Photo Credit: Adam Mosseri (Instagram)
Instagram head Adam Mosseri says we should be fingerprinting real media instead of trying to track and identify the growing amount of AI slop online.
If you’ve been on any social media platform in the last year, you’ve undoubtedly witnessed the onslaught of AI-generated content that has taken over basically every feed. But Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri says that’s to be expected, and it’s only going to become more prevalent—so we should be identifying “real media,” rather than “chasing fake” content.
“We are now seeing an abundance of AI-generated content, and there will be much more content created by AI than captured by traditional means in a few years’ time,” wrote Mosseri on Threads. “We like to talk about ‘AI slop,’ but there is a lot of amazing AI content that thankfully lacks the disturbing properties of twisted limbs and absent physics.”
“Social media platforms are going to come under increasing pressure to identify and label AI-generated content as such. All the major platforms will do good work identifying AI content, but they will get worse at it over time as AI gets better at imitating reality,” he continued.
“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.”
While it makes sense for manufacturers to adopt digital watermarking to alleviate confusion over whether an image is legitimate, the Instagram head’s stance indicates a bigger issue. There is already way too much AI-generated content for anyone to keep track of it all. Many platforms that have employed some form of AI tagging are not always accurate, and bad actors who don’t want their content to be identified as fake might take advantage of that fact.
Studies indicate that AI slop accounts for as much as 70% of the content we see on social media now, but that number seems a little high. However, Mosseri is probably right in that it’s impossible to identify every piece of “AI slop” out there—and it’s only going to become more difficult as the technology improves.
So what’s the solution? Maybe identifying human-created content is the way to go, or perhaps we need to expect more of our tech company overlords. Either way, it will be interesting to see how AI tracking evolves and social media platforms continue to fight (or embrace) AI slop this year.
