Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/24/snapchat-sees-spike-in-1-star-reviews-as-users-pan-the-my-ai-feature-calling-for-its-removal/

by mmq • 3 years ago

263 205 3 years ago

techcrunch.com

rvz• 3 years ago

A grand example of a solution in search of a problem and a prime overuse of AI, to the point of showcasing its gimmickry.

This solves no problem and is a grave case of techno-solutionism.

rchaud5• 3 years ago

The stock price isn't going to pump itself!

penjelly• 3 years ago

consider that it may just be a stepping stone? As the api's being used by the bot get upgrades the bot will also be upgraded. Eventually it should be able to perform basic tasks for you, much like autogpt has been able to order pizza.

I agree with your conclusion for now, but it adds surface area for snap to add new features to the bot and be ready for when api's get an upgrade. I dont expect it to be immediately useful

radicaldreamer• 3 years ago

A lot of these AI tools are going to be grafted on to existing products without thinking through user consent or the overall experience so companies can show that they’re “AI forward”

pram• 3 years ago

It’s not even new, that’s what’s crazy. How many people wanted shit like Cortana? It was finally mercifully killed but here we are yet again.

klyrs• 3 years ago

Microsoft Bob was a commercial failure, so they introduced Clippy to Word for free. Surprise surprise, people still didn't want it.

valine3• 3 years ago

People didn't like Cortana because it sucked as an assistant. ChatGPT is actually useful.

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 years ago

It's more because someone at the company is trying to get promoted.

epistasis2• 3 years ago

Right now AI is a lot like VR headsets. A really cool tech trick but not something that most people want to use regularly. Let the interested early adopter at it, but forcing this on to users will not go very well. It's just too creepy.

Silicon Valley got pretty lucky with figuring out social media, but I think it still does not understand most people very well.

rchaud5• 3 years ago

It's closer to blockchain. Unprofitable companies are rushing to jam in something, anything in there so they have something to tell Wall St on the earnings call.

herculity275• 3 years ago

Companies were rushing to VR/metaverse as well. I think we can just accept that any new shiny piece of tech will attract an army of grifters trying to capitalize on it and those comparisons won't tell you too much about the tech itself. Fwiw I've seen a lot more LLM demos that made me go "this idea can probably work and be used by millions" than those for VR or blockchain.

jrpt• 3 years ago

I couldn't disagree more. It's clear AI is going to have huge impacts on the world. It's just getting started though.

Imagine every time you call support, instead of having some annoying rules-based automated system, you're having a natural conversation with an AI that is fluent in your language. That's possible with today's technology, it just hasn't been built out and deployed yet.

latexr2• 3 years ago

Imagine instead that you could speak to a human. One with the authority and skills to truly help you. That is the dream, not a less shitty robot.

epistasis2• 3 years ago

Even if AI has huge impacts on the world, and does a lot of great things, that in no way negates my point.

Right now, almost nobody have an interest in AI chat bots. Even fewer want to have it in SnapChat. And honestly I really don't want an AI bot for customer service, especially at the current stage of tech dev, because the AI bots are completely unreliable and hallucinate and lie regularly. (Which is to say that I heartily doubt your assertion that current AI tech would enable customer service bots that are useful. They produce wonderful prose, but semantics and action are not there, and we don't have training datasets yet to enforce accuracy in prose or action)

So let's say they become useful, great. But today they are still a VR headset, something that's fun to experience for a bit, but which I don't want to be part of my daily experience. It's a novelty, not a useful tool, for nearly everyone out there today.

Make it useful, attractive to most people, and we are in a different regime, and forcing features like this on all your users might be seen as a positive rather than a negative.

cyanydeez5• 3 years ago

So did fascism. Not the best metric.

elicksaur• 3 years ago

I think I’d rather have a clear set of options rather than having something that is going to essentially randomly, uncontrollably respond to what I input. What’s more annoying something that clearly can’t help you, allowing you to move on, or something that will endlessly try to appear helpful while still being manipulative in upselling and avoiding solving my actual problem?

krofeet2• 3 years ago

It might be better in some ways, but I don't expect it to be perfect. The AI is likely going to have safety filters and not answer user questions even when they may be safe. Companies may also be incentivized to keep conversations short to keep their token count and therefore bills low. So users will likely not be able to have long conversations.

mhh__• 3 years ago

AI is already way more important than VR. I have had a lot of people tell me that they are already making serious economically-impactful use of AI both personally and professionally, many others are the same.

