Instagram head Adam Mosseri has warned that camera makers are focused on an outdated visual style as social media shifts toward rougher, more candid imagery and AI-generated visuals flood online platforms.
In a year-end post on Threads and Instagram, Mosseri reflected on authenticity at a time when “AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media.” He pushed back on the label “AI slop,” arguing that there is “a lot of amazing AI content,” though he did not cite specific examples.
Mosseri said many people over 25 still think of Instagram as a feed of carefully composed, square photos featuring polished portraits, heavy makeup, skin smoothing, and dramatic landscapes. That feed, he argued, “is dead.”
According to Mosseri, users largely stopped posting personal moments to the main feed years ago. Stories remain popular as a lower-pressure way to share with followers, but he said the primary way people share photos and videos today is through direct messages.
Against this backdrop, Mosseri criticized the direction of camera design. “The camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic,” he wrote. “They’re competing to make everyone look like a professional photographer from the past.” He pointed to smartphones touting higher megapixel counts and more aggressive image processing as part of a broader tendency to “romanticise the past.” Features like Portrait mode, he noted, mimic the shallow depth of field of traditional lenses to create a flattering, softly blurred background.
While Mosseri acknowledged that this look “looks good” and people “like to look good,” he argued that “flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume.” He predicted “a significant acceleration of a more raw aesthetic” in the coming years, with savvy creators embracing explicitly unproduced and even unflattering images.
“In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal,” he wrote. “Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore — it’s proof. It’s defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it’s imperfect.”
Yet Mosseri also acknowledged that AI tools will soon be able to simulate imperfections as well. The long-standing assumption that most photos and videos represent real-world events, he said, no longer holds. Adapting to that shift “is going to take us, as people, years.”
He expects growing pressure on social media platforms to flag AI-generated content. Major services will invest in detection, Mosseri said, but those systems will likely become less effective as AI-generated media improves at imitating reality.
Instead, Mosseri suggested it may be more practical to verify real imagery than to chase fakes. One option, he said, is for camera makers to cryptographically sign images at the moment of capture, creating a verifiable chain of custody for authentic photos and videos.