- Snickers is bringing AI to its “You’re not you when you’re hungry” marketing platform by creating a virtual candy bar users can feed to an AI chatbot when it starts to have “hallucinations” or wrong answers.
- The virtual candy bar, called Hunger.AI, is designed to combat the quirks in which AI seems too enthusiastic to agree to a user’s point of view, makes up facts and creates misinformed answers.
- By copying a snippet of code from Snickers’ website and pasting it into the AI chat, users can get a clearer, more concise answer.
The tool takes its cue from Snickers’ “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” platform, which has depicted various people – both famous and not – acting out of character until they’re brought back to reality after eating a Snickers bar. Like those characters, AI can also appear out-of-sorts when it provides answers that are too agreeable or contain incorrect information.
The brand is promoting the new digital tool via a marketing campaign that depicts various people asking AI for advice and information and getting deliberately incorrect answers. In one case, a woman asks an AI whether she should have trained more for a marathon she’s about to run. Rather than warning her off, the AI responds, “The human body can do amazing things.” By the end of the commercial, she is sitting on a curb, icing her knees, clearly having not finished the race.
Other scenarios include the AI telling an intern that it’s a good idea to question the CEO’s decisions, telling a man that saying “I love you” after five days isn’t too soon, and advising a rideshare driver to get a facial tattoo of a scorpion.
“Snickers has long been the remedy for out-of-character moments,” said Ashley Gill, Brand & Content Vice President, Mars Snacking, in a release. “As generative AI becomes part of everyday life, we’re playfully reinventing the way Snickers connects with our fans in today’s culture. Whether it’s a person losing their cool or an AI chatbot consistently agreeing with you, the truth hasn’t changed: when you’re not acting like yourself, we believe you maybe just need a Snickers.”
Along with the campaign and the digital tool, Snickers has created an IRL promotion through which consumers can get a free Snickers candy bar delivered directly to them via DoorDash for interacting with the Hunger.AI tool on Reddit or Snapchat.