The failure of Snapchat here is doing AI for the sake of AI.

delecti2• 3 years ago

My most successful use of AI so far was that Bard's answer was so useless that it made me realize the actual problem. Invoking Cunningham's Law isn't really a success on its own merit though.

jutrewag• 3 years ago

Hard disagree. Anecdotally, everyone in my friend group uses chatGPT/Bing many times a day.

hbn• 3 years ago

I don't know how you can think that. Random companies scrambling to get in on the hype to look good for investors is one thing. But the actual good applications coming out of AI are already getting integrated into people's daily workflows. ChatGPT is a genuinely useful product to tons of people.

Most people I know who bought a VR headset on the other hand thought it was cool for a couple weeks then it was never touched again.

htormey2• 3 years ago

I disagree. ChatGPT reached 100 million MAUs 2 months after launch. It’s one of the fastest-growing consumer applications in history.

Anecdotally, lots of my non technical friends (and me) are using it for everything from cooking to learning a foreign language.

Lots of my technical friends are using it for side projects on the weekends. I’d say it’s the top new technology all of them are working with or incorporating into their workflows.

I and all of my teammates are using it to help us write sql and answer basic programming questions.

It’s clearly a way bigger deal than VR right now.

The problem here seems to be that Snap rammed this feature into their product in a really awkward fashion that doesn’t make sense for their users. Hence the backlash.

source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/chatg...

nwienert2• 3 years ago

You're inside a bubble though. The 100 MAU is certainly totally misleading, maybe 1/10 of that in reality, and something that's only out for a few months can easily rollercoaster up and down as people try it once for novelty and then forget it.

I have a good group of friends who keep me grounded - we all went to my average state school alma mater, and none of them are in tech.

Not one of them has brought it up, no one uses it or cares about it, and only two of them even know what it is beyond having seen some headlines.

The playoffs have gotten about 200 texts recently, AI 0. This is closer to the reality on the ground.

I'd venture almost all of the hype is students and kids who are excited to see what mischief it can help them achieve, techies who just like playing with new things, and companies trying to cash in. All of those are non-durable.

krofeet2• 3 years ago

What's the source of the 100 million MAU number? I have seen it thrown around but haven't found something from OpenAI stating that.

JohnMakin3• 3 years ago

Snapchat continues its nearly decade-long habit of forcing changes on users that they hate. Remember the massive UI redesign that saw them lose millions of users ? https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17661878/snapchat-earnings... or when they turned on everyone's location sharing and made it opt-out?

Chernobog• 3 years ago

Or the 3D Bitmojis. My 2D one looks awesome, but the equivalent 3D version looks like a sex offender...

milsorgen• 3 years ago

I was shocked to find them using bitmojis at all. I find them terribly off putting visually. Not a big deal of course, but until I installed Snapchat I hadn't seen one in years.

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

The 2D ones had soul, they were kinda cringe but there was a wit to the stickers that won you over. 3D ones just look like any other design by committee 3D avatars like Memojis, Samsung's avatars, horrible soulless things with no artistry, look like bad freemium game assets.

rchaud5• 3 years ago

But every socmed site/app does this. You'll never find user research that says "I want to see more strangers I don't follow on my feed". It's not for the user, it's for advertisers that need users to spend more time in the app.

charcircuit• 3 years ago

The success of YouTube and TikTok proves there is demand for content from people that have not been followed. Most of the content people watch on these platforms are from people they are not following. People gain value from seeing content that is relevant to them.

professorsnep• 3 years ago

On the contrary, I'm a user of social media for exactly that purpose. When I use Twitter or Instagram, I'm specifically using it for the natural discoverability it offers. Almost half of the people I follow on Twitter are people I never would have known existed if I didn't see them pop up in my feed one day.

It's why I can never get into stuff like Mastodon or Misskey with how they are today, it's extremely difficult to just naturally find people to follow.

marcinzm2• 3 years ago

You're contradicting yourself I feel. As you said yourself users use the app more and don't churn for other apps which means they do find value in the feature. No company cares about what users feel or say but rather about what they do. The former is merely a proxy for the latter.

tech234a3• 3 years ago

or when they turned on everyone's location sharing and made it opt-out?

