Instagram’s CEO believes we’ll have to start labelling real content

Users are constantly struggling to distinguish between “real” media and AI-generated content, but Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri might have a solution.

To ring in the New Year, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said via Threads, Instagram’s answer to X (formerly Twitter), that we should be looking for “authenticity after abundance” when it comes to social media use.

“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…one new significant shift is that authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.”

AI is making it increasingly difficult to understand what we’re seeing, as AI-generated media is becoming more convincing with the continued evolution of text-to-image and text-to-video models.

Mosseri claims that “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.”

Whether Instagram and other social media platforms are “real” is up for debate. However, it’s become easier than ever to deceive social media users using AI.

Deepfakes are getting more convincing, and “AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media,” Mosseri said.

“The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything.”

Mosseri suggests that Instagram and other social media feeds are becoming polluted by synthetic media, and as a result, people are growing more skeptical of what they see online.

The Instagram CEO said that “social media platforms are going to come under increasing pressure to identify and label AI-generated content.”

This means finding a solution that makes sense for both users and social media platforms.

“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.”

One example Mosseri provided was that camera companies could “cryptographically sign images at capture,” which would create a chain of ownership.

Mosseri implies that Instagram could be moving towards labelling that identifies real, human-made content, rather than labelling AI-generated content.

“​​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,” Mosseri concludes.

While the Instagram CEO doesn’t confirm that “real content” labels will be enforced on the platform over AI-generated content labels, it seems that Mosseri believes that the way we’ve been labeling our content just isn’t working.

While platforms like Instagram may grow more adept at identifying AI-generated content, this will eventually become harder as “AI gets better at imitating reality.”

Have thoughts about this topic? Others do, too. Join them in the discussion.

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Aerie, Polaroid, and Heineken are among high-profile companies that launched “human-made” marketing campaigns this year, as 2025 marks the shift towards "100% human" and “no AI” products.

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