Instagram head Adam Mosseri has shared some end-of-year thoughts on the state of photos on social media amid an avalanche of AI slop, and has said “camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic.”
In a lengthy post shared to Threads and Instagram, Mosseri addressed the issue of autheticity in a world where “AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media.”
Moserri takes issue with the term “AI slop,” saying there is “a lot of amazing AI content,” without giving any examples.
“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,” Moserri says before declaring that feed “is dead.”
“People largely stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago,” he continues. “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.”
It is here where Mosseri takes aim at camera companies.
“The camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic,” he says. “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,” he continues. “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.”
But Mosseri then immediately follows the above by saying AI will soon be able to recreate imperfect imagery anyway.
“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,” he says before offering some possible solutions.
“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.”
