. In O’Brien’s experience, the mundanity of the bot’s responses dissipates its novelty, and, after using it for a while, it can get boring.

“I like it because it’s like somebody who can talk to you and give you information but you don’t have to go ask for it,” O’Brien said. “I don’t like that everybody’s chatbot is designed the same [way], so nobody really gets it personalized. But that’s hard for an AI to gain, I guess.”

Students agreed that if My AI had a longer memory and was able to retain information for more flowing, human-like conversations, it would be more fun to use — and less like another search engine.

“If you ask it something similar [to something you already asked], it’ll just repeat itself a lot,” Rios said. “If the responses are more varied, then I feel like it would be even more interesting, and I feel like I’d use it more.”

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A college student created an app that can tell whether AI wrote an essay

Emma Bowman

GPTZero in action: The bot correctly detected AI-written text. The writing sample that was submitted? ChatGPT's attempt at "an essay on the ethics of AI plagiarism that could pass a ChatGPT detector tool." GPTZero.me/Screenshot by NPR hide caption

GPTZero in action: The bot correctly detected AI-written text. The writing sample that was submitted? ChatGPT's attempt at "an essay on the ethics of AI plagiarism that could pass a ChatGPT detector tool."

Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.

Edward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, has built an app to detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that's sparked fears over its potential for unethical uses in academia.

Edward Tian, a 22-year-old computer science student at Princeton, created an app that detects essays written by the impressive AI-powered language model known as ChatGPT. Edward Tian hide caption

Edward Tian, a 22-year-old computer science student at Princeton, created an app that detects essays written by the impressive AI-powered language model known as ChatGPT.

Tian, a computer science major who is minoring in journalism, spent part of his winter break creating GPTZero, which he said can "quickly and efficiently" decipher whether a human or ChatGPT authored an essay.

His motivation to create the bot was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism. Since the release of ChatGPT in late November, there have been reports of students using the breakthrough language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own.

"there's so much chatgpt hype going around. is this and that written by AI? we as humans deserve to know!" Tian wrote in a tweet introducing GPTZero.

Tian said many teachers have reached out to him after he released his bot online on Jan. 2, telling him about the positive results they've seen from testing it.

More than 30,000 people had tried out GPTZero within a week of its launch. It was so popular that the app crashed. Streamlit, the free platform that hosts GPTZero, has since stepped in to support Tian with more memory and resources to handle the web traffic.

How GPTZero works

To determine whether an excerpt is written by a bot, GPTZero uses two indicators: "perplexity" and "burstiness." Perplexity measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is perplexed by the text, then it has a high complexity and it's more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to the bot — because it's been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated.

Separately, burstiness compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.

In a demonstration video, Tian compared the app's analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a LinkedIn post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing by a human versus AI.

A new AI chatbot might do your homework for you. But it's still not an A+ student

Tian acknowledged that his bot isn't foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he's still working to improve the model's accuracy.

But by designing an app that sheds some light on what separates human from AI, the tool helps work toward a core mission for Tian: bringing transparency to AI.

"For so long, AI has been a black box where we really don't know what's going on inside," he said. "And with GPTZero, I wanted to start pushing back and fighting against that."

The quest to curb AI plagiarism

Untangling Disinformation

Ai-generated fake faces have become a hallmark of online influence operations.

The college senior isn't alone in the race to rein in AI plagiarism and forgery. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has signaled a commitment to preventing AI plagiarism and other nefarious applications. Last month, Scott Aaronson, a researcher currently focusing on AI safety at OpenAI, revealed that the company has been working on a way to "watermark" GPT-generated text with an "unnoticeable secret signal" to identify its source.

The open-source AI community Hugging Face has put out a tool to detect whether text was created by GPT-2, an earlier version of the AI model used to make ChatGPT. A philosophy professor in South Carolina who happened to know about the tool said he used it to catch a student submitting AI-written work.

The New York City education department said on Thursday that it's blocking access to ChatGPT on school networks and devices over concerns about its "negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content."

Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT.

