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A few weeks ago, Adam Mosseri Posted on his network. In a series of messages, a senior Instagram executive laid out his concerns about the platform next year, which is largely centered around artificial intelligence. The post was equal parts working through it, raising alarms, and a rallying cry for creators using the platform: AI is about to be everywhere on Instagram, and the best way to stand out from “inauthentic” content is to have an authentic, authentic voice.
“Everything that made creative people important — the ability to be real, to communicate, to have a voice that can’t be faked — is now within the reach of anyone with the right tools,” he says. People want brave realismnot shiny fakes that can be easily fooled by artificial intelligence. This may be true, but I think Mosseri is missing the point: Instagram actually It’s overpowered by similar-looking automated content, not just created by AI. It’s made by humans churning out post after post following the same formula; One designed to keep us scrolling, liking and sharing.
Throughout his article, Mosseri actually made some points that I agree with. He states that as AI-generated images become more complex and easier to produce, it will be easier to classify what is real rather than putting a watermark on every AI-generated image. That’s why Google’s Pixel 10 phones include content credentials all The photo was taken with one of its cameras, not just the one taken using AI. Mosseri also mentions that the AI will get better at mimicking the look of a low-res phone camera that suggests authenticity — although I would argue that This is already happening nowand not sometime in the near future. There is a real threat to Instagram’s business model, even if we disagree on the timeline.
But I have one big problem with his argument. Over and over, Mosseri mentions “authentic” content, implying that it is something human-made versus inauthentic content created by artificial intelligence. He describes this as “a major shift: originality has become infinitely replicable.” There are definitely a lot of amazing creatives posting amazing work on Instagram. But a lot of human-generated content on Instagram is also inauthentic, and that’s a feature of algorithmic social media, not a bug.
Creative people learn what the algorithm rewards, and then they do more of that thing. In the end, you find a lot of people posting things that look pretty similar. Otherwise how do you end up Two influencers whose vibes are very similar So that no one can know if this happened by chance or if one is imitating the other? The algorithm rewards whatever keeps us glued to the platform, not the most thought-provoking or original stuff. I made the algorithm we Robots. This unreal, predictable, man-made content will be the first thing to be replaced by artificial intelligence. This is what AI does at its core: make predictions based on its training data. Mosseri is right to be concerned.
I recently opened Instagram Video of a mother repeatedly counting her children She watches them in a public place. “One, two, three,” she nodded as she counted them, then started again. “Who else does this? It’s not stressful at all,” the caption read. I don’t, but that’s because I only have one to keep track of. But I remembered the video because I watched it Back when I published it in 2024. The repost strategy is a direct manipulation of the algorithm, casting the same net again to attract some new followers, or perhaps see if that particular video reaches better at a different time and context. I see the same thing on Threads, where a comedian I follow will try the exact same joke weeks or months after it was first posted to try to catch a different algorithmic wave. Even people who post “authentic” content have to act like robots to win the algorithmic feed.
However, I don’t think any of this comes as a revelation for Mosseri. His post indicates that he understands this reality, saying: “Pleasant images are cheap to produce and boring to consume.” Which for sure. But if Instagram’s first mission is to show you new content when you open the app and keep scrolling while you’re there, quantity will always trump quality. Do you know what is expensive and time consuming to produce? The content that “feels real,” is the content that is least sustainable to produce when every influencer is under pressure to become a full-time small business owner. Unless Instagram can come up with a great new way to incentivize real creators, I think Mosseri can count on getting more of this fake content — whether it’s human-made or not.