By John Brandon
Reach is everything on social media. Post a thoughtful message that four people read and you might as well scream at the ocean. Recently, Instagram made a move to crack down on AI content by potentially limiting the reach of posts. That might actually work, and it could pave the way for at least addressing some of the AI slop issues we’ve been dealing with lately on social media.
As a quick summary, AI slop is the computer-generated content you might be seeing on your Instagram, X, Facebook and TikTok feeds. It looks ultra-realistic, mostly because AI content generators are now really good at making images and posts that look authentic.
The Instagram crackdown involves two seemingly minor changes. One is that AI creators, meaning the accounts that use an AI-generated profile and use AI content, must use a new label. Earlier this year, Instagram required using the label “AI creator”—the new label “AI-generated profile” is a way to identify the content more clearly.
However, it’s the second change that is the most surprising and potentially could help us all identify AI slop more easily. If an AI creator does not use the new label, Instagram can reduce the reach of posts.
According to the official statement: “Creators who proactively add the AI-generated profile label will not see a change to their profile’s reach. Creators who don’t appropriately label their AI-generated profiles may see limits to their profile’s reach.”
Why the Instagram crackdown is happening now
While a very recent Pew Research study looked at online content, it’s a good indicator of what is happening on social media as well. The study found that 10% of all content you see online is AI generated, and that’s a sharp increase since 2021 when AI slop accounted for only about 2% of all content.
The strong implication here is that AI content is now proliferating widely. Another study found that one out of every four posts on social media is aided by AI in some way. LinkedIn recently added a way for users to label AI content by clicking a button when they see the content.
As it happens, LinkedIn users are all over this change for Instagram users, and some have posted several insightful comments. In the posts I reviewed, most users are saying the Instagram change could help because the main reason people are using the bots is to increase reach, and this a notable penalty.
My own take on this is that Instagram has the best data on users and officials there know what works and doesn’t work. It is a balancing act, because as bots gain more reach and AI content looks more and more realistic, some of us could be fooled into thinking it’s real and that ultimately hurts the brand.
Reach is a tricky business. A post can go viral for the wrong reasons, but it can also go viral because we think fake content is legitimate and we connect on a personal level. Once we realize it’s AI generated content, we become just a bit less likely to keep clicking and sharing. It has a longterm impact on our engagement.
I feel this move by Instagram is a good step and will hopefully cause more human-generated content to surface as a way to avoid more Instagram AI slop. We’ll see in the coming months of it actually starts
Feature image credit: Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images
By John Brandon
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