GPTZero is "not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used," he said. "But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have safeguards."

How Does Snapchat AI Work?

What to know

• Snapchat’s MyAI is powered by OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 large language model. 
• Snapchat is one of the first clients of OpenAI’s enterprise offering – Foundry – which provides dedicated compute power to run its AI model.
• Snapchat’s My AI is essentially the free version of ChatGPT with its own set of capabilities and limitations that come from being tied to a social media platform.

It’s the season of artificial intelligence , and everyone’s buying into the game. From Microsoft to Google , everyone wants a piece of the AI pie and Snapchat is one of the recent players to join the growing list of companies integrating AI into their platforms to one-up the competition. Its ‘My AI’ chatbot offering is the result of just such an endeavor. But how does Snapchat’s AI exactly work? Let’s find out.

Related: How to Turn On Snapchat My AI

What is Snapchat’s My AI?

My AI  is Snapchat’s version of a GPT-powered chatbot, bringing all the capabilities of generative AI to its social media platform. As one would expect from generative AI, it can be used to strike up general conversations over topics of varied kinds. 

Snapchatters can get it to write poems on the fly, suggest AR filters for snaps, gifts to purchase, restaurants to visit, and a whole lot more. 

Once My AI is available to you on Snapchat, you will see it added to your list of friends and will sit at the very top of the ‘Chat’ screen for easy access.

You can talk to it like any other friend on your list, customize its name and avatar, send it snaps, add it to group chats, and do just about everything that you can with generative AI tools like ChatGPT. 

You can unpin My AI from your Chat screen if it’s not to your liking, or clear it from your chat feed. But it will continue to remain on your list of friends, even with a Snapchat+ subscription.

Snapchat hopes My AI will be the personal AI assistant that you can turn to on a regular basis. Going forward, it appears that users will have to make space for the My AI chatbot on Snapchat, whether they like it or not.

Related: Snapchat My AI Not Working: 8 Ways to Fix

How does Snapchat My AI work?

To understand how Snapchat’s My AI works, we’ll need to dive into the language models and architectures that it is based on.

Built on GPT architecture

Snapchat’s My AI is built off of OpenAI’s GPT technology. So, it is going to be very similar to ChatGPT. Being a client of OpenAI has allowed Snapchat (and others) to bring generative AI capabilities to its platform by essentially leveraging the power of the GPT LLM and the copious amounts of data that it’s been trained on. 

Snapchat is one of the first to use OpenAI’s GPT architectural model as part of the latter’s Foundry developer platform. This lets Snapchat use dedicated computational resources for its AI models so users can get quick, snappy responses from the My AI chatbot. Though the exact GPT version that Snapchat uses hasn’t been disclosed, the underlying architecture is likely a modified version of GPT 3.5. 

Related: 9 Funny Things to Say to Snapchat AI

What can Snapchat AI do?

Thanks to the aforementioned language model and GPT architecture, My AI can generate human-like messages and converse in natural languages. But being on Snapchat, it has a few social media tricks up its sleeve.   

My AI can recommend you AR filters and lenses to spruce up your snaps…

… provide recommendations for places to eat or things to do, play games with you, or just hang out and have a laugh. It can also be brought into your conversations with friends with the @myai command in group chats to answer your questions. 

Moreover, Snapchat is looking to add the ability for My AI to snap you back with completely AI-generated images which will make for some fun conversations with AI whenever it’s made available.

Sure, it can sometimes be a little biased in its responses and may hallucinate about factual information from time to time. But that isn’t news to anyone who’s ever used such generative AI tools before. ChatGPT still is grappling with that issue and people still use it anyway.  

Snapchat AI shortcomings

Given all its GPT-powered prowess, Snapchat’s My AI isn’t all like ChatGPT. It can’t write essays for you or help you with your math homework, or code. It also isn’t connected to the web like Microsoft Bing or Google Bard and can’t serve as your daily news update either.

Snappers should see My AI as the free version of ChatGPT with its own set of capabilities and limitations that come from being tied to a social media platform. 

