Snapchat’s AI upgrade will make you look as old as the features feel
Snap catches up with Google, Meta, and ChatGPT AI tools
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Snapchat’s AI experiments are reaching a new level of maturity, as exemplified by the new AI Lens that will let you see how you might look in the future. Aging your appearance is just a taste of the upgraded AI on Snapchat, as the company seemed eager to show off how AI is becoming integrated even more into its platform, including the latest version of the Spectacles.
The most notable new feature is “My Selfie,” which employs AI and photos of you to produce a digital avatar based on your selfies. You can then ask the social media app to create AI-generated images and place your virtual self in them.
It’s a lot like the “Imagine” feature from Meta, which also makes an AI-produced version of you to embed in AI-generated images. A bonus of the Snapchat version is that you can generate images of yourself as well as your friends if they have made an AI avatar and opted into the program.
If you subscribe to Snapchat+, your real experiences with friends also get an AI upgrade. Snapchat has boosted the Memories feature for all users with collages and videos. But with Snapchat+, you’ll also have more AI-produced information in the form of captions and curated Lenses for the old pictures, all adding detail and reworking the images in new ways.
AI Lens Life
Information is also key to Snapchat’s upgraded My AIchatbot, which usesChatGPT-based models to converse. Snap announced it is improving the chatbot’s problem-solving capabilities with visual processing. That means the bot can now interpret images, answer questions about parking rules based on a picture of a sign, identify plants from a photo you take, and even translate text from another language. Like the AI avatar, this feature might also sound familiar if you’ve used ChatGPT’s image features or the Gemini-poweredGoogle Lens.
If you’re feeling creative but aren’t a fan of the Lens that makes you look old, there’s a lot of opportunity for you in the new AI-powered tools in Lens Studio. The new Easy Lens tool lets you design a Lens by writing a text prompt that can theoretically do anything you might imagine from a Snapchat filter.
For more advanced creators, the GenAI Suite has several new tools, including Body Morph, which produces three-dimensional characters and outfits based on text prompts or uploaded images. There’s also the new Animation Blending feature, which combines multiple animation clips to move smoothly.
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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He’s since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he’s continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.
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