Instagram head Adam Mosseri has a blunt prediction about the public mood on artificial intelligence. He expects the backlash to grow, not fade, over the next two years.
Mosseri made the comments on the Colin and Samir podcast while discussing Instagram’s new widescreen and long-form video push.
He was asked about college students booing tech executives at graduation ceremonies. Mosseri said the frustration is not confined to young people or creative industries.
“It’s going to continue to get worse”
“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 also addressed how Instagram treats AI-made content. He said the platform does not rank AI creators differently from anyone else, but he questioned the quality of what gets surfaced.
“There’s a lot of great AI content out there, there’s also a lot of AI slop,” he said. “Do we rank AI content as well as we rank non-AI content? Probably not.”
He pushed back on how broadly the word “slop” gets applied. Mosseri argued the label is used “too liberally” against work that took real effort.
Labels, deepfakes, and enforcement
Instagram has been tightening its rules on synthetic accounts. The company launched a label for AI accounts earlier this year and began cracking down on AI-generated profiles in August.
Misleading material still spreads. Celebrity deepfakes remain a persistent problem on the platform, and detection lags behind the tools that produce them.
The comments echo a wider shift in the industry. Publishers and platforms keep spending on in-house AI image models while audiences grow more skeptical of the output.
Google’s recent move to feed Gmail and Photos data into ad targeting has added to that unease. Each expansion of AI into personal data gives critics another example to cite.
For Instagram, the tension is commercial. AI tools speed up content production, but a hostile audience punishes platforms that look automated. Mosseri’s own timeline suggests that tension gets sharper before it eases.
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