Instagram boss: the hate for AI is only going to get worse

Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, said out loud what Silicon Valley usually avoids saying: people are getting angrier about AI, and it will get worse. He went on the Colin and Samir podcast to talk about widescreen and long-form video on Instagram, and got asked about college graduates booing tech executives who praise AI at commencement ceremonies.

His answer was blunt: "It's not only getting worse, it's going to continue to get worse." Over the next couple of years, Mosseri expects more frustration and anger, "some of it founded, some of it unfounded," and says it will be hard on a lot of people, not just in the industry and not just young people and creatives.

He listed the fears himself. People worry about owning their content and about models being trained on it, about safety, and about AI taking their jobs, whether they are content creators, engineers or mathematicians. But when you have a real heart-to-heart with someone, Mosseri says, it comes down to a fear of being left behind.

He also explained how Instagram treats AI content. AI creators are not ranked differently, but quality is another matter: "There's a lot of great AI content out there, there's also a lot of AI slop. Do we rank AI content as well as we rank non-AI content? Probably not." He thinks the word "slop" gets used too liberally. Instagram is now starting to require AI accounts to label themselves, but Mosseri says banning AI content from the platform outright isn't practical.

When the man whose platform runs on algorithms says the anger at AI will keep growing, it's worth listening.