Instagram head Adam Mosseri said AI will change who can be creative, as the new tools and technology will give people who couldn’t be creators before the ability to produce content at a certain quality and scale. However, he also admitted that bad actors will use the technology for “nefarious purposes” and that kids growing up today will have to be taught that you can’t believe something just because you saw a video of it.
The Meta executive shared his thoughts on how AI is impacting the creator industry at the Bloomberg Screentime conference this week. At the interview’s start, Mosseri was asked to address the recent comments from creator Mr. Beast (Jimmy Donaldson). On Threads, Mr. Beast had suggested that AI-generated videos could soon threaten creators’ livelihoods and said it was “scary times” for the industry.
Mosseri pushed back a bit at that idea, noting that most creators won’t be using AI technology to reproduce what Mr. Beast has historically done, with his huge sets and elaborate productions; instead, it will allow creators to do more and make better content.
“If you take a big step back, what the internet did, among other things, was allow almost anyone to become a publisher by reducing the cost of distributing content to essentially zero,” Mosseri explained. “And what some of these generative AI models look like they’re going to do is they’re going to reduce the cost of producing content to basically zero,” he said. (This, of course, does not reflect the true financial, environmental, and human costs of using AI, which are substantial.)
In addition, the exec suggested that there’s already a lot of “hybrid” content on today’s big social platforms, where creators are using AI in their workflow, but not producing fully synthetic content. For instance, they might be using AI tools for color corrections or filters. Going forward, Mosseri said, the line between what’s real and what’s AI-generated will become even more blurred.
“It’s going to be a little bit less like, what is organic content and what is AI synthetic content, and what the percentages are. I think there’s gonna be actually more in the middle than pure synthetic content for a while,” he said.
As things change, Mosseri said Meta has some responsibility to do more in terms of identifying what content is AI-generated. But he also noted that the way the company had gone about this wasn’t the “right focus” and was practically “a fool’s errand.” He was referring to how Meta had initially tried to label AI content automatically, which led to a situation where it was labeling real content as AI, because AI tools, including those from Adobe, were used as part of the process.
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The executive said that the labeling system needs more work, but that Meta should also provide more context that helps people make informed decisions.
While he didn’t elaborate on what that newly added context would be, he may have been thinking about Meta’s Community Notes feature, which is the crowdsourced fact-checking system launched in the U.S. this year, modeled on the one X uses. Instead of turning to third-party fact checkers, Community Notes and similar systems mark content with corrections or additional context when users who often share opposing opinions agree that a fact-check or further explanation is needed. It’s likely that Meta could be weighing the use of such a system for flagging when something is AI-generated but hasn’t been labeled as such.
Rather than saying it was fully the platform’s responsibility to label AI content, Mosseri suggested that society itself would have to change.
“My kids are young. They’re nine, seven, and five. I need them to understand, as they grow up and they get exposed to the internet, that just because they’re seeing a video of something doesn’t mean it actually happened,” he explained. “When I grew up, and I saw a video, I could assume that that was a capture of a moment that happened in the real world,” Mosseri continued.
“What they’re going to…need to think about who is saying it, who’s sharing it, in this case, and what are their incentives, and why might they be saying it,” he concluded. (That seems like a heavy mental load for a five-to-nine-year-old child, but alas.)
In the discussion, Mosseri also touched on other topics about the future of Instagram beyond AI, including its plans for a dedicated TV app, and its newer focus on Reels and DMs as its core features (which Mosseri said just reflected user trends), and how TikTok’s changing ownership in the U.S. will impact the competitive landscape.
On the latter, he said that, ultimately, it’s better to have competition, as TikTok’s U.S. presence has forced Instagram to “do better work.” As for the TikTok deal itself, Mosseri said it’s hard to parse, but it seems like how the app has been built will not meaningfully change.”
“It’s the same app, the same ranking system, the same creators that you’re following — the same people. It’s all sort of seamless,” Mosseri said of the “new” TikTok U.S. operation. “It doesn’t seem like it’s a major change in terms of incentives,” he added.
