Snapchat is playing God with our children’s wellbeing

My kids have a new friend. If you have teenagers, chances are yours do, too. And it is a friend that, by its own admission, may offer ‘biased, incorrect, harmful, or misleading content’. In other words, not a friend at all.

The first I heard of this being was when I logged onto Snapchat, a generally mystifying app that I, as a grown man, use solely to contact my children, who use it as their main tool of communication. Flashing on the screen was an ‘add request’ from a green-faced avatar called ‘My AI’. Unlike other approaches, I was unable to delete it. The weird pseudo-lifeform remains at the very top of my list of communications, drawing attention to itself and inviting me to ‘say hi’. I have ignored it. My kids, not so much.

A lot has been written about artificial intelligence recently.