By: Adam Mosseri – Head of Instagram
Source: https://www.threads.com/@mosseri/post/DS76UiklIDf/media
Photo By Anthony Quintano from Mount Laurel, United States – Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri META, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130404087
The key risk that a platform like Instagram faces is that, as the world inevitably changes more and more quickly, the platform fails to keep up. Looking forward to 2026, one new significant shift is that authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible. Everything that made creators matter—the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked—is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools. Deepfakes are getting better and better. AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media. The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything. And in that world, here’s what I think happens. Creators matter more Power has been shifting from institutions to individuals for years because the internet made it so anyone with a compelling idea could find an audience. The cost of distributing information is essentially zero, which Ben Thomson has been pointing out as far back as 2014, so people can now bypass the traditional ways information spreads (newspapers on trucks, produced shows on television) and just go directly to an audience. We see it in everything from athletes who are more relevant than their teams to journalists who are more trusted than their publications. What we’ve seen with the creator economy is individuals, not publishers, media companies or brands, establish that there is a significant market for content from people. Trust in institutions – government, media, corporations – has been declining for decades.In a world where we’ve all been inundated with heavily produced content from institutions we’ve turned to self-captured content from people we admire, creators. But we haven’t truly grappled with synthetic content yet. We are now seeing an abundance of AI generated content, and there will be much more content created by AI than captured by traditional means in a few years time. We like to talk about “AI slop,” but there is a lot of amazing AI content that thankfully lacks the disturbing properties of twisted limbs and absent physics. Even the quality AI content has a look though: it tends to feel fabricated somehow. The imagery today is too slick, people’s skin is too smooth. That will change; we are going to start to see more and more realistic AI content. Authenticity is fast becoming a scarce resource, which will in turn drive more demand for creator content, not less. The creators who succeed will be those who figure out how to maintain their authenticity whether or not they adopt new technologies. That’s harder now—not easier—because everyone can simulate authenticity. 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. The raw aesthetic Just as AI makes polish cheap, phone cameras have made professional-looking imagery ubiquitous—both trends cheapen the aesthetic. Unless you’re under 25 and use Instagram, you probably think of the app as a feed of square photos. The aesthetic is polished: lots of make up, skin smoothing, high contrast photography, beautiful landscapes. That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago. Stories are alive and well as they provide a less pressurized way to share with your followers, but the primary way people share, even photos and videos, is in DMs. That content is unpolished; it’s blurry photos and shaky videos of people’s daily experiences. Think shoe shots and unflattering candids. This raw aesthetic has bled into the zeitgeist of public content and across art forms. Think @jordan_the_stallion8 shooting videos in a bathroom mirror, or @pitchfork’s description of @mrcameron_winter’s voice as “a slurred, straining warble.” The camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic. They’re competing to make everyone look like a professional photographer from the past. Every year we see phone cameras boast about more megapixels and image processing. We are romanticising the past. Portrait mode is artificially blurring the background of a photograph to reproduce the soft glow you get from the shallow depth of field of a fixed lens. It looks good, and we like to look good. But flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume. People want content that feels real. We are going to see a significant acceleration of a more raw aesthetic over the next few years. Savvy creators are going to lean into explicitly unproduced and unflattering images of themselves. In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal. Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore—it’s proof. It’s defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it’s imperfect. Defaulting to skepticism Relatively quickly we are going to see the AI tools that create content mature and the range of aesthetics that they can produce expand. We’ll go from the Midjourney realistic video game aesthetic and imitating Wes Anderson and Studio Ghibli films to being able to direct an AI to create any aesthetic you like, including an imperfect one that presents as authentic. At this point we’ll need to shift our focus to who says something instead of what is being said. For most of my life I could safely assume that the vast majority of photographs or videos that I see are largely accurate captures of moments that happened in real life. This is clearly no longer the case and it’s going to take us, as people, years to adapt. Over time we are going to move from assuming what we see is real by default, to starting with skepticism when we see media, and paying much more attention to who is sharing something and why they might be sharing it. This is going to be incredibly uncomfortable for all of us because we’re genetically predisposed to believing our eyes. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Talking to Strangers, articulated elegantly that we, as a species, default to truth because the evolutionary and social benefits of efficient communication and cooperation far outweigh the occasional cost of being deceived. Social media platforms are going to come under increasing pressure to identify and label AI-generated content as such. All the major platforms will do good work identifying AI content, but they will get worse at it over time as AI gets better at imitating reality. There is already a growing number of people who believe, as I do, that it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media. Camera manufacturers could cryptographically sign images at capture, creating a chain of custody. Labeling content as authentic or AI-generated is only part of the solution though. We, as an industry, are going to need to surface much more context about not only the media on our platforms, but the accounts that are sharing it in order for people to be able to make informed decisions about what to believe. Where is the account? When was it created? What else have they posted? So what? In a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity—by being real, transparent, and consistent—will stand out. As for Instagram, we’re going to have to evolve in a number of ways, and fast. We need to build the best creative tools, AI-driven and traditional, for creators so that they can compete with content fully created by AI. We need to label AI-generated content clearly, and work with manufacturers to verify authenticity at capture—fingerprinting real media, not just chasing fake. We need to surface credibility signals about who’s posting so people can decide who to trust. And we’re going to need to continue to improve ranking for originality, but tackling algorithmic transparency and control is probably best left for another essay.
