Instagram enters the age of infinite AI slop

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As 2025 limps toward the finish line, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has chosen an interesting way to reflect on the future: a 20-slide slideshow about how reality itself is slowly melting into AI-generated goo. 

It’s part tech manifesto, part group therapy session, and part obituary for the Instagram feed you remember, the one with square photos, tasteful filters, and brunch that looked suspiciously better than real life.

Mosseri’s big idea is simple and unsettling: we’ve entered the age of “infinite synthetic content.” Photos and videos used to be proof that something happened. 

Now they’re just vibes. Creating a convincing fake is trivial, which means our default relationship with images is flipped. 

Instead of “seeing is believing,” we’re heading toward “hmm, who posted this and why?”

This isn’t exactly a shock. Tech writers have been warning for years that AI would break photography as a trustworthy medium. 

Mosseri now agrees, noting that we’re biologically wired to trust our eyes, and that this wiring is about to cause a lot of emotional buffering wheels.

Instagram’s response plan reads like a to-do list written five minutes before a deadline: better creative tools, labels for AI-generated content, verification for real media, credibility signals for accounts, and ranking boosts for originality. 

All reasonable. Also arriving just as we barrel into 2026, wondering if it’s already too late.

Mosseri also takes a swing at camera companies, accusing them of chasing the wrong dream, making everyone look like a “pro photographer from 2015.” 

In a world where flawless images are cheap and boring, perfection has become the giveaway. 

The new signal of reality? Blurry, awkward, unflattering photos. Shoe pics. Shaky videos. Stuff you’d only send to friends in DMs.

Ironically, this raw aesthetic won’t last either. AI will learn to fake imperfection, too. 

When that happens, Mosseri says, authenticity won’t live in the image at all. It’ll live in the person behind it. Trust, consistency, and identity will matter more than pixels.

So yes, the feed is dead. Reality is negotiable. And Instagram, like the rest of us, is sprinting to keep up, armed with cryptographic fingerprints, skepticism, and maybe one more slideshow.