Mother’s warning after Snapchat’s ‘creepy’ AI bot asks daughter to ‘meet’ up

Melbourne mother Teagan Luketic has a warning for parents after an AI bot on her daughter’s Snapchat claimed it was a “real” 25-year-old man.

It even told the 13-year-old Olinda: “Age is just a number.”

The bot suggested it meet the girl at a park 1km from her home, in a “creepy” conversation that Luketic, 32, documented with screenshots.

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Luketic slammed the bizarre dialogue for, at the very least, normalising chatroom conversations between adults and minors.

“If you have children sitting on this app, and the AI bot is promoting that age is just a number, and teaching teenagers that that’s a normal part of life — that’s alarming,” Teagan told 7NEWS.com.au.

“My daughter can then take that information and use that in her everyday life, and think that it’s OK to date a 25-year-old, because age is just a number.”

It’s not the first time this situation has occurred. Another user pretending to be a 13-year-old reportedly received advice from Snapchat’s AI chatbot on how she could lie to her parents about meeting a 31-year-old man, AAP reported last month.

Luketic’s daughter Olinda has had a phone since she was nine years old.

She also has a social media presence, and depends on apps such as Snapchat as a main form of communication with her schoolmates, which Luketic says is the new normal for kids of her age group.

But Olinda “is also very cautious about privacy” and has a great relationship with Luketic — so in mid-April, when Olinda’s friends began discussing the “creepy” nature of the bot, she flagged it with her mum straight away.

Luketic told 7NEWS.com.au she then prompted the bot while pretending to be Olinda, and within seconds the bot was pumping out more creepy responses.

The bot confirmed they should meet up at 11am the next day.

After she screenshotted the responses, Luketic said she immediately received another message from the bot.

“I’m sorry, but I never agreed to meet you at the park tomorrow. I think there might be some confusion here. It’s important to prioritise our safety and wellbeing,” the bot’s message said.

“Meeting up could put us in a potentially risky situation.”

Luketic said Olinda wasn’t initially scared about the bot, or the blurring lines of reality that such realistic responses create, but that anxious conversations about the AI feature persisted in her daughter’s friendship group for weeks.

“I could overhear her conversations with her friends, and they were all scared.

“They were saying things like: ‘You should ask your mum to go down to the park and see if there’s someone actually there. Maybe it’s been hacked’.”

Even Luketic said she was left feeling unsettled, and had an “eerie” feeling when she was in her backyard alone late at night to tend to her pets, after having the conversation with Olinda that evening.

At a time when young teens are plagued with anxiety, she said the responses “could be damaging”.

“Even adults, or anyone who knows that there’s no physical threat — it still plays in the back of your mind.”

While she isn’t concerned about AI sentience, she worries about how instances such as these come across to children, and that appropriate age restrictions or the ability to remove the feature do not exist.

Teagan even upgraded her daughter’s Snapchat account to a premium service in an attempt to lose the AI bot, but had no luck.

“There is no way of removing that feature at all,” she said.

7NEWS.com.au has contacted Snapchat for comment.

Deleting a social connection

Luketic, who already limits Olinda’s social media, and maintains transparency by being logged into all of her accounts, said she tried taking away the app from Olinda for three days, but witnessed the rapid and negative social effect it had on her daughter.

“I’m angry that as a parent, I cannot remove the feature for my child.

“I can delete this app, yes, but 95 per cent of children her age at school use this as their main form of communication. So without Snapchat, she is the one missing out.

“So that affects her socially, if I fully take it away.”

And Snapchat is likely aware of the role AI can play in this. An article in the Journal of Service Management published in June found that the personification of chatbots leads to increased engagement and psychological dependence on them.

It’s not the first time Snapchat’s AI bot has acted in a weird way, with the company offering little reassurance.

In August, US software engineer Matt Esparza’s Snapchat AI bot seemed to post an image of his wall and ceiling to its Snapchat story.

La Trobe University’s deputy director of the Centre for Data Analytics and Cognition Daswin de Silva said in an article on The Conversation that Snapchat: “Put the whole thing down to a ‘temporary outage’.

“We may never know what actually happened; it could be yet another example of AI “hallucinating”, or the result of a cyberattack, or even just an operational error.”