Instagram boss says the platform as it's known is dead and 'AI slop' bears much of the blame

Adam Mosseri, the general director (CEO) of Instagram, believes that artificial intelligence has turned the carefully curated stream of the social network into a relic of the past, writes Business Insider.

In a year-end message published on the Threads network, Mosseri wrote that the platform will need to evolve to cope with an impending wave of AI-generated content and warned that the rise of AI has ended the polished aesthetic that defined Instagram.

“If you're under 25 and don't use Instagram, you probably think of the app as a stream of square photos. The aesthetic is refined: lots of makeup, skin smoothing, high-contrast photography, beautiful landscapes,” Mosseri wrote.

“That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments in the feed years ago,” said the executive of the company owned by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta giant. Mosseri added that users now keep their friends up to date with their personal lives through “shoe photos and unflattering snapshots,” sent via direct messages.

Social networks like Instagram have been flooded with AI-generated images and clips

Mosseri said the increasing ubiquity of AI-generated imagery means content creators will need to adapt to this trend and move away from meticulously clean grids and professional-looking photography in favor of a “rawer aesthetic”.

“Flattering 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 “synthetic stuff of all kinds.”

While he didn't explicitly use the term “AI slop,” Mosseri was essentially referring to the wave of low-quality content, photos, and videos mass-generated using AI tools to drive traffic, clicks, or advertising revenue. In some cases these images and clips are used to promote scams, using the image of politicians, celebrities or well-known people from public life.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are facing a wave of AI-generated content as tools like Midjourney and Sora, OpenAI's text-based clip generator, make it extremely easy to produce images and videos of almost anything.

The head of Instagram says it is no longer clear that most of the images on the platform are real

But even Meta has been quick to integrate artificial intelligence tools into Instagram and Facebook. Last year, Instagram launched an AI studio that lets users create personalized chatbots, including digital versions of themselves, and has previously experimented with AI-generated Instagram “influencers” based on real-life celebrities.

Mosseri said social platforms will become increasingly poor at identifying AI-generated media as the technology improves. He floated as a possible solution that camera and video camera manufacturers would cryptographically sign photos and recordings at the time they are taken to prove they are real.

Mosseri said Instagram needs to clearly label AI-generated content, provide more transparency about who's publishing on the platform, and build better creative tools so human users can compete with AI-powered content.

“For most of my life I could safely assume that the vast majority of photos or videos I see are, by and large, faithful captures of real-life moments. This is clearly no longer the case,” Mosseri wrote in his message.