Instagram head Adam Mosseri pushes back on MrBeast’s AI fears, but admits society will have to adjust

Summary

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said AI will change who can be creative, as the new tools and technology will give people who couldn’t be creators before the ability to produce content at a certain quality and scale. However, he also admitted that bad actors will use the technology for “nefarious purposes” and that kids growing up today will have to be taught that you can’t believe something just because you saw a video of it. The Meta executive shared his thoughts on how AI is impacting the creator industry at the Bloomberg Screentime conference this week. At the interview’s start, Mosseri was asked to address the recent comments from creator MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson). On Threads, MrBeast had suggested that AI-generated videos could soon threaten creators’ livelihoods and said it was “scary times” for the industry. Mosseri pushed back a bit at that idea, noting that most creators won’t be using AI technology to reproduce what MrBeast has historically done, with his huge sets and elaborate productions; instead, it will allow creators to do more and make better content. “If you take a big step back, what the internet did, among other things, was allow almost anyone to become a publisher by reducing the cost of distributing content to essentially zero,” Mosseri explained. “And what some of these generative AI models look like they’re going to do is they’re going to reduce the cost of producing content to basically zero,” he said. (This, of course, does not reflect the true financial, environmental, and human costs of using AI, which are substantial.) In addition, the exec suggested that there’s already a lot of “hybrid” content on today’s big social platforms, where creators are using AI in their workflow, but not producing fully synthetic content. For instance, they might be using AI tools for color corrections or filters. Going forward, Mosseri said, the line between what’s real and what’s AI-generated will become even more blurred. “It’s going to be a little bit less l...