It’s no secret that AI-generated content has taken over our social media feeds in 2025. Now, Instagram’s top executive Adam Mosseri has made it clear that he expects AI content to overtake non-AI imagery and have significant implications for creators and photographers.
Mosseri shared thoughts in a lengthy post about the broader trends that will shape Instagram in 2026. And he offered a particularly candid assessment on how AI is driving the platform. He wrote, “Everything that matters to creators – the ability to be real, the ability to connect, to have a voice that can’t be faked – is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools.” “Feeds are starting to be filled with synthetic everything.”
But Mosseri doesn’t seem particularly worried by the change. He says there is “a lot of amazing AI content” and the platform may need to rethink its approach to labeling such imagery by “not just chasing out fakes, but fingerprinting the real media.”
From Mosseri (emphasis on them):
There is going to be increasing pressure on social media platforms to identify and label AI-generated content. All major platforms will do a good job at identifying AI content, but they will get worse at it over time as AI gets better at mimicking reality. The number of people who believe in it like me is already increasing It would be more practical to fingerprint genuine media than counterfeit media.Camera manufacturers can cryptographically sign images at the time of capture, creating a chain of custody,
On some level, it’s easy to understand how this would seem to be a more practical approach to the meta. As we’ve previously reported, AI content identification technologies like watermarks have proven unreliable at best. They are easy to dismiss and even easier to ignore completely. Meta’s own labels are unclear and the company, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on AI this year alone, has acknowledged that it cannot reliably detect AI-generated or manipulated content on its platform.
However, that Mosseri is so easily accepting defeat on this issue is telling. The AI slop has won. And what do Instagram’s 3 billion users understand when it comes to helping Is Realistically, this should largely be someone else’s problem, not Meta’s. Camera manufacturers – presumably phone manufacturers and actual camera manufacturers – should come up with their own systems that certainly sound like watermarking “to verify authenticity on capture”. Mosseri provides few details about how this would work or how it would be implemented at the scale necessary to make it viable.
Mosseri doesn’t even really address the fact that this will alienate the many photographers and other Instagram creators who are already frustrated with the app. The executive regularly fields complaints from groups who want to know why Instagram’s algorithm doesn’t consistently deliver their posts to their followers.
But Mosseri suggests that these complaints stem from outdated thinking about Instagram. The feed of “polished” square images, he says, “is dead.” In his estimation, camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic by “trying to make everyone look like the professional photographers of yesteryear.” Instead, he says more “raw” and “unpleasant” images will be how creators can prove they are real, and not AI. In a world where there is more AI content on Instagram, creators should prioritize images and videos that intentionally make them worse.
<a href