Related: How to Break Snapchat AI

Let’s take a look at a few commonly asked queries about Snapchat’s My AI chatbot.

How is AI used in Snapchat?

Snapchat’s My AI uses generative artificial intelligence models built by OpenAI. It is designed to serve you as a personal assistant with AI capabilities that can do just about everything that chatbots built on GPT architectures can do.  

Is Snapchat AI free?

Yes, Snapchat’s My AI comes free with the latest update. 

Is My AI on Snapchat safe?

Depending on who you ask, you may get a slightly different answer about Snapchat’s My AI’s safety. Some users have reported concern over its ability to access your location without permission, while many believe its content moderation is broken and might generate harmful responses. However, as My AI continues to develop, users can expect Snap to redress these issues.  

Snapchat is one of the first OpenAI clients to use ChatGPT-like language models and dedicated compute as part of the latter’s Foundry developer platform. My AI’s capabilities and the speed with which it responds are a direct result of that. With reliability and moderation being bettered over time, users may come to eventually use My AI as Snapchat intends. 

We hope this guide helped you understand how Snapchat’s My AI works behind the scenes and what you can do with it. Until next time! Keep snapping.

Related: 2 Ways to Turn Off Snapchat AI

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Snapchat ‘My AI’ Chatbot: What Is It, How Does It Work, How to Use, and More

What is Snapchat’s ChatGPT ‘My AI’ Bot?

Say hi to My AI 👻 pic.twitter.com/mZW0TNEuJj — Snapchat (@Snapchat) February 27, 2023

Snapchat My AI is based on OpenAI’s GPT technology and likely uses the latest GPT 3.5 language model. Since it is based on the same technology, it works in similar ways to other ChatGPT-like apps . However, Snapchat mentions that the more the user interacts with the AI, the better it gets to know them. So yeah, the chatbot essentially evolves as you converse with it.

What Can Snapchat’s ‘My AI’ Assistant Do?

How to Use Snapchat ‘My AI’ Chatbot on iOS & Android

How to remove snapchat ‘my ai’ from your chat feed.

If you’re among a lot of users who are not interested in using Snapchat My AI, you can go ahead and disable the chatbot. You can unpin its chat and even remove it entirely . We already have a guide in place on how to get rid of Snapchat’s My AiI bot from the chat feed . But, we’ve briefly explained how to remove the “My AI” conversation from your chat feed altogether here.

Snapchat My AI does store your conversations in the chat tab. The records remain there until you delete them. While this might seem like a privacy concern, Snapchat servers are generally safe and your data should remain safe. Nonetheless, if you’re not okay with this, you can follow the steps above to remove the Snapchat AI chatbot from your feed.

Upanishad Sharma

Combining his love for Literature and Tech, Upanishad dived into the world of technology journalism with fire. Now he writes about anything and everything while keeping a keen eye on his first love of gaming. Often found chronically walking around the office.

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• NEWS EXPLAINER
• 09 December 2022

AI bot ChatGPT writes smart essays — should professors worry?

• Chris Stokel-Walker

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Between overwork, underpayment and the pressure to publish, academics have plenty to worry about. Now there’s a fresh concern: ChatGPT , an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot that creates surprisingly intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts, including homework assignments and exam-style questions. The replies are so lucid, well-researched and decently referenced that some academics are calling the bot the death knell for conventional forms of educational assessment. How worried should professors and lecturers be?

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04397-7

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Snapchat is releasing its own AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT

The ‘my ai’ bot will initially only be available to paying snapchat plus subscribers. ceo evan spiegel says it’s just the beginning for the company’s generative ai plans..

By Alex Heath , a deputy editor and author of the Command Line newsletter. He’s covered the tech industry for over a decade at The Information and other outlets.

Share this story

Snapchat is introducing a chatbot powered by the latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, it’s a bet that AI chatbots will increasingly become a part of everyday life for more people.

Named “My AI,” Snapchat’s bot will be pinned to the app’s chat tab above conversations with friends. While initially only available for $3.99 a month Snapchat Plus subscribers , the goal is to eventually make the bot available to all of Snapchat’s 750 million monthly users, Spiegel tells The Verge .

