Instagram’s top boss is missing the point about AI on the platform

A couple of weeks ago, Adam Mosseri posted to his grid. In a series of messages, Instagram’s top exec laid out his concerns for the platform in the coming year, largely around AI. The post was equal parts Working Through It, a sounding of alarms, and a rallying cry to creators who use the platform: AI is about to be everywhere on Instagram, and the best way to stand out from “inauthentic” content is to be an authentic, original voice.

“Everything that made creators matter — the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked — is now accessible to anyone with the right tools,” he says. The people want gritty realness, not glossy fakeness easily duped by AI. Which may be true, but I think Mosseri is missing the point: Instagram is already overrun by robotic, same-y looking content, and it’s not just made 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 post, Mosseri actually makes a few points I agree with. He mentions that as AI-generated imagery gets more sophisticated and easy to produce, it’ll be easier to label what’s real than to put a watermark on every AI-created image. That’s why Google’s Pixel 10 phones put content credentials on every photo taken with one of its cameras, not just the ones made with AI. Mosseri also mentions that AI will get better at mimicking the low-fi phone camera look that signals authenticity — though I’d argue that’s already happening now, not at some point in the near future. There’s a real threat to Instagram’s business model, even if we disagree on the timeline.

But I have one major problem with his argument. Again and again, Mosseri mentions “authentic” content, implying something human-made versus inauthentic content created by AI. He calls this a “major shift: authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.” To be sure, there are plenty of fantastic creators posting great work to Instagram. But a lot of human-made content on Instagram is inauthentic too — and that’s a feature of algorithmic social media, not a bug.

Creators learn what the algorithm rewards, and then they go do more of that thing. Eventually, you get a lot of people posting things that look awfully similar. How else do you end up with two influencers whose vibe is so similar that nobody could tell if it happened by coincidence or if one of them was copying the other? The algorithm rewards whatever keeps us glued to the platform, not the most thought-provoking or original stuff. The algorithm made us the robots. And that inauthentic, predictable human-made content will be the first thing that AI replaces. That’s what AI does at its core: make predictions based on its training data. Mosseri is right to be worried.

I opened Instagram recently to a video of a mom repeatedly counting her kids as she watches them in a public place. “One, two, three,” she nods her head as she accounts for them, then starts again. “Who else does this too? It’s not at all exhausting,” the caption reads. 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 she posted it in 2024. The reposting strategy is a direct play to the algorithm — casting the same net again to hook some new followers, or maybe seeing if that particular video lands 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 they first posted it to try and catch a different algorithmic wave. Even people posting “authentic” content have to act like robots to win the algorithmic feed.

I don’t think any of this comes as a revelation to Mosseri, though. His post hints that he understands this reality: “Flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume,” he says. Which, sure. But if Instagram’s first job is to show you fresh content when you open the app and keep you scrolling while you’re there, quantity will always win over quality. You know what’s expensive and time-consuming to produce? Content that “feels real,” the stuff that’s the least sustainable to produce when every influencer is under pressure to become a full-time small business owner of one. Unless Instagram can cook up some brilliant new way to incentivize real creators, I think Mosseri can count on getting more of that inauthentic content — whether it’s made by a human or not.