Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:41:17 · Adam Mosseri
[00:41:17] S0: I think it's going to be a tailwind, but I think it's going to be a challenge. And not just because it's more content. Obviously, we're an attention-driven business. We're an advertising business. More content means potentially more attention. That's not for free, though. I don't think we're very good at ranking AI content yet. There's great AI content, this crap AI content. You should just see the stuff you're interested in and not any of the stuff you're not interested in. But I do think that in a world where ... Or for years now, and I've said this many times, power shifting from institutions to individuals across industries. The easiest example of sports, where players are more relevant than teams now, and that was not the case when I was a kid. In that world, I think it behooves us to invest in individuals and to invest in, specifically, for Instagram and creators. And I mean creators broadly. I don't just mean influencers who are promoting branded content and making native-only videos. I mean, anybody who's using platforms like Instagram to help do what they do. You could be a journalist, you could be an artist, you could be selling scarves you sew. But you're out there, as yourself, creating and sharing content that helps you achieve whatever it is you're trying to do. So we've been leaning in that direction for many years now. That's been one of our two or three most important audiences for as long as I've been on Instagram. In a world where there's an abundance of synthetic content, I actually think people are going to seek out creativity and authenticity and people more, not less. And I think that will help us. That doesn't mean that we won't have AI content on our platform. There's going to be bad and good AI content, and we're going to try and handle that the way we normally handle content. So unsafe goes away. Interesting versus not interesting is based on ranking and personalization. But I think people are going to really seek out other points of view, because Instagram was never just about the content. It was always about, to a certain degree, the person behind the content, the point of view, the reason they're sharing it, their perspective. And I think that's going to become more important, not less. And I think given that we are not the best at a lot of things, but we are the largest creator platform.
00:43:30 · Adam Mosseri, Lenny Rachitsky
If you look at how we define creators and how many creators use us versus other platforms, I think it'll be a tailwind for us, because I think people are going to seek out people. [00:43:41] S1: And this connects to your earlier point that companies like, say, New York Times can pump out a bunch of AI content versus a creator. And so you're saying you kind of want to protect against that too, allow individuals to continue to perform well in spite of just all this AI content. [00:43:58] S0: If you just love AI content, great. You should be able to have a feed that's just AI town. And if you don't, then you shouldn't have it in your feed. To me, it's like ... I don't think we should ... I understand why people are. I'm not oblivious to the overall paradigm shift and sort of revolution that we're sitting in. But I don't think we should judge content based on the tool that made it. I think we should judge it based on the content, the point of view, the person behind the content. I don't think we should filter out AI content. I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not. I think we should let you know more about the person who posted anything, so that you can make informed decisions about whether or not to believe or trust them based on knowing who they are, or where they are, or how many times they've changed their profile, or if their profile's three days old or three years old. But I don't think we should be making value judgements based on what tool you used.
00:43:58 · Adam Mosseri, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:43:58] S0: If you just love AI content, great. You should be able to have a feed that's just AI town. And if you don't, then you shouldn't have it in your feed. To me, it's like ... I don't think we should ... I understand why people are. I'm not oblivious to the overall paradigm shift and sort of revolution that we're sitting in. But I don't think we should judge content based on the tool that made it. I think we should judge it based on the content, the point of view, the person behind the content. I don't think we should filter out AI content. I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not. I think we should let you know more about the person who posted anything, so that you can make informed decisions about whether or not to believe or trust them based on knowing who they are, or where they are, or how many times they've changed their profile, or if their profile's three days old or three years old. But I don't think we should be making value judgements based on what tool you used. [00:44:59] S1: Is there an AI content creator you love that you're just like, "This is so good. I love watching these AI videos." [00:45:06] S0: Yeah. What is she called? Plastic Dream Sequence. Is that what it is? [00:45:10] S1: Cool. [inaudible 00:45:12] check it out.
00:45:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:45:10] S1: Cool. [inaudible 00:45:12] check it out. [00:45:13] S0: Check it out, yeah. Plastic Dream Sequence. I have it on my phone. I'll double check. It's these sort of dolls, Barbies, but they're singing songs in these little tiny silhouettes and snippets. And it's just amazing. It's a little weird, but also kind of amazing. And it's very clearly AI, it's not pretending not to be, but it has a very clear creative and aesthetic point of view. And every time I come by one, I'm like, "Yep, we're doing this now." I'm going to watch this for 30 seconds. [00:45:47] S1: I have it pulled up here, and I want to watch it, but I'm not going to. That's awesome. [00:45:53] S0: Ifonly.ai, that's another one. He's in France. I think he's in Paris. He uses multiple different tools and models, but he kind of tries to create these dreamscapes and animate them. So he uses one model to create the image, another one to create the video, music, et cetera. He's very clearly got his own aesthetic. And you could think of him as a painter, but this is his tool. [00:46:19] S1: Is there a vision of AI versus human in the feed? Do you think it'll... You said you maybe want to mark it. How do you think about people? Are they going to be like AI account, not AI count? How do you think about it, or is that still kind of a work in progress?
00:46:31 · Adam Mosseri
[00:46:31] S0: Maybe we'll end up in the same place, but there's a difference between marking content and marking accounts, and they're both useful and interesting. So if content was created with AI, I think you should be able to know that. That's hard, by the way, because we can detect that right now, but as these models get better, we might lose the ability to detect that. So we should also be very careful to be honest with you about how confident we are in our own sort of assessment. But I think you should be able to just ask, be like, "Hey, is this AI?" And we should be able to tell you who we think it probably is, or we're not sure, or it's definitely not, or it definitely is. I actually think we might be more practical to label camera captured content, basically non-AI content as opposed to labeling AI content long-term for a couple of reasons. But then at the account level, I think it also matters. There's definitely a new spam vector, which is these fake accounts. Which by the way, an AI creator, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But there are these spam vectors which are trying to abuse that, and they're selling bogus supplements, and it's like an AI monk, and it doesn't present it, and it's not obvious that it's an AI, and it's just trying to take advantage of a certain aesthetic or a certain sort of stereotype. We need to figure out how to crack down on that. And so I do think we should be making sure that you know. Basically you just need to know, and then you can make your own informed decision. Is the account a real person or not? Is the content a real piece of content or not?
00:48:01 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:48:01] S1: When you think about other platforms in the space, social content platforms, are there any features or ways of approaching stuff that they do well, that you're kind of jealous of or really impressed by?