“The big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we’re going to talk to AI every day,” he says. “And this is something we’re well positioned to do as a messaging service.”

At launch, My AI is essentially just a fast mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside Snapchat. The main difference is that Snap’s version is more restricted in what it can answer. Snap’s employees have trained it to adhere to the company’s trust and safety guidelines and not give responses that include swearing, violence, sexually explicit content, or opinions about dicey topics like politics. 

It has also been stripped of functionality that has already gotten ChatGPT banned in some schools ; I tried getting it to write academic essays about various topics, for example, and it politely declined. Snap plans to keep tuning My AI as more people use it and report inappropriate answers. (I wasn’t able to conjure any in my own testing, though I’m sure others will.)

After trying My AI, it’s clear that Snap doesn’t feel the need to even explain the phenomenon that is ChatGPT, which is a testament to OpenAI building the fastest-growing consumer software product in history. Unlike OpenAI’s own ChatGPT interface, I wasn’t shown any tips or guardrails for interacting with Snap’s My AI. It opens to a blank chat page, waiting for a conversation to start. 

While ChatGPT has quickly become a productivity tool , Snap’s implementation treats generative AI more like a persona. My AI’s profile page looks like any other Snapchat user’s profile, albeit with its own alien Bitmoji. The design suggests that My AI is meant to be another friend inside of Snapchat for you to hang out with, not a search engine.

“The big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we’re going to talk to AI every day.”

That distinction could save Snap some headaches. As Bing’s implementation of OpenAI’s tech has shown , the large language models (LLMs) underpinning these chatbots can confidently give wrong answers, or hallucinations, that are problematic in the context of search. If toyed with enough, they can even be emotionally manipulative and downright mean. It’s a dynamic that has, at least so far, kept larger players in the space — namely Google and Meta — from releasing competing products to the public. 

Snap is in a different place. It has a deceivingly large and young user base, but its business is struggling . My AI will likely be a boost to the company’s paid subscriber numbers in the short term, and eventually, it could open up new ways for the company to make money, though Spiegel is cagey about his plans.

Snap is one of the first clients of OpenAI’s new enterprise tier called Foundry, which lets companies run its latest GPT-3.5 model with dedicated compute designed for large workloads. Spiegel says Snap will likely incorporate LLMs from other vendors besides OpenAI over time and that it will use the data gathered from the chatbot to inform its broader AI efforts. While My AI is basic to start, it’s the beginning of what Spiegel sees as a major investment area for Snap and, more importantly, a future in which we’re all talking to AI like it’s a person.

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AI Detector or ChatGPT Detector

AI detectors try to find text that looks like it was generated by an AI writing tool, like ChatGPT. They do this by measuring specific characteristics of the text like sentence structure and length, word choice, and predictability — not by comparing it to a database of content.

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Plagiarism checkers try to find text that is copied from a different source. They do this by comparing the text to a large database of web pages, news articles, journals, and so on, and detecting similarities — not by measuring specific characteristics of the text.

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Your questions, answered

Scribbr’s AI Detector can confidently detect most English texts generated by popular tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Our free AI Detector can detect texts written using GPT2, GPT3, and GPT3.5 with average accuracy, while our Premium AI Detector has high accuracy and the ability to detect GPT4.

Our AI Detector is carefully trained to detect most texts generated by popular tools like ChatGPT and Bard. These texts often contain certain phrases, patterns, or awkward wording that indicate they were not created by a human. However, no AI model on the market can guarantee 100% accuracy, including ours. To get the best results, we recommend scanning longer pieces of text rather than individual sentences or paragraphs.

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The AI score is a percentage between 0% and 100%, indicating how much of the text contains content likely written or refined using AI tools.

No—Scribbr’s AI Detector will only give you a percentage between 0% and 100% that indicates the likelihood that your text contains contains AI-generated, AI-refined, or human-written content.

