In a year-end 2025 post, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri discussed the massive changes AI is bringing to photography, emphasizing that authenticity will become increasingly difficult to achieve – and offered thoughts on how creators, camera makers, and Instagram itself will need to adapt.
“The main risk Instagram faces is that as the world changes faster, the platform fails to keep pace. In 2026, a major change: authenticity becomes infinitely repeatable,” Mosseri wrote in the post, which took the form of 20 slides of text – no images. (He also posted a somewhat expanded version on Threads.)
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Mosseri said AI makes it impossible to distinguish real photos from AI-generated images and that as more “savvy creators turn to unproduced and unflattering images,” AI itself will follow with images that also rely on this “raw aesthetic.” This will force us, he said, to change the way we approach images of the jump.
“At this point we will have to focus more on who is saying something rather than what is being said,” Mosseri said. But it will take us “years to adapt” and stop assuming that what we see is real. “It will be uncomfortable – we are genetically predisposed to believe our eyes.”
On the technical side, Mosseri predicted that camera equipment manufacturers will begin offering ways to cryptographically sign photos to establish a chain of ownership, thereby proving that the images are not generated by AI.
He also warned that these camera makers were going in the wrong direction by offering ways to help amateur photographers create polished images. “They’re competing to make everyone look like a professional photographer from 2015,” Mosseri said. “Flattering images are cheap to produce and boring to consume. People want content that looks real.”
Instagram and the need to “highlight credibility signals”
Instagram is owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp. Like these platforms, Instagram AI features added in 2025. It also surprised some users who saw AI-generated versions of themselves appearing in ads. Like other platforms, Instagram has struggled with the flood of AI-generated content, including slopecrowding out human content.
Just look at the powerful AI image and video generators that have emerged in 2025, from Google’s nanobananas has Sora from OpenAI.
In his posts, Mosseri said he hoped the struggle to distinguish between fake and real content would be resolved by labeling “real media” and rewarding originality in how that content is classified.
Mosseri concluded by listing the steps Instagram will need to take, driven by the need to “surface credibility signals about who posts so people can decide who to trust.”
- Create tools, both traditional and AI-powered, to help creators compete with content created entirely by AI.
- Clearly label AI-generated content.
- Work with manufacturers to “verify authenticity at capture – fingerprinting real media, not just scanning for fakes.”
- Improve ranking for originality.
“Instagram is going to have to evolve in many ways,” he said, “and quickly.”