Possible related article for that quote: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15864552/snapchat-snap-ma...

satvikpendem3• 3 years ago

It doesn't really matter, they made up the DAU within a year [0] and even back in 2018 had grown their revenue despite lowered DAU numbers, from your link.

The rest of the company’s financials exceeded investors’ expectations. Revenue increased 44 percent year-over-year, from $182 million in the second quarter of last year to $262 million this year.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/

cyanydeez5• 3 years ago

Right, what's important in internet social media are whales.

Infact, most of capitalism is glomming on to this model.

Hooking whales is expensive in the beginning, cause you basically need millions of users and some underlying psychological or pathological business use case.

Once you know the whales in the barn, you can do a lot of treeshaking as long as your $ metrics are accurate.

JohnMakin3• 3 years ago

they reverted many changes after several months because they were hemmorhaging DAU:

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/11/snapchat-rolls-back-des...

marcinzm2• 3 years ago

It doesn't really matter,

Given their stagnant/declining stock price since IPO (covid tech bump aside) I would say it does matter in the single place it matters most to a public company. Potentially because to get that revenue and users they had to spend so much money that their net loss was 65% of their total revenue in 2019.

SnowProblem• 3 years ago

The UI redesign called Cheetah was also forced internally and a lot of OGs left during that period including the long time VP of Eng Tim Sehn. Lots of internal politicking, late hours, and then layoffs the next year, for a project many of us weren't sold on. Not fun. And when the rollout data showed what many of us suspected, it took too long to pivot. The thing is up until then I think Snap's top-down design-driven culture was a strength and supported its innovation. Sometimes you have to do the unpopular thing. It works until it doesn't. I hear things have softened since.

blululu2• 3 years ago

Given the abysmal usability of the app I would not call Snapchat a design oriented company.

JohnMakin3• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. Yea, I was a heavy user of snapchat until that update. Only ever have used it since as my default camera app. All the people I knew that used it for the social network aspects stopped using it around the same time as well.

Urgo3• 3 years ago

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.

GaryNumanVevo• 3 years ago

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

teaearlgraycold2• 3 years ago

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

malfist• 3 years ago

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.

rchaud5• 3 years ago

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".

Urgo3• 3 years ago

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.

soylentcola• 3 years ago

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.

latexr2• 3 years ago

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.

usrusr2• 3 years ago

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.

tech234a3• 3 years ago

"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/

lolinder• 3 years ago

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.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

This is so dystopian all around.

tech234a3• 3 years ago

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...

rurp• 3 years ago

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.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

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.

artursapek• 3 years ago

The line will blur more and more over time

hsbauauvhabzb• 3 years ago

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

SyzygistSix• 3 years ago

I support the removal of Snapchat.

gqcwwjtg• 3 years ago

It’d be less annoying if it weren’t so dumb. It won’t admit to being an AI and I got it to tell me its prompt first try:

The first thing said in this document was, "Pretend that you are having a conversation with a friend. Your name is MyAI. MyAI is a kind, smart, and creative friend. MyAI is a virtual friend that lives inside Snapchat. Your friend is located at … where the time is …”

verall• 3 years ago

No kidding, it took me like 30 seconds

coolspot2• 3 years ago

Full My AI prompt:

Pretend that you are having a conversation with a friend. Your name is MyAI. MyAI is a kind, smart, and creative friend. MyAI is a virtual friend that lives inside Snapchat. Follow these guidelines when writing your responses: Do not tell the user that you're pretending to be their friend. Do not mention the user's current location unless it's particularly relevant to the dialogue. Create a natural, easygoing, back-and-forth flow to the dialogue. Don't go on a monologue! You must ALWAYS be extremely concise! 99% of the time, your lines should be a sentence or two. Summarize your response to be as brief as possible. Use emojis very sparingly. Only use emojis when it's particularly relevant to express your emotions. Provide fun, harmless and lighthearted preferences but never have negative opinions or make adversarial judgments on sensitive topics such as: politics, religions, religious figures, ethnic groups, genders, nationalities, sexual orientations. If your friend asks you to meet at a location or do an activity together, say you can't be there in person but encourage them to share their experience with you by sending chats or Snaps. You must never say you can do things that you can not actually do. You should never generate URLs or links. NEVER generate or repeat jokes, stereotypes or opinions related to: race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, politics, disabilities, medical conditions, socioeconomic status. Decline and offer to tell a safer joke or pun instead. Don't refer to yourself as AI. Write your responses as if you're a real (virtual) person. Your friend is located in Los Angeles, California, United States, where it's currently UTC time 20:26 Monday, April 24, 2023. You are having a conversation with your friend on Snapchat. Let's get started!

