On January 1, 2026, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, published a year-end reflection on the platform: a visual and textual essay examining how artificial intelligence is radically reshaping the way we interpret images and videos online. In his statement, he makes a clear assertion: the era in which we could assume what we see is real has come to an end. We now operate within an ecosystem where AI-generated content has reached a level of sophistication that renders it indistinguishable from authentic media.
The proposal that emerges is sharp and, in many ways, unsettling. Rather than attempting to chase down and expose every individual fake, it becomes more rational to shift the problem upstream, toward the certification of reality itself. No longer an endless hunt for falsification, but the construction of credibility systems, reliable author-based signals, and mechanisms for authentication at the point of media origin. In other words, the issue is not about saving the image, but about redefining the conditions that allow it to carry weight.
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