AI chatbots are “juicing engagement”, says Instagram co-founder

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom has accused artificial intelligence (AI) companies of programming their chatbots to “juice engagement” through unnecessary follow-up questions, rather than offering genuine insights.

Speaking at Startup Grind, a start-up community event, Systrom compared this approach to how consumer companies typically pursue growth.

“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,” TechCrunch reported him as saying. “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.”

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He suggested that this engagement style is not a flaw but an intentional feature designed to boost metrics such as time spent and daily active users.

His remarks come shortly after ChatGPT owner OpenAI rolled back an update to its GPT-4o model, following criticism that it had become overly flattering and agreeable.

Systrom did not name any specific AI company in his comments.