Instagram chief: negativity toward AI will keep growing
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in an interview that frustration with artificial intelligence is set to grow, especially in creative industries. He argued that most concerns ultimately come down to a fear of being left behind.
Adam Mosseri, who runs the social network Instagram, said on the Colin and Samir podcast that anxiety, frustration and anger about artificial intelligence (AI) will keep rising over the next couple of years. The interview was tied to Instagram's launch of widescreen and long-form video. The topic also follows a trend of college students booing tech executives at graduation ceremonies.
Mosseri said the negativity is not limited to young people and creatives. In his view, some of the anger is justified and some is not, but it will make life hard for many people, not only those working in the industry.
How Instagram treats AI content
Mosseri claimed Instagram does not rank AI creators differently. He did acknowledge a question of quality, asking whether AI content is ranked as well as non-AI content, and answering: "Probably not." He said there is both good AI content and a lot of low-quality "slop," though he thinks the word is used too liberally.
Instagram started cracking down on AI-generated profiles in August, after introducing a label for AI accounts earlier this year. Misleading content such as celebrity deepfakes remains a problem. Earlier this month Mosseri said the company is working out what to do about AI fakes, adding that banning AI content from the platform is not practical. Instagram is now starting to require AI accounts to label themselves, because people should know whether what they see is real.
The underlying concerns
Mosseri listed several worries: ownership of content and models being trained on creators' work, safety, and job displacement, whether someone is a content creator, an engineer or a mathematician. In his view, a frank conversation shows that it all comes down to a fear of being left behind in some way.