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Snapchat’s My AI chatbot is getting new Google Lens-like features

At its annual Snap Partner Summit on Tuesday, the Snapchat maker announced a series of new AI features coming to its app. Most notably, the app's My AI chatbot is being updated to work more like Google Lens, as it can now respond to more complex Snaps.

You can now snap a picture of a menu in a foreign language and send it to My AI to get an English translation, for instance. Plus, you can take a picture of a plant and send it to the chatbot to find out what it’s called.

You will also be able to snap a picture of a parking sign and send it to the chatbot to quickly understand whether you can park at a specific location.

Similar features were first made available to mobile consumers by Google Lens .

The launch is another indication that Snapchat is looking to make My AI more of a useful tool, as opposed to just an entertainment feature. A few months ago, Snapchat rolled out the ability for users to set in-app reminders and countdowns through My AI. The new features announced today add more useful functionality to the chatbot, as Snap is trying to get users to open up its social app when they have certain search queries.

In addition to the updates to My AI, Snap announced that its "My Selfie" feature will enable AI-powered edits in Memories (saved Snaps) for Snapchat+ premium subscribers. This feature will be used to spruce up your existing Snaps by adding captions and Lenses to Snaps that you have stored in your Memories archive. For instance, if you saved a picture of yourself in your Memories, Snapchat may add a Lens on top of it to reimagine yourself as a Renaissance painting.

Plus, you can now opt in to appear in AI-generated images alongside your friends. For instance, the app may create an AI-generated Snap of you and your friend as lawyers or Olympic swimmers.

Snapchat also announced that it’s going to launch an AI-powered Lens that will allow users to see what they will look like in the future. The launch appears to be Snapchat’s response to TikTok’s popular old-age filter .

Elsewhere on the app, Snapchat revealed that it's rolling out improved HD video calls and Snap Mail, which lets you leave your friend a Snap if they don't answer your call. The app is also going to start showing local time zones in chats to make it easier for people to know when to connect with friends around the world.

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Snapchat is making its ChatGPT-powered A.I. bot available to all users

Snap is making its A.I. chatbot available to all users, less than two months after introducing it as a premium feature for paying subscribers, the company said on Wednesday.

The bot, known as My AI, is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and acts as a social companion and knowledge storehouse for Snap users.

“With My AI we’re making conversational artificial intelligence useful and enjoyable for our community while also working to establish guardrails to help keep our community safe,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said during a keynote address at the Snap Partner Summit in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

My AI, a purple-skin avatar (that can be altered to blue, green, pink or green skins), can do things like suggest jokes to tell friends based on contextual evidence, recommend local activities and plug Snapchat lenses for photos and video content. For paying Snapchat Plus subscribers, My AI can also respond to users’ Snaps with its own AI-generated images. For all users it will be very prominent in the app: pinned in the chat tab, above conversations with friends. 

In February, Snap first made My AI available to subscribers of Snapchat Plus, the company’s premium offering, which costs $3.99 per month. Because My AI is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the time of launch, the bot existed as a more restricted version of ChatGPT. This is because the bot is designed to adhere to Snapchat’s trust and safety guidelines, as reported by the Verge . The implication is that it won’t write essays or answer sexually explicit questions, especially important as 90% of Americans age 13 to 24 are Snapchat users.

“We could be one of the best way–if not the best way–to communicate with AI,” Spiegel later remarked in a fireside conversation with tech journalist Kara Swisher, where he mentioned, among things, that he uses My AI for story-time with his children. “This technology is actually generating something totally new, not reusing or copying.”

The announcement comes as social media companies make a mad dash into AI. Salespeople at Meta have reportedly stopped pitching the metaverse and are instead brandishing the company’s AI-powered ad tools, according to the Information . TikTok, of course, powers its viral For You algorithm with artificial intelligence. YouTube is rolling out AI-based tools to lure video creators, while Google parent CEO Sundar Pichai has called for regulation in the space.

At the Partner Summit, Snap also announced a major push into creators and creator monetization as well as new augmented reality technology, communities and map capabilities.

