Instagram wants people AI creators to start being more transparent about, uh, being AI — and will start cracking down on accounts that look like real people but are actually AI. Sort of.
There’s already an “AI Creator” label that accounts can select for their profile. But that was an option, an opt-in type of thing.
Now, Instagram is telling AI creators that if they don’t put on that label, their content won’t get recommended into the algorithm.
Basically, Instagram is telling these AI-generated accounts: fess up to being AI, or we’ll tank your reach.
They’re also tweaking the label from “AI Creator” to “AI-generated profile,” which is more accurate and less easily confused with a real human who posts about the topic of AI.
That’s probably a good thing for (real) users on Instagram.
“As generative AI becomes a bigger part of how people create, we’ve heard that people don’t like seeing a profile that seems human, only to find out later that the person featured is AI-generated,” Instagram’s blog post on the announcement says. Reasonable!
The kind of AI creators that this is targeting are accounts that look like real people — often beautiful women — and post the kind of photos or videos that lifestyle influencers might do. The classic example of this is Lil Miquela, a computer-generated influencer that predates the AI boom. But now that there are so many AI tools to easily create super-realistic women, there’s a new cottage industry.
What’s the point of these AI creators? I’m not totally sure, but I can imagine a world where creating an AI account on Instagram that looks like a hot babe could be lucrative, either through traditional influencer work like brand endorsements or by other means.
The fact that hot babes seem to be the most common type of AI-generated profile — at least as far as I’ve observed — is probably a little bit complicated. You could imagine the frustration of a real human who thinks they’re complimenting a woman’s photos when it turns out she’s just AI (embarrassing!).
Meta says it will now proactively find suspected AI-generated profiles masquerading as human and flag their accounts. Their posts won’t appear in recommendations until they add that tag.
In a world where AI slop is everywhere, from our sexy fruit melodramas to our deli menus, it’s nice at least to have a wee bit more transparency!
What do you think about Instagram’s push for AI profiles to be clearly labeled as such? Let us know in the comments below:
