Instagram head Adam Mosseri has conceded that the anger directed at AI is not going to fade. In an interview on the Colin and Samir podcast, where he was discussing Instagram's new long-form and widescreen video formats, Mosseri said there is a trend of "more anxiety, more frustration and more anger about AI," particularly in creative industries — and that the trend will not resolve itself.
"It's not only getting worse, it's going to continue to get worse," he said. "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."
The prompt was a run of graduation ceremonies where students booed tech executives — a phenomenon Mosseri treated not as a curiosity but as a signal of a broader mood that extends beyond young people and creatives.
On how Instagram handles AI content, he was careful. The platform does not rank AI creators differently, he said, but it does have a quality problem: "There's a lot of great AI content out there, there's also a lot of AI slop. Do we rank AI content as well as we rank non-AI content? Probably not." He added that he thinks the word "slop" is used too liberally.
Instagram introduced labels for AI accounts this year, is now requiring AI accounts to label themselves in Mosseri's telling, and has been cracking down on AI-generated profiles since August. Misleading content — celebrity deepfakes among them — remains an unresolved problem. Mosseri has said a flat ban on AI content is not practical.
Why it matters. Mosseri is not a regulator or an outside critic; he runs one of the world's largest distribution platforms. A public expectation that sentiment gets worse is also a statement about product planning — more labeling, more moderation, and less room for features that could read as AI overreach.
His diagnosis is the more interesting part. After many conversations, he said, it comes down to "a fear of being left behind in some way." He listed concerns about owning your own content, about models being trained on it, about safety, and about job displacement — for content creators, engineers and mathematicians alike.
That framing moves the argument. Dismissing AI resistance as mere technophobia misses that it is also a distributional question: who captures the gains from a tool that makes work faster, and who carries the risk when their own work becomes replaceable. Platforms can mandate labels; they cannot label that question away.
One caveat: Mosseri's remarks are interview comments, not company policy, and his claim that Instagram does not favor AI creators is an assertion without disclosed ranking data. Anyone wanting to know how far AI content actually reaches will have to wait for independent measurement.
