Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri Says AI Backlash Is Only Going to Get Worse

Instagram head Adam Mosseri says public anger over AI "is going to continue to get worse" — and he expects the frustration to peak over the next couple of years. His comments came in an interview on the Colin and Samir podcast, where he was asked about a recent trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies.

Mosseri did not dodge the question. He acknowledged that a lot of people really don't like AI. And it's not just young people and creatives, he said. Speaking alongside the launch of widescreen and long-form video for Instagram, he described a clear trend of "more anxiety and more frustration and more anger about AI," particularly in creative industries.

What exactly did Mosseri say?

His prediction was blunt. "It's not only getting worse, it's going to continue to get worse," Mosseri 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."

That framing matters coming from one of Meta's most visible product leaders. The executive running a platform that distributes AI content at massive scale is openly forecasting escalating public hostility to that same technology. He also conceded that some of the anger is founded — a notable admission from a company betting heavily on generative AI.

The context sharpens the statement. College students have booed tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, a signal that skepticism toward the industry has moved from opinion columns into physical protest. Mosseri treated that backlash as data, not an aberration.

Does Instagram rank AI content differently?

On the mechanics of his own platform, Mosseri made a striking admission about ranking quality. He claimed Instagram doesn't rank AI creators differently from human creators. But he immediately raised a harder question about how well the recommendation system handles AI-made posts.

"There's a lot of great AI content out there, there's also a lot of AI slop," Mosseri said. "Do we rank AI content as well as we rank non-AI content? Probably not."

That "probably not" is the quote worth holding onto. The head of Instagram is conceding that his platform's ranking systems treat AI-generated material worse than non-AI content — not by policy, but by outcome.

This is not Mosseri's first pass at the subject. He previously brought up AI slop in a New Year's slideshow dump. In the podcast interview, he pushed back on the term itself, saying he thinks "slop" is used "too liberally" to describe AI content.

What is Instagram doing about AI fakes?

The platform has taken concrete steps this year. Instagram began cracking down on AI-generated profiles in August, after launching a label for AI accounts earlier in the year. The problem has not gone away: misleading AI content, including celebrity deepfakes, remains an issue on the platform.

Earlier this month, Mosseri said Instagram is "actively working out what to do" about AI fakes. But he ruled out the most aggressive option. "I don't think it's practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform," he said.

Instead, Instagram is betting on transparency. "We're now starting to require AI accounts to label themselves, because we think it's important that people know if what they're looking at is real or not real," Mosseri said.

The labeling approach puts the burden of disclosure on AI account operators rather than on Instagram's enforcement teams. Whether labels alone can contain deepfakes of real celebrities is an open question the company has not yet answered.

Why do people fear AI, according to Mosseri?

Mosseri gave one of the more candid catalogues of public AI anxiety from a major tech executive. He listed the concerns he hears directly:

• Creators worried about owning their content and about models getting trained on it
• People concerned about safety
• Workers worried about job displacement, whether they are content creators, engineers, or mathematicians

"I think people are concerned about a lot of things," Mosseri said. "I think they're concerned about owning their content and models getting trained on their content. I think they're concerned — there's people who are concerned about safety. They're concerned about job displacement, having AI displace whatever it is they do."

Then he went one level deeper. After what he called a "heart-to-heart" with someone, he said the fear distills to a single core emotion. "Fundamentally what I think it comes down to when you really have, like, a heart-to-heart with someone is a fear of being left behind in some way," Mosseri said.

That diagnosis came from the executive whose parent company, Meta, is building and deploying the very models driving that fear of being left behind.

Why does this matter?

The stakes here run in two directions at once. For creators, Mosseri's comments confirm that the platform hosting their work sees their anxiety as legitimate and growing — and admits its own ranking systems don't handle AI content as well as human content. For Meta, the comments sketch a strategic problem: the company must keep distributing AI content at scale while the public mood around that content, by its own executive's forecast, deteriorates through the next couple of years.

Mosseri's interview also lands at a moment when the booing of tech CEOs at graduations has become a recurring image, and when regulators, creators, and platforms are fighting over training data, labeling, and deepfakes. His answer — transparency labels, no ban, better ranking eventually — is Instagram's current position on all of it.

The forward signal is Mosseri's own timeline. He expects frustration and anger over AI to keep building for the next couple of years, some of it founded and some of it unfounded, and to make things hard for a lot of people beyond the industry itself. How Instagram's labeling requirements and ranking improvements hold up under that pressure will be the test.