Instagram CEO: 2026 will favour raw, real human content
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri says 2026 will favour raw, realistic content as AI floods feeds, making overly polished posts less appealing and harder to trust
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri says 2026 is likely to become the year people crave content that feels more real, after AI-generated material increasingly dominated feeds throughout 2025.
Mosseri said AI content has been taking over social media feeds in large volumes, creating major impacts for photographers and creators. At the same time, he suggested this saturation could push the 2026 trend towards content that feels more authentic and grounded in reality.
He pointed to rapid advances in AI technology in 2025 that are expected to accelerate further, flooding the internet with synthetic material and making it harder for users to distinguish what is real from what is fake.
A likely consequence, he said, is rising pressure on platforms to detect and label AI-generated content. However, he argued that AI has already reached a point where it can produce highly realistic images, making reliable detection and identity verification increasingly difficult—implying that platform efforts in that direction may not be sufficient.
Mosseri also suggested that as AI output becomes ubiquitous, “too-perfect” content—heavily edited or algorithmically smoothed images—may lose its appeal, because AI can now produce similar polished visuals within seconds.
Instead, he expects greater attention to shift towards content that looks raw, real and imperfect: backlighting, shaky hands, small flaws and human traces that make an image feel less manufactured. Those imperfect details, he said, are likely to become a defining current of 2026.
