Snap's AI Bug Raises Concerns About The Pitfalls Of Generative AI

Last week, Amazon.com Inc AMZN announced that it will be using generative AI to enhance its product reviews and Snap Inc SNAP scared its Snapchat users as its My AI feature went rogue, raising privacy concerns.

Snap’s AI Goes Rogue

Last Tuesday, Snapchat’s My AI posted its own Story and stopped responding to users’ messages, briefly appearing to have a mind of its own. Snapchat parent company Snap later confirmed this surreal experience was a bug. But this temporary glitch raised many concerns, especially as Snap’s platform is filled with youngsters who are a more vulnerable group than adults. This temporary outage caused strong reactions and concerns over privacy, highlighting the general concerns related to generative AI development. 

Generative AI Comes To Product Reviews On Amazon

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stated that every Amazon business has multiple initiatives involving generative AI underway. The feature that was introduced last week summarizes product reviews to help shoppers save time spent in reading through individual reviews. Amazon will be streamlining the process of analyzing customer reviews by picking out common themes and summarizing them in a short paragraph that will be placed as part of product’s details. Considering that last year, about 125 million customers made nearly 1.5 billion reviews and ratings to its stores, Amazon is an incredible foundation for building the vocabulary of large language models. The e-commerce giant also believes that the AI-generative review feature will be able to bypass unauthentic comments and bots, therefore this is also a solution to fake reviews that according to a report, affect from 15% to as much as 40% of reviews on the buying platform. While publishing this novelty, Amazon stated that this feature will contribute to a richer, better and more trustworthy reviews, improving the buying experience of its shoppers. Amazon will also add a product insight feature that gives customers a glance of common themes they seek for in reviews, such as ‘easy-to-use’.

As AI technology continues to evolve, companies need to show commitment to innovate with the goal of serving the civilization which demands striking the right balance between development and a healthy dose of caution, one that is needed to safeguard private information. Unfortunately, Big Tech didn’t become known for prioritizing the welfare of its users as it was often criticized for its practices so here’s to hoping that the AI era will be an exception. Snap might have made the effort to make its AI feature safe but the price of failure is much higher than for others, as it is practically testing its developments on youngsters. Therefore, speeding its AI efforts to catch up to competitors is quite risky as Snap needs to remember it is mainly speaking to children, the most vulnerable group that must be protected at all costs.

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