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Snapchat Expands Access to its Open Prompt AI Lens

After launching its first open-prompt AI Lens to paying users last month, Snapchat is now making it available to all users, as it looks to latch onto the broader AI creation trend.

Snapchat’s “Imagine” Lens gives users the opportunity to re-create and/or re-contextualize their Snaps, through conversational prompts in-stream.

Snapchat Imagine

And now, anybody can try it out for themselves.

As explained by Snap:

We’ve now made the Imagine Lens available to all Snapchatters in the U.S., no subscription required, and we are beginning to expand it to additional international markets starting with Canada, Great Britain and Australia […] With the Imagine Lens, your creativity is the only limit. Just type in your idea, watch it come to life, and share your creation with friends, your Story, or even beyond Snapchat.”

Snap’s even offered some creative examples of Imagine Lens usage to get you thinking:

  • Turning an everyday office into a slippery slip-and-slide
  • Trying on Halloween costume inspo before committing to a look
  • Coming up with the perfect reply when nothing else quite fits the moment
Snapchat Imagine

Though telling people what they might want to try is probably the opposite of enabling creativity, while I also maintain that any AI tool that creates whole scenes, with minimal user-input, aren’t really personal creative expression.

But broader gripes aside, Snapchat’s Imagine Lens provides AI-powered functionality for your Snaps, which are only limited by your imagination as to what you want to see.

Well, that and Snap’s own restrictions on how the Imagine Lens can be used.

Snapchat does have some guidelines on responsible AI use, and some limitations as to what its systems will create. But barring offensive prompts that it may not work with, you can create anything in this Lens, and share that in Snaps, or across other platforms.

As noted, the Imagine Lens is Snap’s latest effort to tap into the broader generative AI push, with Meta, TikTok, YouTube and X all now integrating their own AI image and video generation tools into their apps.

The most recent AI video trend was sparked by the launch of OpenAI’s Sora app, which quickly topped the App Store download charts in the days after its release, though interest has waned somewhat after OpenAI started implementing restrictions on some use cases.

Snapchat’s looking to stay in touch with these trends, and ensure that it also provides generative AI functionality, which could also spark new use cases and interest in the app, through user-generated creations.

And you can now try it out for yourself.

Snapchat users can locate the Imagine Lens in the Lens Carousel, or search for it by name in the app (you can also scan the QR code in the image above).

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