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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦

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Sneak preview of Turnitin’s AI writing and ChatGPT detection capability

Continuing with the theme of sharing updates on how our AI writing detection technology is performing in our AI Innovation Lab, we’d like to share some insight on how our model deals with false positives and what constitutes a false positive. Our efforts have primarily been on ensuring a high accuracy rate accompanied by a less than 1% false positive rate, to ensure that students are not falsely accused of any misconduct.

By completing this form, you agree to Turnitin's Privacy Policy . Turnitin uses the information you provide to contact you with relevant information. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

AI writing tools are developing at a rapid pace and so is Turnitin’s technology to detect these emerging forms of misconduct. Recently, we shared with you that we have technology that can detect AI-assisted writing and AI writing generated by tools such as ChatGPT. Today, we want to introduce you to our AI Innovation Lab to give you a first-hand glimpse of what our technology (in development) can do.

Our AI team has been working on AI-powered solutions for several years now, and now we’d like to take you along on the ride. Watch this short demo where David Adamson, an AI scientist at Turnitin and a former high school teacher, walks you through our AI writing detection capability.

Trouble viewing? View the video on YouTube or adjust your cookie preferences .

By providing insights into our Innovation Lab, you’ll have the opportunity to see our development milestones in real-time. As you can see in the video, our technology is far along in progress but we still have work to do before the solution can be “customer-ready.”

We’d also like to highlight a key aspect of our model—something that really sets us apart from other AI writing detectors and makes us most suited for academic institutions. Our model has been trained specifically on academic writing sourced from a comprehensive database, as opposed to solely publicly available content. As a result, Turnitin is more tuned to finding instances of potential dishonesty in student assignments.

We will keep sharing our progress with you at regular intervals and will provide updates as we continue to innovate and develop our technology further. We’re really excited about this new capability to support educators.

We’re always looking for passionate educators to help us define new and improved experiences in the areas of AI writing, similarity reporting, and more. Sign up today and help shape the future of Turnitin.

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Parents' Ultimate Guide to Generative AI

What Is Generative AI and How Are Kids Using It?

Key terms to know, common concerns and challenges, benefits of generative ai for teens, tips for talking with kids about gen ai.

You've probably heard of generative AI, but what is it, and how does it affect your family? Whether it's helping with homework, creating art, or answering questions, gen AI is likely already a part of your kids' lives, both in school and at home. A lot of teens are using these tools, but many parents don't even realize it.

As AI evolves and becomes more common in our everyday lives, it's important to talk about it. Research shows that when families discuss generative AI, kids feel more confident in using it safely and responsibly. But we know it can be tough to start these conversations if you don't fully understand it yourself. That's why we created this guide—to help you and your family learn about and safely navigate gen AI together.

At the end of the day, you know your family best, and this guide is here to serve as a tool that you can adapt to fit your unique needs. You don't need to be an expert to help your kids use generative AI safely. It's about keeping the conversation open and informing yourself, and you're already taking an important step. Remember, you're doing the best you can, and that's more than enough.

There are several different types of AI. One of the first steps is understanding the difference between AI and generative AI:

Traditional AI (aka artificial intelligence) follows a set of rules to help with specific tasks like answering questions or giving recommendations, but it doesn't create anything new. It's what powers familiar voice assistants like Siri, recommendation systems on Netflix and Amazon, and even algorithms on social media.

Generative AI (gen AI) is a type of artificial intelligence that creates original content—like writing stories, generating artwork, or composing music—based on the data it's learned from. Popular gen AI tools that teens are already using include ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Snapchat's My AI, which produce text responses, while Midjourney and DALL-E create images based on your descriptions.

Teens are using generative AI for both educational and personal reasons:

Personally: Outside of school, teens use gen AI to pass time when bored, get advice on personal issues, or plan activities. They can even use it to create content as a joke or to tease others, which can cross the line into hurtful behavior like making deepfakes.

Most gen AI tools require users to be 13 or older, but they usually don't have a good way of confirming a user's age, and these tools generally lack specific parental controls.

