(Credit: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Whether you’re scrolling YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Spotify, or even browsing for educational articles online—AI slop is hard to avoid. On Instagram, some AI-generated models are racking up more followers than most would-be human influencers could dream of.
In response, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri has promised to support authentic and “raw” creators on the platform, hinting at new tools to help human creators.
In a post on Threads, Mosseri argued that authenticity is “fast becoming a scarce resource,” but that this will “drive more demand for creator content, not less.” Mosseri said “flattering imagery”—for example, edited selfies with no blemishes or high-contrast travel snaps—“is cheap to produce and boring to consume.” However, “People want content that feels real,” he says.
“We are going to see a significant acceleration of a more raw aesthetic over the next few years,” Mosseri said, predicting that savvy creators will increasingly lean into explicitly unproduced and unflattering images of themselves. “In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal.”
Mosseri also acknowledged the scale of the slop problem facing social media platforms, predicting that although “all the major platforms will do good work identifying AI content,” they will “get worse at it over time as AI gets better at imitating reality.”
In terms of practical takeaways, Mosseri suggested it may be “more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media” on Instagram. He suggested that camera manufacturers could cryptographically sign images at capture, creating a technical seal of authenticity.
Mosseri said Instagram needs to “surface credibility signals about who’s posting so people can decide who to trust,” as well as “continue to improve ranking for originality.” Finally, he said Instagram also needs to roll out new creative tools, both AI-enabled and traditional, to help human creators compete with increasingly advanced AI. But Mosseri didn’t officially announce any new features or timelines for when they could be introduced.
In November, TikTok rolled out a new feature as part of its Manage Topics menu, allowing users to see less AI-generated content (even if it doesn't remove it entirely). Instagram, alongside Facebook and Threads, did roll out labels for AI-generated content in 2024, but the labeling depends on user disclosure or the platform being able to detect it, meaning large amounts of AI content still appears without AI labels.