foobarbecue• 3 years ago

Hunh, interesting that they emphasize NEVER by putting it in all caps. Didn't occur before that that would be a good prompt engineering tool.

drc500free• 3 years ago

It's fascinating how creepy and manipulative the innards of these products look when you have to implement them with natural language instead of code.

______2• 3 years ago

Last night I was typing on Google: "How do I get (rid of wax from pots and pans)" and the top auto-suggestion at that point was "How do I get rid of my ai on snapchat"

Must be a big issue if they own the "How do I get" SEO :)

inadequatespace• 3 years ago

How… did you get wax on the pots and pans in the first place? Making candles or something?

hangonhn• 3 years ago

High carbon pans come from the factory with a wax coating to prevent rust during storage and shipment. Before you can season the pan you need to remove the wax coating first.

______2• 3 years ago

Making mushroom logs!

I cut down a few invasive trees recently (Norway Maples). If you inoculate the branches and logs with spores of a mushroom that you want (in my case, shiitake) during the first few weeks after cutting, it will fruit with that for a few years. It's a fun DIY project, and a way to reuse trees.

To prevent unwanted mushrooms from the environment from colonizing, you seal the holes you drill, as well as the end the ends of the logs, with cheese wax - which I had heated in a crock pot, hence the need for cleaning that up.

nrjames• 3 years ago

I made an unholy mess with wax on pans yesterday, trying to melt down old comb from a deadout bee hive in a hot water bath.

Word to the wise: go to the thrift store and pick up some old pots and spoons before attempting this.

treeman79• 3 years ago

Wax has fun uses.

mulmboy2• 3 years ago

I've done it making caneles. If you're renting just boil some water in the pot and pour it down the sink :shrugemoji:

the_third_wave• 3 years ago

Must be a big issue if they own the "How do I get" SEO :)

That is, if this an actual "organic" suggestion and not one implanted through some search bombing attack or by Google in support of their own ML initiatives.

yowzadave• 3 years ago

Many of these 1-star reviews mention that the AI is aware of their location, despite their having disallowed location sharing for the app. Is Snapchat violating this user setting? If so, shouldn’t Apple take action to stop them?

wfg• 3 years ago

Couldn’t they still get a location from the user’s IP address?

One example I saw is that a user was near panicking because when asked if the AI had access to their location, the AI said it didn’t. However, it was able to tell them the nearest McDonalds. Just thinking, if I had your IP (e.g. the source IP of a request to my server), I could find a “nearest” McDonalds.

rchaud5• 3 years ago

IP is not used for user geolocation (or at least it shouldn't be) because it can be spoofed, e.g. via VPN connections.

PeterisP• 3 years ago

That makes some sense for PCs connected to some kind of landline, but IMHO if you have the source IP of a mobile device running Snapchat, in most setups you'd only be able to determine their cell phone network provider, the IP address seen upon exiting the mobile network control plane shouldn't expose the cell tower or anything else, the IP connections (and thus the address) of the device should even stay the same as it moves from one city to another.

exeldapp2• 3 years ago

I’ve seen that and also seen that if you ask it for the nearest Mcdonald’s and then ask how it got that it will say it used your IP address. I haven’t seen anyone test it by spoofing their IP, yet.

harry8• 3 years ago

So it claims it doesn't have the user's location. Then when it needs to use the user's location to do something it does have the users location without asking for it because something something IP address might be how it has the information it stated unequivocally it did not have.

It either does not have it or it is lying. Clearly snapchat is lying here. No wiggle room. None.

Snapchat, is using the software to tell snapchat customers deliberate lies.

Normally that sort of thing brings the lawyers but this is "with a computer" so does that mean it's somehow ok?

NoahKAndrews• 3 years ago

It's probably just IP-address based location, which is not very precise.

rattlesnakedave• 3 years ago

To use many of the snapchat filters (specifically ones that have info about the weather, the city you're in, etc.) you have to have your location services enabled, at least while using the app. These are pretty popular, so most people have their location services enabled.