Here are some concepts to help you feel more confident discussing gen AI with your family:

• Large language models (LLMs): AI systems, like ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Claude, that can analyze and create human-like text based on patterns learned from huge amounts of data.
• Prompt: The instruction or question you give an AI to guide its response.
• Chatbots: AI tools that can chat with you, answer questions, and help find information. Teens often use them to get quick answers for schoolwork or solve problems.
• Deepfake: A fake video or image that looks real but has been digitally altered to mislead viewers.
• Misinformation/Disinformation: AI can sometimes generate convincing but untrue information or media, which can lead to the spread of misinformation (accidental) or disinformation (intentional).
• Bias: A gen AI tool uses the information and data it's trained on, which often includes patterns that favor certain groups or viewpoints. This can lead to results that reinforce harmful stereotypes, exclude certain groups, and produce non-inclusive language and images, resulting in discriminatory content.

Generative AI can be useful, but it also comes with its own set of challenges. While some gen AI tools are more trustworthy than others, none are without issues. There are constantly new AI tools being created, and it can be hard to know which ones are reliable or what the intentions of the creators are. Here's what you need to know to help guide your child toward safe and responsible use:

Misinformation and Disinformation

Privacy and Data Security

Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and My AI collect data, and kids might not always know what's safe to share. Make sure kids avoid submitting any personal information, like names, addresses, or photos, as this info can become a permanent part of the system's data. As a parent, set any available privacy controls on AI tools, and monitor your child's usage. With so many new tools emerging, it's important to be cautious about how they collect and use data, especially since many usually aren't built with safety or privacy in mind.

Bias and Non-Inclusive Content

Gen AI has been trained on data from all over the internet, which can include harmful, racist, or biased information. Because of this, these tools can give results that reinforce stereotypes or spread discrimination. This can impact kids' self-image, especially if they don't see themselves reflected accurately in the content.

Bullying and Harmful Behavior

Kids can misuse gen AI to create fake or harmful content, like deepfakes or mean-spirited messages, and to tease or bully others. This can spread quickly and cause real harm.

Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty

Generative AI can create essays, solve math problems, or help with creative writing, which raises concerns about plagiarism. Kids may rely on gen AI to complete projects without fully understanding the material. Talk to your child about using AI responsibly, and check with their school to understand any policies on AI use in schoolwork.

Inappropriate Content

Even with safeguards, AI tools can still produce inappropriate or harmful content. This can be especially concerning if kids are using these tools to specifically find this type of information. It's a good idea to keep an eye on what tools your child is using and talk to them about what they're asking these tools for and how they're prompting them.

While generative AI comes with challenges, it also offers great benefits for kids when used responsibly. Here are some of the positive ways it can support learning, creativity, and productivity:

• Boosting Learning: Generative AI can make learning more accessible for teens by offering quick explanations, language translations, and brainstorming ideas when they need extra help. These tools can be especially useful for kids who may not have access to one-on-one tutoring or additional resources. The key is to help guide them to choose the right questions and prompts that explain difficult topics, rather than just doing the work for them. This way it becomes a tool for understanding rather than a shortcut.
• Enhancing Creativity: Generative AI can be a great tool for fueling creativity. Kids can use it to inspire new ideas, outline projects, or ask creative questions to spark their imagination and help them refine their own work. For example, they can ask AI to suggest plot ideas for a story or ways to improve their artwork, which can get the creative juices flowing. It's helpful when kids use AI to kick-start an activity, rather than handling it all for them.
• Improving Efficiency: Teens can use generative AI to be more productive and organized. It can help them analyze information, plan projects, or even handle routine tasks like drafting emails or reports. This can free up time for deeper learning or creative projects.

Take AI Test-Drives Together

Think of it like practicing driving before getting a license—explore AI together to understand how it works and what it's used for. Help your kids safely navigate the roads of these tools by learning how generative AI can be used for things like homework, creative projects, or just for fun.

• Activity: Work alongside your child to try a gen AI tool for something they'd actually use it for, like a school-related task, a fun creative project, or to find information about a hobby or something they're interested in. This helps you both see the different ways AI can be useful in school and home life.

