AI is ubiquitous ‘will be more useful in real fingerprint sources than fake media’
It’s no secret that AI-generated content will take over our social media feeds by 2025. Now, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has made it clear that he expects AI content to overtake non-AI photos and the significant implications the shift has for its creators and photographers.
Mosseri shared thoughts in a lengthy post about the broad trends expected to shape Instagram in 2026. And give a clear assessment of how AI is improving the platform. “Everything that makes creators valuable—the ability to be real, to connect, to have an inimitable voice—is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools,” he wrote. “The feed is starting to fill up with everything that’s been done.”
But Mosseri doesn’t seem too concerned about the change. He says there is “a lot of wonder in AI content” and that the platform may need to rethink its way of labeling such images by “stamping real media, not just chasing fakes.”
From Mosseri (emphasis his):
Social networks will come under increasing pressure to identify and label AI-generated content as such. All the major platforms will do a good job of identifying AI content, but will get worse over time as AI gets better at simulating reality. There is a growing number of people who believe, like me, that it will be more useful for real fingerprint media than fake media. Camera manufacturers can cryptographically sign images when they are captured, creating a chain of custody.
On one level, it is easy to understand that this seems to be the most effective method for Meta. As we’ve previously reported, technologies designed to identify AI content, such as watermarks, have proven to be very unreliable. They are easy to remove and even easier to ignore completely. Meta tags are not very clear and the company, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on AI this year alone, has admitted that it cannot reliably detect AI-generated or exploited content on its site.
That Mosseri easily admits that he lost in this matter, is telling. AI slop won. And when it comes to helping Instagram’s 3 billion users understand what is something real, that should very much be someone else’s problem, not Meta’s. Camera makers – possibly phone makers and actual camera manufacturers – should come up with their own system that sounds like watermarking to “verify authenticity in photography.” Mosseri offers few details about how this would work or be implemented at the scale needed to make it happen.
Mosseri also doesn’t really address the fact that this may alienate many photographers and other Instagram creators who are already frustrated with the app. The official often fields complaints from the group who want to know why the Instagram algorithm does not always show their posts to their followers.
But Mosseri suggests those complaints stem from an outdated idea of what Instagram is. The “polished” square footage feed, he says, is “dead.” Camera companies, in his estimation, are “making the wrong aesthetic bet” by trying to “make everyone look like a classic professional photographer.” Instead, he says more “raw” and “unpleasant” images will be how creators can show they’re real, not AI. In a world where Instagram has more AI content than not, creators have to prioritize photos and videos that make them look bad on purpose.
