You can’t trust your eyes to tell you what’s real anymore, says the head of Instagram

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri is closing out 2025 with a 20-images-deep dive into what a new era of “infinite synthetic content” means as it all becomes harder and harder to distinguish from reality, and the old, more personal Instagram feed that he says has been “dead” for years. Last year, The Verge’s Sarah Jeong wrote that “...the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do,” and Mosseri eventually concurs: You can read the full text from his slideshow at the bottom of this post, but according to Mosseri, the evolution required of Instagram and other platforms is that “We need to build the best creative tools. Label AI-generated content and verify authentic content. Surface credibility signals about who’s posting. Continue to improve ranking for originality.”

Our readers and listeners know we’ve spent the last few years discussing the “what is a photo?” apocalypse arriving in the form of AI image editing and generation. Now, as we hurtle into 2026, it feels a little late to lay out a thin list of proposals.

Mosseri’s Instagram-centered view of the whole thing claims that “We like to complain about ‘AI slop,’ but there’s a lot of amazing AI content,” without specifically identifying any of it, or specifically mentioning Meta’s push for AI tools. He claims camera companies are going the wrong way by trying to give everyone the ability to “look like a pro photographer from 2015.”

Instead, he says raw, unflattering images are, temporarily, a signal of reality, until AI is able to copy imperfections too. Then “we’ll need to shift our focus to who says something instead of what is being said,” with fingerprints and cryptographic signing of images from the cameras that took them to ID real media instead of relying on tags and watermarks added to AI.

Mosseri is far from the first tech exec to point toward the same issue. Samsung exec Patrick Chomet took the approach that “actually, there is no such thing as a real picture,” after controversies last year over the Galaxy phones’ approach to Moon photography, and Apple’s Craig Federighi told the WSJ he’s “concerned” about the impact of AI editing. But hey, maybe we’re just another Instagram slideshow or two away from figuring all of this out.