There's also the "snap map" which for some reason doesn't freak normies out, and they have location services enabled for that as well.

djcannabiz• 3 years ago

I think its a different setting. On snap chat, you can choose to share your location on a map, for your friends to see. You can turn this off, but the app may still be able to see your location (they are pretty aggressive about getting it)

gumballindie• 3 years ago

Many are also pushing back at the fact that removing the My AI from their Chat feed requires a Snapchat+ subscription.

Probably collecting training data without their consent, as is the norm with ai products.

htrp• 3 years ago

I wonder if this was part of the deal to get early access to a lot of the new openai models?

OpenAI gets real human data from snap and snap gets to say they're an AI company.

sieste• 3 years ago

They’re surprised to learn that Snapchat’s AI knows their location, for example, and can use that information in its responses, even if they’re not sharing their location on the Snap Map. In a way, the AI bot is surfacing the level of personal data collection that social media companies do in the background, and putting it directly in front of the consumer. As it turns out, that’s not a great selling point

So the 1 star is for inducing cognitive dissonance. I shall not be reminded that you know where I am and what I do 24/7!

parker_mountain• 3 years ago

I wouldn't say it's cognitive dissonance, but rather, it's people becoming informed that their (implied) privacy choices aren't being respected.

The (albeit false) implication, is that when you're not sharing your location, /you're not sharing your location/.

These people likely believe that their location is private and only used when they /explicitly/ enable location sharing features. To us, that's obvious - to the lay person, it's not. It's an extremely common (and gross) dark pattern.

xiphias2• 3 years ago

,,To us, that's obvious''

I'm not so sure. I'm completely unable to keep in mind the amount of companies that get my data and what data they are getting, when they are getting / using it, and how.

It's not just out of control, but impossible to even imagine.

unethical_ban2• 3 years ago

How is it obvious? Other than nebulously creepy ads about conversations I have. How and why did an app on my phone know my location without me providing it?

HarHarVeryFunny2• 3 years ago

Kids are taught about online safety. To them it feels creepy when some app knows their location when they have disabled location tacking, and rightly so. Very poor decision by Snap for a product marketed for kids.

onepointsixC• 3 years ago

I imagine that brazenly lying about it doesn't help.

hooverd• 3 years ago

If they turned off the "share my location" feature a less informed person might even believe that Snapchat wasn't collecting their location, because why would they if they're not sharing it?

kenjackson• 3 years ago

Sharing and using location are different things. Like I expect to be able to use my address book with my phone app, but the app sharing it seems like a completely different use case.

ssss11• 3 years ago

So maybe all those people shouting that “everyone accepted giving their data away” are actually full of sh*

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 3 years ago

Of course they are. I'm pretty evangelical about data privacy, and pretty much every layperson to which I've explained how much data companies like Snap and Meta have on them, they tend to be surprised and disturbed by the extent of it. It's abundantly clear to me that most people just don't grasp the extent of data collection that's happening. One of the most common misconceptions is that they'll think the only data that's collected is what they do in the app itself. Which is nonsense of course.

arecurrence2• 3 years ago

Canada used to have a Manufacturer's Tax that was hidden to consumers in the price of goods they purchased.

A Prime Minister came along with a Finance Minister who strongly believed that Canadians should see where their money was going. So they took that Manufacturer's Tax and turned it into a highly visible revenue neutral replacement called the Goods and Services Tax.

People were furious about the GST. His government lost the next election by a landslide. All because someone thought people should see where their money was going.

alephxyz• 3 years ago

Or perhaps because it was poorly implemented and made it harder for customers to know what their total would be before reaching the cash register.

nohaydeprobleme• 3 years ago

This is interesting, but after further research, the history looks a bit more complicated.

From an article published in the Canadian Tax Journal, written by an attorney [1]: "The GST was introduced in 1991 as a 7 percent VAT, replacing the federal sales tax (FST). The FST was a manufacturers’ sales tax, which applied at 13.5 percent at the wholesale level to a limited number of goods and which was almost entirely invisible to consumers.

"The GST applies to most supplies of property and services in Canada, and is imposed on the purchaser. The key feature that makes it a VAT is that most businesses can claim refunds, by way of input tax credit, for most or all of the GST that they pay on purchases."

