Instagram head Adam Mosseri says camera makers are the problem

Instagram head Adam Mosseri has shared some end-of-year thoughts on the company’s “Threads” platform on the state of photos on social media amid an avalanche of AI slop, and blamed “camera companies” who “are betting on the wrong aesthetic.” Claiming the ubiquitous social media platform has evolved past merely sharing photos, Mosseri acknowledged the platform struggles with keeping up with inevitable changes. He claims “authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.”

“Everything that made creators matter—the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked—is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools. Deepfakes are getting better and better. AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media. The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything.”

Mosseri observed brands and influencers can go directly to the audience, bypassing the traditional media gatekeeping: “the creator economy is individuals, not publishers, media companies or brands, [establishing] that there is a significant market for content from people. Trust in institutions – government, media, corporations – has been declining for decades … But we haven’t truly grappled with synthetic content yet. 

He noted, “Just as AI makes polish cheap, phone cameras have made professional-looking imagery ubiquitous—both trends cheapen the aesthetic. 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 makeup, skin smoothing, high-contrast photography, beautiful landscapes. That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago. 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. That content is unpolished; it’s blurry photos and shaky videos of people’s daily experiences. Think shoe shots and unflattering candids.

“The camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic. 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. 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”

Mosseri adds that social media platforms will face mounting pressure to differentiate between AI-generated content and real content. He noted that, in addition toplatforms labeling AI content as inauthentic, camera makers should include encryption to verify legitimate images. 

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.