If you have Snapchat, you know about the new update: your own personal artificial intelligence (AI) friend.

You can ask it questions, name it, customize it and add it to group chats with your friends. It can tell you places to go based on your location, things to do and you can joke around with it.

The AI bot is powered by ChatGPT by OpenAI. It was originally supposed to be just for Snapchat+ subscribers, but it recently became available to all Snapchat users.

Any conversations that occur with AI are saved in Snapchats database, and the information is used to improve each user’s experience on Snapchat.

The company’s goal in creating the AI bot is to get feedback to make Snapchat a more accessible place, increase personal creativity and get people to interact with each other more.

Many people don’t know how to feel about this. There are some that just ask the bot funny questions and tell jokes, others that try to get it to do their homework, but many people are more worried about the bot stealing their data.

Freshman Jordan Novak, a religious Snapchat user, thinks that the bot can be a nuisance but is also cool at times.

“It’s annoying, but they give good advice,” Novak said. “It gives fast responses, but it can also be used to help cheat. If you ask it to do something, it will, no matter what and it will give you the right answer.”

Sophomore Maddie Maslona, another Snapchat user, has a different opinion than Novak.

“I don’t talk to it at all– I think it’s creepy,” Maslona said. “I don’t like it. I think it’s weird, and kinda creepy that it can answer your questions and talk to you and stuff, and I don’t think I’ll ever use it.”

She also said that she doesn’t want to chat with it because she knows that the bot saves your conversations.

“[The bot] freaks me out because of the fact that it can act like a person then five minutes later [you realize] it’s an AI,” said Zachary Littlejohn, sophomore at SHS.

Littlejohn has talked with the bot a few times, but says he already wants to get rid of it. He also has strong feelings about the bot being pinned to the top of the friends home screen.

“Oh my god I do not need it pinned,” Littlejohn said. “Like, leave, I do not want to talk to you.”

A few people, myself included, have been able to unpin the AI bot, but that feature isn’t available to everyone.

“I’ve unpinned it, so I don’t feel like it bothers me as much since it’s essentially not there,” Sophomore Katelyn Henline said.

While the bot bothers some people, and some don’t care about it, there are others who find it helpful.

“There are some very obvious errors,” Sophomore Alyssa Feldman said. “This dude doesn’t know half the things I ask him, [but] he totally helps me with any APUSH topic, which is truly great.”

Feldman likes to goof around with the bot and experimented by asking him a lot of random questions.

“I told him my birthday was coming up, and he asked me about my plans,” Feldman said. “I sent him some very weird emojis- most of which he didn’t understand, and then I tried to get him to tell me about his parents– which did not work.”

While some people just use the AI bot and ChatGPT to goof around and joke with, there are others who use ChatGPT’s software for more serious things.

Though Forensics teacher Joseph Bubonics has not used Snapchat’s AI bot, he has experimented with ChatGPT.

“I created an escape room, and used ChatGPT to write a letter with a riddle in it to help solve the escape room,” Bubonics said. “It’s an amazing tool, and you can use it instead of researching things and finding new information.”

Bubonics went on to talk about how it can be used for recipes and other things as well, and said that it could be a very useful tool.

“I know that you can’t use it in college though, like, they use programs that stop it, like turnitin.com, to make sure students aren’t cheating,” Bubonics said.

Bubonics said that some of his students have come into class talking about what the Snapchat bot does, and those students have claimed the bot has developed a personality or started messaging them after they’ve left the bot on read.

“It’s scary what AI can do, and I think that students having access to this technology will definitely have an impact on how they learn and take in information in the future,” Bubonics said.

Overall, many people have been creeped out by AI, and some have found it fun to play around with, or useful for certain things, like learning new concepts.

“It’s [AI] an amazing tool, that could be really useful for some things, but it scares me with some of the things it’s able to do,” Bubonics said.