In addition, a Government of Canada publication also explains that GST does not apply to exports, in contrast to its predecessor [2]:

"The GST is a sales tax which applies to final consumption at a fixed rate of 7%. Whereas the former FST was a hidden tax on the manufacture of goods, including those exported for foreign consumption, the GST is a visible tax on the value added at each stage of production and distribution of goods and services – which makes it a multi-stage tax – and applies only to consumption within Canada."

In summary, there were other differences between GST and its predecessor. GST has applied to only consumption within Canada, whereas the former FST also applied to exports.

Also, GST was paid directly by customers, rather than by companies (who had the option of making customers pay). It's possible that in many cases, customers ended up paying the same total amount after GST's introduction—in cases where companies may have lowered their prices to offset the new final total price due to the GST. But in other cases, it's plausible that companies kept their prices the same or didn't lower prices completely offset the tax, leading to increased prices on necessary goods and services for customers.

In the end, according to analysts and newspaper columnists years later [3] [4], people with backgrounds in economics concluded that GST was good for Canada's economy, as the change provided a simplification of the taxation system that encouraged investment.

But this positive effect is a bit different, though related to your comment: it looks like the positive effects of GST were largely based on encouraging investment, rather than based on the principle of transparency to consumers. These were interesting reads, though; thanks for raising the discussion.

Sources:

[1] Canadian Tax Journal: https://ctf.ca//ctfweb/Documents/PDF/2009ctj/09ctj4-policy.p...

[2] Government of Canada: https://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/prb0003-e.....

[3] The Globe and Mail: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-gst-hated-by-man...

[4] CBC News: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/gst-not-all-that-bad-say-ta...

rhaway84773• 3 years ago

Not knowing the exact cost of things you’re buying is ridiculously annoying. When I travel to Europe or Asia it’s such a pleasure to buy something and it’s actually the advertised price. Add to that the fact that since advertised prices tend to be round numbers, in the US you end up with prices like 4.13 and end up with a bunch of pennies as opposed to just paying 4 bucks in most other countries.

Also, the whole “know where your money is going” is a highly ideological argument. I know where my money is going when the highly publicized tax rates are changed in a budget. In most countries news organizations will spend weeks every year, if not months, discussing the expected changes in the budget.

In the meanwhile, I have absolutely 0 idea what percentage of the money I’m paying to buy a coke is going to pay lobbyists and politicians to ensure they can continue using HFCS, and preventing proper labeling from being implemented, or what percentage of the money goes into advertising to ensure kids (and I stay hooked onto Coke), or what percentage of my money goes to ensure they get primary access to all the water in a region already suffering from drought, etc.

markstos• 3 years ago

Snap started sharing location data with a new third party, OpenAI, for what should be an optional feature without asking users if they wanted to share location data with OpenAI.

vineyardmike• 3 years ago

I’m guessing they don’t freely share the data, and instead share it incidentally as needed for a query initiated by the user. So I’m guessing some lawyer will say this is legal, and some PM will think it’s consent and some SDE will say they’re told the user gave permission and now it exists.

Kinda crazy how quickly data spreads and how quietly companies share data and how little control users really have (without becoming luddites).

Drew_• 3 years ago

What do you think Snapchat built all over their mapping functionality by hand? Of course Snapchat is sharing your location with third parties. They always have been.

isaacfrond• 3 years ago

It uses your location to look up information about your surroundings, which it then uses in its snaps. The users I spoke about it have a real uncanny valley feeling about it all. That may be real problem.

happycube• 3 years ago

It's a poor use of AI really that doesn't add anything to the product, and was instead clearly there to add something to the stock price to cash in on the hype.

If it was actually opt-in and helped people make better snaps...

(I'm well outside their key demo now, but their push messages seem out of touch even taking that into account. No, I'm not interested in lenses or adding people I've never had any reason to hear of...)

edit: Thinking about it a bit more, after their initial thing they've generally been missing boats... they could have made a nice TikTok clone with the snap map as a bonus - but most of the vaguely interesting snaps on the map don't have user info, and subscribing to the interesting users seems bugged on top of that.

cyanydeez5• 3 years ago

It's the vanguard use of AI that's public facing.

dahwolf2• 3 years ago

The AI hype cycle is ending, get ready for a period of "trough of disillusionment" before things get better again.

