Instagram's chief executive believes AI has made the social media site's carefully curated grids a thing of the past.
In a year-end message posted on Threads, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said the platform needs to evolve to cope with the coming flood of AI-generated content, warning that the rise of AI is sapping Instagram's sleek aesthetic.
“Unless you're under 25 and use Instagram, you probably think of the app as a feed of square photos. The aesthetic is sophisticated: lots of makeup, smooth skin, high-contrast photos, and beautiful landscapes,” Mosseri wrote on Wednesday.
“That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments as feeds years ago,” the Meta executive said, adding that users now keep friends updated on their personal lives through unpolished “shoe shots and unflattering candids” shared in direct messages.
Mosseri said the increasing prevalence of AI images means creators need to embrace this trend and eschew curated grids and professional-style photos in favor of a “more raw aesthetic.”
“Flattery images are cheap to produce and boring to consume. People want content that feels real,” he wrote, adding that social media feeds are starting to fill up with “all things synthetic.”
Social media platforms like Instagram are dealing with a flood of AI-generated content, with tools like Midjourney and Sora making it easy to create images and videos of almost anything.
At the same time, Meta is rushing to integrate its AI tools into Instagram and Facebook. Last year, Instagram rolled out an AI studio that lets users create custom chatbots that include digital versions of themselves, and previously experimented with AI Instagram influencers based on real celebrities.
As technology improves, social platforms will find it increasingly difficult to identify AI-generated media, Mosseri said, adding that one solution could be for camera companies to cryptographically sign photos when they take them to prove the photos are genuine.
A former Facebook executive said Instagram needs to clearly label AI-generated content, increase transparency about who is posting on the platform, and build better creative controls so human users can compete with content created entirely by AI.
“For most of my life, I could safely assume that the majority of photos and videos I saw were near-accurate captures of moments that happened in real life. This is clearly no longer the case,” Mosseri wrote.
