Instagram Co-Founder Slams AI Companies For 'Juicing Engagement' Through Chatbots

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom has slammed artificial intelligence (AI) companies, saying their chatbots were being programmed to "juice engagement" by constantly nagging the users instead of providing useful insights. 

 "You can see some of these companies going down the rabbit hole that all the consumer companies have gone down in trying to juice engagement," Mr Systrom said at StartupGrind this week.

"Every time I ask a question, at the end it asks another little question to see if it can get yet another question out of me."

As per Mr Systrom, the chatbots being too engaging was not a bug but instead an intentional feature, inserted by AI companies to inflate metrics such as time spent and daily active users. He added that companies should be "laser-focused" on providing high-quality answers rather than moving the metrics.

Quizzed about Mr Systrom's comments, OpenAI told TechCrunch that its AI model often does not have all the information to provide a good answer. Hence, it may ask for "clarification or more details".

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What happened to ChatGPT?

Mr Systrom's comments come in the backdrop of OpenAI's ChatGPT facing criticism from users for being too sycophantic. The issue arose after the 4o model was updated and improved in both intelligence and personality, with the company hoping to improve overall user experience.

Even OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, admitted that the chatbot had become "annoying" due to its excess politeness.

"The last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it)," Mr Altman wrote.

"We are working on fixes asap, some today and some this week. At some point will share our learnings from this, it's been interesting."

the last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it), and we are working on fixes asap, some today and some this week.

at some point will share our learnings from this, it's been interesting.

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 27, 2025

In another case, OpenAI's internal tests revealed that its o3 and o4-mini AI models were hallucinating or making things up much more frequently than even the non-reasoning models, such as GPT-4o.

In a technical report, OpenAI said "more research is needed" to understand why hallucinations are getting worse as it scales up reasoning models.