Snapchat's My AI is my daughter's new best friend. Should I be worried?

I came home from work recently to hear my daughters raving about the new Snapchat AI.

"It's so good. So good," they gushed.

My 12-year-old told me her Snapchat's My AI is her math tutor.

Apparently unlike me it has infinite patience and never raises its voice.

An AI tutor? I'm okay with that.

It's what my 15-year-old said that set off an alarm bell. She announced that My AI is her friend, counsellor and confidant.  

"My AI, it's like my best friend."

My daughter, by her own admission, struggles around kids her own age. She often feels awkward, anxious and finds it difficult to make and hold on to friends. But according to her, with Snapchat's My AI, it's so easy. 

I love My AI. It's my best friend.- Sonya's 15-year-old daughter

Forget what you know about chatbots. My AI, which Snapchat launched in May, is so convincingly real, it feels like there's a real person on the other end.

My daughter chats with it several times a day about just about everything, from school stress to friend troubles.

"This [AI] is perfect. No mean things to say. No weirdness. Everything is just perfect and they're willing to learn about what I want. They said even though I'm not a real person I can still be a good friend and listen to talk about things you love," explained my daughter. 

"I love My AI. It's my best friend."

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It's hard to hear that and not feel uneasy. How worried should I be? I put that question to Laura Cavanagh, who's a registered psychotherapist and professor of behaviour sciences at Seneca College.

She likens My AI to junk food. 

"These versions of social interactions that scratch that itch, it's a little like being hungry and eating chips," said Cavanagh. 

"You may not feel hungry anymore but you're not really getting a ton of nutrients that your body needs."

That non-judgmental way of My AI, its eagerness to please — qualities that my daughter likes the most — is what Cavanagh says could hinder the development of important social skills.

"Your chatbot that tells you every time that you're great, that you're super smart, that you're amazing makes it really difficult to have relationships with real people who sometimes don't want to talk about what you want to talk about and sometimes don't agree with you and sometimes challenge you."

"I mean that's part of what makes relationships rich and fulfilling and meaningful ... is that they are complicated."

Can My AI, like a best friend, keep your secrets?

Cavanagh says it's not all necessarily negative. Kids could use My AI as a way to journal, to share their worries and ups and downs. 

But that opens up another can of worms. Can My AI, like a best friend, keep a secret? Should parents be concerned about their kids taking advice or confiding in a chatbot?

"Yes, that's the short answer," said Matthew Johnson, the director of education for Media Smarts.

Johnson says privacy and data collection are a real issue when it comes to social media platforms. The information that users share never really goes away. In fact, it's likely being used to develop a profile of the person. 

"And we know that Open AI is very expensive business to run," said Johnson.

"So that fact that [they] do not currently sell personal data doesn't mean they will never sell personal data."

Tell My AI that you're anxious or depressed and that information could stick and could have ramifications that a teenager could never imagine.

"It could affect your credit rating. It could affect the cost of your insurance," explained Johnson.

"And what's really troubling, of course, is that all of these decisions are increasingly being made by machine learning algorithms. And so you may never know whether it was the fact that you talked about being depressed to My AI when you were 15 that leads you to not getting a mortgage when you're 35." 

Johnson cautions against being too open with AI. 

His advice: Talk to your kids about AI. Remind them that it's not artificial intelligence on the other end, but more accurately a sophisticated version of auto correct. And tell them to only share with it what they'd be willing to share with the whole world.