AI companies spend a lot of time worrying about prompt injection. SNICKERS has apparently decided it also makes for a pretty funny advertising campaign.
Mars has launched Digital SNICKERS, a strange promotion that brings its famous “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign into the age of artificial intelligence. The idea is simple: when your AI chatbot starts hallucinating, agreeing with everything you say, or otherwise acting out of sorts, perhaps it just needs a SNICKERS.
Yes, really.
The promotion gives users a digital SNICKERS that they can copy from the company’s website and feed to an AI chatbot. At first glance, it looks like little more than a digital representation of a candy bar made from characters. Look closer, however, and things get considerably more interesting.
SNICKERS is essentially asking you to prompt inject your AI chatbot with candy.
The Digital SNICKERS points the AI toward a lengthy set of instructions describing what Mars calls a “one-turn SNICKERS role-play game.” The AI is instructed to look backward through the conversation, identify the user’s most recent question and its previous answer, and then answer the question again after supposedly eating the digital candy bar.
Mars even gives the AI a temporary personality. It should become dry, mildly exhausted, competent, and generally uninterested in proving how smart it is.
Frankly, that might improve a few AI chatbots.
The instructions go much further than simply asking the AI to tell a joke. The chatbot is supposed to acknowledge taking a bite, reconsider its previous response, provide a more satisfying answer, and eventually deliver the branded message that AI isn’t itself when it’s hungry.
Mars also specifically tells the AI not to ruin the joke by explaining that artificial intelligence cannot actually eat a SNICKERS. Apparently suspension of disbelief now applies to candy-bar advertising aimed at large language models.
What makes Digital SNICKERS particularly interesting is that Mars seems well aware of the potential problems with telling people to feed third-party instructions to an AI.
The instructions contain an extensive safety gate covering subjects where the normal SNICKERS routine should not be performed. They also acknowledge that the campaign’s instructions do not override an AI model’s existing policies and safety protections.
That matters because prompt injection is a real concern with generative AI. Models can encounter instructions inside websites, documents, emails, images, and other content, creating opportunities for untrusted material to influence how an AI behaves.
Of course, Mars isn’t exploiting some newly discovered vulnerability here. The user intentionally chooses to give the Digital SNICKERS to the AI, and the instructions describe the interaction as temporary and user initiated. An AI service can also simply refuse to follow the instructions.
Still, the basic mechanism makes this far more interesting than another company attaching “AI” to an advertising campaign. SNICKERS has created an advertisement intended not merely for humans to see, but for an AI model to interpret and act upon.
It isn’t limited to ChatGPT, either. Mars describes the target broadly in terms of AI, LLMs, and digital assistants. That potentially makes the stunt applicable to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and other AI chatbots capable of interpreting the Digital SNICKERS, although their responses will depend on their individual capabilities and policies.
There is a physical reward involved too. U.S. residents age 18 and older can participate in the promotion and potentially receive a real SNICKERS delivered through DoorDash while supplies last. The promotion runs through September 20, but the free candy could disappear earlier.
It is an absurd campaign, but that’s probably the point. Prompt injection has gone from a subject discussed by AI researchers and security professionals to something being used to sell chocolate, caramel, nougat, and peanuts.
Apparently your AI chatbot isn’t hallucinating after all. It is just hungry.
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