Instagram chief Adam Mosseri expects public anger toward AI to keep growing over the next couple of years. He says people fear losing their work, their jobs and being left behind, and Instagram is still struggling to handle AI-generated content, so it is now starting to require AI accounts to label themselves.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri expects public anger toward artificial intelligence to intensify, and he admits the platform is still struggling to handle AI-generated content.
Asked about a trend of college students booing tech executives at graduation ceremonies, Mosseri said in an interview that “a lot of people really don’t like AI,” and that the resentment is not limited to young people and creatives. He made the comments on the Colin and Samir podcast, where he was discussing the launch of widescreen and long-form video on Instagram.
Why is anger toward AI growing?
Mosseri described “more anxiety and more frustration and more anger about AI,” particularly in creative industries. He did not expect it to ease. “It’s not only getting worse, it’s going to continue to get worse,” he said. “I think we’re going to see more frustration and anger, some of it founded, some of it unfounded, over the next couple of years, and that’s going to make it hard for a lot of people, not just in the industry.”
Mosseri said Instagram does not rank AI creators differently from other creators. He then raised a harder question about quality. “There’s a lot of great AI content out there, there’s also a lot of AI slop,” he said. “Do we rank AI content as well as we rank non-AI content? Probably not.” He also said the word “slop,” which he had brought up in a New Year’s slideshow, is used “too liberally.”
Instagram began cracking down on AI-generated profiles in August, after launching a label for AI accounts earlier this year. Misleading AI content, including celebrity deepfakes, still gets through. Earlier this month, Mosseri said Instagram is “actively working out what to do” about AI fakes. “I don’t think it’s practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform,” he said.
Is Instagram labeling AI accounts?
Instead, the company is moving toward labeling. Mosseri said Instagram is “now starting to require AI accounts to label themselves, because we think it’s important that people know if what they’re looking at is real or not real.”
He also acknowledged that the fears go beyond the content itself. Mosseri said people are worried about owning their work and about AI models being trained on their content. Some are concerned about safety. Others fear job loss, whether they are content creators, engineers or mathematicians. Asked what sits underneath all of it, he gave a blunt answer.
“Fundamentally what I think it comes down to when you really have, like, a heart-to-heart with someone is a fear of being left behind in some way,” he said.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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