I’ve been covering social media for a long time, over a decade in fact, and I can tell you one thing I’ve learned about Instagram chief Adam Mosseri: he’s a corporate drone, with little personality or passion for anything, and no matter what, he’ll toe the company line and say what’s best for Instagram and/or Meta no matter what.
Mosseri has never shown any real creative passion or conviction. Ask him what his favorite IG feature is, and he’ll say the one they just released. Ask him who his favorite artist is, and he’ll name the most popular artist on IG at the time (or his brother), ask him what he’s into, and he’ll give you some random IG trends.
Sure, he started wearing vests and chains after becoming head of IG, but Mosseri has never been a creative person, and as such he seemingly has no understanding of what creative people really want or need. He simply gets the message from Zuck, justifies the logic behind it, and then delivers it to the Instagram community. That’s why I’m always skeptical of posts where he shares his personal thoughts and opinions on the app.
Because I honestly don’t think he has, and through that prism you can usually see the corporate message he’s trying to blend into a fairly intellectualized screed.
This week, Mosseri shared his thoughts on the year ahead for IG, in a lengthy rant discussing the future of content, with the key premise being that “authenticity becomes infinitely reproducible” in the AI-enabled world.
About 20 text-only slides in an IG carousel post (could text messaging become a new IG posting option at some point?), Mosseri explains that:
- With AI tools, anyone can now replicate the work of creators
- AI content is also getting better and will soon become indistinguishable from human-made content
- People no longer share personal content on Instagram (they share it in DMs)
- Creators turn to less polished content to combat AI fakes (roughness as evidence, as Mosseri puts it)
- But AI tools will soon replicate this aesthetic too, increasing skepticism about what’s real and what’s not.
- Instagram is working to showcase AI content through labels, but it will soon become overwhelming and IG won’t be able to label everything
- To counter this, Mosseri says Instagram will look to verify authentic content and showcase original creators
- Instagram will also try to do more to display information about who is behind each account
So what does this all mean?
Well, based on the aforementioned overview of Mosseri’s motivations, I’d say the impetus here is pretty clear: Mosseri is trying to justify the influx of AI content, rather than working to protect creators, and give users more choice over what they see in the app.
Meta’s expenses hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI tools, so it makes sense that it wants users to create with them, expanding its position as the AI market leader. More people creating with AI is better for Meta, so Mosseri is essentially waving the white flag and saying that creators will have to get better at producing original content if they want to keep up with AI fakes.
This is despite more and more platforms exploring anti-AI options as people become overwhelmed by AI sloppiness. That in turn impacts users’ trust in such a way that they are less likely to share posts because they don’t know if they are real or fake. This is essentially the antithesis of what social media has traditionally been about: empowering people to share their own perspectives with the world. AI has eroded this, and Meta has actively pushed for this to happen by encouraging users to create with their AI tools at every turn, so Mosseri’s veiled concern about this is disingenuous to say the least.
Mosseri knows that Meta actually wants more AI-generated junk, which means more content flowing through the system and more opportunities to keep people engaged. That’s why it’s actively creating AI tools that are better at replicating the work of real people. So while Mosseri flags initiatives to spotlight authentic creative work from real, human creators, it is Meta herself who gives people the tools to deny this.
And undoubtedly the solutions here will also benefit Meta. Meta will encourage more creators to sign up for Meta Verified and then rank their content higher because Meta will know it’s from real, human creators. And while Mosseri says they can’t flag all AI content, Meta could go a long way to countering this with its own built-in digital tagging (and by working with other platforms to detect various forms of AI tagging), or even by adding a simple flagging system that lets users indicate whether they think a post is AI-generated (if the majority of tags suggest the AI is in it, IG could add the AI content tag).
There are ways to counter this, but Mosseri is trying to justify the concept that AI content is going to get so good that creators will have to adapt their approach.
But they won’t.
Sure, some AI-generated content is actually good, but the ease with which it can be created allows anyone to pump out AI-generated crap, and it does so on such a scale that the vast majority of AI material is sloppy indeed.
Do you know which AI-generated content succeeds? Satisfied with a good concept, a man-made idea that forms the core of the performance. AI tools can’t generate human ideas, which remains the key differentiator, and AI tools can’t develop the same relationship with an audience as the best online creators.
Human connection remains key, and while Mosseri may want to downplay that as a means to justify the influx of AI content, it remains the foundation of all resonant, popular creatives and makers.
That’s not going to change. AI tools may get better at creating derivative works, but they will always be derivative and only resonate based on the idea and concept behind them. Great ideas and concepts are hard to come up with, and even harder to consistently come up with, while very few people in the world have a personality that shines through on screen and resonates with a wide audience, which then allows them to build a viable, valuable online community. And even fewer people have the work ethic and dedication to make this happen.
That’s why, despite the promises of the “creator economy,” only a fraction of a percentage of online creators ever actually make money from their work. This isn’t a realistic “career” for 99% of people, but the platforms want you to believe that if you consistently create content and feed more material into their databases, which they can then show to users to keep them engaged, you too can become the next online billionaire.
It chases the dragon, and that dragon keeps their profits high. So of course they’ll say, “creators need to come up with better angles to stay ahead.”
But no matter how good AI content becomes, it doesn’t matter if the concept is nonsense. People-centered ideas are what people identify with, and the ability to come up with such ideas is a skill in itself.
That’s where the real value lies, and it always has been that way. Having more tools to create more crap doesn’t change that.
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