So that didn’t take long. Snapchat is (I think?) the first of the major social networks to add a “chat to AI” feature. Currently only available to its paid users, the AI will appear in the same way as any other human chat participant in the DM list does. So you can easily text it whenever you decide your human friends are too slow, boring or ignorant.

From an interview their CEO gave to 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,”

That all sounds too nice and measured for 2023. I’m curious to see whether in fact it turns out that we all start chatting to the robot so much that it reduces our interactions with our human connections in the long term- I mean, you can trust it to never break your snap-streak - or perhaps it’ll be a fad that won’t generate much interest in the longer term. Honestly, without having any knowledge of the situation, I’d more bet on the former.

They’re billing it as some kind of assistant to improve your human relationships:

My AI can answer a burning trivia question, offer advice on the perfect gift for your BFF’s birthday, help plan a hiking trip for a long weekend, suggest what to make for dinner. My AI is there to help and to connect you more deeply to the people and things you care about most.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

I’m sure we’ll see many more of these type of integrations happening soon. OpenAI has recently opened up its API to developers, such that any app can use its chatGPT technology at a cost of around $0.002 per 750 words of output, which is apparently extremely cheap as far as these things go. You can of course still play with chatGPT itself for free at present on OpenAI’s own website.