Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, recently made two interesting statements – on the one hand, he admits that AI has taken over the platform and is changing what people post:
“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 make up, skin smoothing, high contrast photography, beautiful landscapes,” wrote Mosseri on Wednesday. “That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago,” the Meta executive said, adding that users now kept friends updated on their personal lives through unpolished “shoe shots and unflattering candids” shared via direct messages.
And on the other hand, he concedes that you simply can’t trust what you see anymore:
For most of my life I could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened. This is clearly no longer the case and it’s going to take us years to adapt. We’re going to move from assuming what we see is real by default, to starting with skepticism. Paying attention to who is sharing something and why. This will be uncomfortable - we’re genetically predisposed to believing our eyes.
It goes without saying that this might morph into a larger problem – not just for Instagram but society at large. Personally, I wonder how long it will take the general public to shift from “I trust what I see” to “I never trust a photo unless proven otherwise.”