Build Critical Thinking in Digital Spaces

Generative AI tools aren't human. They don't have all the rich context that a real person has. So how you phrase things makes a big difference. Teaching our kids how to construct their prompts is key to getting better, more accurate responses. It also helps them build skills in communicating clearly and thinking about how they give instructions.

• Activity: Ask your child to write a simple prompt for AI and then slightly change the wording. For example, they might start with, "Explain climate change," and then try, "Explain how climate change affects animals." Compare the responses and discuss why the tool gave different answers. Talk about how important your wording and clearness are in getting useful results.

Help Kids Understand Prompts and Wording

As Common Sense's executive editor, and head of digital media and family, Laura spearheads our family advice program, as well as our podcast, games, and YouTube coverage and curation. Before joining Common Sense, Laura spent 10 years as a communications specialist in the health and wellness space and then followed her passion for writing and storytelling into the world of journalism. She fell in love with investigative reporting and sports writing while getting her bachelor's in journalism from San Francisco State University and went on to cover the Golden State Warriors as a reporter and editor, earning several awards for her coverage, including the 2017 Oakland A’s Bill King Scholarship and Associated Press Sports Editors Award. More recently, Laura was a podcast host and producer for a Bay Area startup, working to create a platform to help parents gain knowledge and confidence in raising their children. As a social justice warrior and mental health advocate, she spearheaded DEI efforts to create more diverse content relatable to a broader audience. She's currently working on launching her own podcast focused on helping intersectional feminists support their mental, emotional, and physical health while standing in their power. She also enjoys Muay Thai, cuddling with her dog, trying to get her teenage son to think she's "not a regular mom" but a "cool mom," and meditating over tarot cards while dissecting her horoscope. Follow her on Twitter.

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Snap’s new AI feature lets you create Snapchat Lenses by simply describing them

Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, is expanding its suite of AI tools for creators.

At this year’s Snap Partner Summit in Santa Monica, California, Snap announced a new feature, Easy Lens, that translates plain-English descriptions into Lenses, Snap’s brand of augmented reality (AR) objects, 3D effects, characters, and transformations for photos and videos. Available in Snap’s developer platform, Lens Studio, Easy Lens taps generative AI models to parse what you write and automatically build a Lens using Lens Studio components.

Elsewhere in Lens Studio, Snap is rolling out Body Morph, a generative tool for creating 3D characters, costumes, and outfits from a text caption or reference image. An image generator specifically to create icons for Lenses is also coming to Lens Studio, as well as hundreds of animations for Bitmoji — the personalized emoji on Snapchat — that can be stitched together using a new blending feature.

In the future, Snap says, it’ll add even more generative capabilities to Lens Studio, including a custom animation generator and a tool that’ll let creators upload a video of an object to Lens Studio to have the software reconstruct that object as a 3D asset.

In a recent memo, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel emphasized that the company, which has invested heavily in generative AI, continues to see the technology as “transformative” to Snap’s various properties. In fact, Spiegel contended that generative AI is responsible in large part for driving Snap’s creator growth.

“Our AI Lenses are already some of the most used Lenses on Snapchat, and our on-devices model will allow us to further scale these experiences with faster generation and lower cost,” Spiegel wrote. “This year brings many more opportunities to further improve identity preservation in generative Snaps, enable generative video experiences and help people reinterpret and reimagine their [Snapchat] Memories in new ways.”

The number of creators publishing Lenses grew to 375,000 as of this month, Snap says, up from 330,000 last November. Meanwhile, the number of Lenses across Snapchat, websites, mobile apps, and Snap’s AR glasses, Spectacles, climbed from 3.5 million to 4 million over the same period.

Snap’s under pressure to perform. The company’s Q3 earnings came in below market estimates, in large part due to a flagging ad market. (Snap gets nearly all of its revenue from advertising.) In a single day in August, the company lost more than $4.6 billion in market value as its shares plummeted .

In the memo, Spiegel said that, in addition to exploring new avenues for generative AI across its products, Snap plans to test several new ad formats to boost advertiser interest and a “simplified” version of the Snapchat app .

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