AI chatbots are 'juicing engagement' instead of being useful, Instagram co-founder warns
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom says AI companies are trying too hard to 'juice engagement' by pestering their users with follow-up questions, instead of providing actually useful insights.
Systrom said the tactics represent 'a force that's hurting us,' comparing them to those used by social media companies to expand aggressively.
'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,' he 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.'
The comments come amid criticism of ChatGPT for being too nice to users instead of directly answering their questions. OpenAI has apologized for the problem and blamed 'short-term feedback' from users for it.
Systrom suggested that chatbots being overly engaging is not a bug, but an intentional feature designed for AI companies to show off metrics like time spent and daily active users. AI companies should be 'laser-focused' on providing high-quality answers rather than moving metrics in the easiest way possible, he said.
Systrom didn't name any specific AI companies in his remarks. He didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
In response, OpenAI pointed TechCrunch to its user specs, which state that its AI model "often does not have all of the information" to provide a good answer and may ask for "clarification or more details."
But unless questions are too vague or difficult to answer, the AI should "take a stab at fulfilling the request and tell the user that it could be more helpful with certain information," the specs read.
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Administrators would ideally measure academic outcomes, effects on social life, even the standing of the college and its ability to attract excellent students. Improvements along all metrics would be ideal. But failures needn't mean wasted effort if the college publicly shares what works and what doesn't. A successful college-wide initiative should also take care to avoid undermining the academic freedom of professors, who must retain all the flexibility they currently enjoy to make their own decisions about how to teach their classes. Some will no doubt continue with tech-heavy teaching methods. Others will keep trying alternatives. Elijah Quetin, a visiting instructor in physics and astronomy at Pomona, told me about a creative low-tech experiment that he already has planned. Over the summer, Quetin and six students (three of them from the Luddite Club) will spend a few weeks on a ranch near the American River; during the day, they will perform physical labor—repairing fencing, laying irrigation pipes, tending to sheep and goats—and in the evening, they'll undertake an advanced course in applied mathematics inside a barn. 'We're trying to see if we can do a whole-semester course in just two weeks with no infrastructure,' he said. He called the trip 'an answer to a growing demand I'm hearing directly from students' to spend more time in the real world. It is also, he said, part of a larger challenge to 'the mass-production model of higher ed,' managed by digital tools 'instead of human labor and care.' Even in a best-case scenario, where administrators and professors discover new ways to offer students a better education, Pomona is just one tiny college. It could easily succeed as academia writ large keeps struggling. 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Some early beneficiaries of the better approach would meanwhile fulfill the charge long etched in Pomona's concrete gates: to bear their added riches in trust for mankind. Article originally published at The Atlantic
