Instagram’s Head Admits AI Poses Threat To ‘Authentic Content’, Says Success Will Hinge On This Factor

• In a year-end letter, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri acknowledges that AI content is flooding social media.
• He says audiences will gravitate toward creators they trust and ‘raw’ content in the future.
• Instagram is considering labeling content at the moment of capture and other platform tweaks to better surface authentic, non-AI content. 

Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta Platforms’ Instagram, has acknowledged what many users have sensed for some time: AI-generated and overly polished content is increasingly dominating social media feeds, making posts look slicker but also more uniform, and, at times, less inspiring.

“Authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible” as AI content tools improve, and “the feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything,” Mosseri said in his year-end letter, posted on Threads. 

Authenticity Over Opulence

In this environment, creators who have earned their audience’s trust will matter even more, as user-generated, independent content overtakes that produced by media organisations and institutions.

The trend has far-reaching implications for digital content and creators, coming at a time when independent creators and content businesses have exploded and now form a core pillar of the advertising business.

Mosseri admitted the changing landscape, saying that success will hinge on uniqueness rather than production skills. “The bar is going to shift from ‘can you create?’ to ‘can you make something that only you could create?’ That’s the new gate.”

He pointed out that the polished feed aesthetic is slowly being replaced by raw, imperfect content—“Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore—it’s proof (of non-AI content)”—and that more people are sharing stories and direct messages featuring blurry photos and shaky videos.

Instagram’s Dominant Position

Instagram has 3 billion monthly active users, over one-third of the world population, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in September. Industry estimates put TikTok’s MAUs at around 1.6 billion. 

In an October earnings call, Zuckerberg announced that Instagram and Facebook Reels had surpassed a $50 billion annual run rate. According to Sensor Tower data, users spend an average of 27 minutes a day on Instagram Reels, 21 minutes on YouTube Shorts, and 44 minutes on TikTok.

The social media giant, which earns most of its revenue from online advertising, is clocking record revenue growth. The topline increased 26% to $51.2 billion in the last quarter, with an operating margin of over 40%. On Stocktwits, META had a ‘bearish’ retail sentiment reading on Friday.

Mosseri’s Workaround

Admitting that identifying AI-generated content would become even harder, Mosseri discussed tweaks to help users discover authentic creators and content on Instagram. 

The company will “work with manufacturers” – likely camera firms – to verify authenticity at the moment of capture, and will surface more context about creator accounts so users can judge trustworthiness. Instagram will also offer more powerful creative tools to creators. 

With powerful AI video-generation tools — from OpenAI’s Sora to Google’s Nano Banana — now at creators’ fingertips and camera makers such as GoPro feeding vast troves of video data into AI training, AI-generated video is poised to explode

“The creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity—by being real, transparent, and consistent—will stand out,” Mosseri said.

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