Asked about AI and the trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged in an interview that a lot of people really don’t like AI, and it’s not just young people and creatives. Appearing on the Colin and Samir podcast to talk about the launch of widescreen and long-form video for Instagram, Mosseri said he thinks there’s a trend of “more anxiety and more frustration and more anger about AI,” particularly in creative industries:
Adam Mosseri says negativity around AI is ‘going to get worse’
The Instagram boss said that worries about AI come down to ‘a fear of being left behind in some way.’
The Instagram boss said that worries about AI come down to ‘a fear of being left behind in some way.’
It’s not only getting worse, it’s going to continue to get worse. I think we’re going to see more frustration and anger, some of it founded, some of it unfounded, over the next couple of years, and that’s going to make it hard for a lot of people, not just in the industry.
Mosseri claimed Instagram doesn’t rank AI creators differently, but raised the question of ranking quality, saying, “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.” Talking about AI slop again after previously bringing it up in a New Year’s slideshow dump, he said he thinks the term AI “slop” is used “too liberally.”
Instagram began cracking down on AI-generated profiles in August, after launching a label for AI accounts earlier this year, but misleading AI content like celebrity deepfakes remains an issue. Earlier this month, Mosseri said Instagram is “actively working out what to do” about AI fakes, but he noted, “I don’t think it’s practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform.”
Mosseri said Instagram is “now starting to require AI accounts to label themselves, because we think it’s important that people know if what they’re looking at is real or not real.” He also acknowledged there are fears around AI, including from creators:
I think people are concerned about a lot of things. I think they’re concerned about owning their content and models getting trained on their content. I think they’re concerned— there’s people who are concerned about safety. They’re concerned about job displacement, having AI displace whatever it is they do, if you’re a content creator or an engineer or a mathematician. I think there’s concerns about— I mean, fundamentally what I think it comes down to when you really have, like, a heart-to-heart with someone is a fear of being left behind in some way.