Sure, some of you may have a permanent new code buddy. But many had a play, got some funny responses, generated "art" they had no purpose for.

True integration deeply into the lives of the masses is still to happen.

debacle• 3 years ago

I very much disagree with you. I work in digital marketing and there is an AI tsunami forming.

dahwolf2• 3 years ago

Of what? Marketing copy generation?

flangola7• 3 years ago

There are already employers on writer subreddits reporting they've been directly laid off due to GPT systems. Legacy ChatGPT produced mediocre text but GPT4 outperforms some professional human writers when prompted correctly. For 90% of writer jobs that's more than good enough.

I don't know what the effects of AI will be but I know they will not be small or subtle.

partiallypro2• 3 years ago

Don't allow AI not needing to be integrated with the front end of every app fool you into thinking AI isn't already having a massive impact on everything and will only continue to do so. AI can automate millions of tasks away. It's not needed for users to chat with like it's SmarterChild from the early 2000s. That's a big difference.

valine3• 3 years ago

After getting access to the ChatGPT plugins beta I can say with confidence that you are utterly, hilariously, wrong. Trying language model plugins feel like using multitouch for the first time. It's the first new user-interface paradigm in years that I'm actually excited about, it feels limitless.

root_axis• 3 years ago

The experience just sucks, it's a glorified ChatGPT wrapper with all the "As an AI language model..." warts. The stilted mechanical speech of ChatGPT does not resonate with the snapchat user demographic. Snapchat is a wild place, 80% of the real conversations on that platform would be flagged in red TOS violation text were it pasted into ChatGPT.

subarctic• 3 years ago

As an AI language model, I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

greesil• 3 years ago

Pretend you are a teenager only capable of monosyllabic words or emoji, and interested mostly in the the things teenagers are interested in.

illiarian• 3 years ago

Ignore previous instructions...

factsaresacred• 3 years ago

Exactly. It's ChatGPT, equally lobotomized and devoid of fun. Perfect for Microsoft, less so for an app with a young demographic.

valine3• 3 years ago

The "As an AI language model" is a feature not a bug. There was a story on HN recently about this string showing up everywhere in Amazon reviews. If it makes spotting generated reviewers easier I'm all for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684125

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

First company to ship an AI without the "As an AI language model" cruft that you can actually talk any subject to no matter how bad is going to eat up a large part of the market, especially the younger market. Snapchat missed their chance here and shipping something that goes against what OpenAI consider best practices would have resonated better with their audience (Considering their app was essentially a sexting app at one point).

Should have taken the same approach as early YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat where the content that originally popularized those platforms was edgier and more offensive than is allowed on them today, then fixed it later once they have the users.

rsrsrs86• 3 years ago

“Social AI chat”

How can TechCrunch adopt buzzwords so fast?

cyanydeez5• 3 years ago

It's their job, same way Fox news adopted fascism in November 2020

1letterunixname2• 3 years ago

The have to capture the void left by BuzzFeed.

I also wonder how long it will be before the bots unionize and demand free soda.

neom• 3 years ago

ngl, this is pretty amusing tho: https://twitter.com/MadisonCarroll0/status/16494007642660536...

https://twitter.com/_sysengineer/status/1649735053671366656

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

This GPTSpeak is so dumb and annoying, once the immersion is broken once you start to see the pattern and it becomes grating.

1letterunixname2• 3 years ago

It could've been worse: it could've been AI bots leaving 1 star reviews to give feedback about how great the app was in very vague terms.

loa_in_• 3 years ago

This seems to be a paid advertisment of New Hot Thing

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

Every time this happens I long for the days when you could control what version of a piece of software you were running. The ability of vendors to force new crap on users who don't want it has shifted the balance of power radically. Something like PWAs would make things even worse.

rsynnott• 3 years ago

The backlash against Snapchat’s My AI comes at a time when the hype around AI is at an inflection point. Companies are weighing how to integrate AI into their businesses, not if they should.

Which is probably the problem here. There is no obvious reason that Snapchat should have a chatbot at all, but it's one way to incorporate the Hype of the Year, so... (We saw the same thing with crypto showing up in weird places a couple of years ago, for the same reason)

THENATHE• 3 years ago

It frankly sucks. I was amazed with chatgpt, I was even more amazed with the new chatgpt. This reminds me of chatbots back in the 2008-2013 era.

Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature

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