Instagram's head says the aesthetic that helped the app become popular is dead — and AI helped kill it

• Instagram's head says creators will have to embrace a "more raw aesthetic" in the age of AI.
• Adam Mosseri said the spread of AI images has killed the polished, curated feed that made Instagram popular.
• He said the platform needs to "evolve" as AI content becomes almost indistinguishable from real photos.

Instagram's top executive thinks AI has made the social media site's carefully curated grid a thing of the past.

In an end-of-year message posted on Threads, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the platform would have to evolve to cope with a coming flood of AI-generated content — and warned that the rise of AI had killed off Instagram's polished 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," wrote Mosseri on Wednesday.

"That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago," the Meta executive said, adding that users now kept friends updated on their personal lives through unpolished "shoe shots and unflattering candids" shared via direct messages.

Mosseri said the growing ubiquity of AI images meant creators would have to embrace this trend, and shy away from curated grids and professional-style photography in favor of a "more raw aesthetic."

"Flattering imagery is 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 everything."

Social media platforms like Instagram are grappling with a flood of AI-generated content, with tools like Midjourney and Sora making it easy to produce images and videos of almost anything.

At the same time, Meta has raced to integrate AI tools into Instagram and Facebook. Instagram rolled out an AI studio last year that lets users create custom chatbots, including digital versions of themselves, and has previously experimented with AI Instagram influencers based on real celebrities.

Mosseri said social platforms will get worse at identifying AI-generated media over time as the technology improves, adding that one solution could be for camera companies to cryptographically sign photos when they are taken to prove they are real.

The former Facebook executive said Instagram needed to label AI-generated content clearly, provide more transparency about who is posting on the platform, and build better creative controls so human users could compete with content made entirely by AI.

"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," Mosseri wrote.