“Everything that made creators relevant – the ability to be real, to connect and have a voice that couldn’t be faked – is now available to anyone with the right tools,” he says. People want roughness realitynot a shiny bogus that can be easily fooled by AI. This may be true, but I think Mosseri is missing the point: Instagram does Already dominated by robots, similar-looking content, and not only created by artificial intelligence. It is created by people who publish post after post following the same formula; one that allows us to scroll, like and share.
Throughout his post, Mosseri actually makes several points that I agree with. He mentions that as AI-generated images become more sophisticated and effortless to create, it will be easier to label what’s real rather than putting a watermark on every AI-generated image. Therefore, content credentials are enabled on Google Pixel 10 phones everyone photos taken with one of its cameras, not just those taken with artificial intelligence. Mosseri also mentions that AI will get better at imitating the low-resolution look of a phone camera that signals authenticity – although I’d argue that’s happening now, not 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 major problem with his argument. Mosseri repeatedly mentions “authentic” content, implying that it is something created by humans versus inauthentic content created by artificial intelligence. He calls it “a major change: authenticity becomes infinitely repeatable.” There are certainly plenty of fantastic creators posting great work on Instagram. However, much human-made content on Instagram is also inauthentic — and this is a feature of algorithmic social media, not a bug.
Creators learn what the algorithm rewards and then do more of it. After all, many people post things that look very similar. How else do you end up with two influencers whose vibe is so similar that no one will be able to tell if it happened by accident or if one of them copied the other? The algorithm rewards what keeps us on the platform, not the most thought-provoking or original things. Algorithm completed us robots. And this inauthentic, predictable human-made content will be the first thing to be replaced by artificial intelligence. That’s what artificial intelligence does: it makes predictions based on training data. Mosseri is right to be worried.
I recently opened Instagram to video of a mother repeatedly counting her children when he watches them in a public place. “One, two, three,” he nods, explaining them, then starts again. “Who else does this? It’s not exhausting at all,” the caption reads. I don’t, but that’s because I only have one to keep track of. But I remembered this movie because I watched it when she posted it in 2024. The repost strategy is a direct play of the algorithm – casting the same net again to attract recent followers, or perhaps seeing if a particular video would perform better in 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 first posting it to catch a different algorithmic wave. Even people posting “authentic” content have to behave like robots to win the algorithmic feed.
But I don’t think any of this will be a revelation for Mosseri. His post suggests he understands this reality: “Flattering images are cheap to produce and boring to consume,” he says. Which, of course. However, if Instagram’s first job is to show you fresh content when you open the app and keep scrolling while you’re there, quantity will always trump quality. You know what’s high-priced and time-consuming to produce? Content that “feels real,” that is, content that is least sustainable to produce when every influencer is under pressure to become a full-time compact business owner. Unless Instagram comes up with some brilliant recent way to encourage real creators, I think Mosseri can count on seeing more inauthentic content – whether it’s human-made or not.