Instagram’s boss has a message for creators getting ripped off by AI copycats: he’s worried too, but he doesn’t have a fix yet. According to Futurism‘s Maggie Harrison Dupré, Adam Mosseri has admitted that Instagram is still figuring out how to handle AI accounts that lift real people’s work, including fake “comedians” that steal stand-up jokes and steer viewers to OnlyFans pages.

How the scheme works

Futurism reports that the trend takes a real comic’s routine and repackages it in an AI-made clip, swapping the human performer for a fake one. Those AI performers are often shown as glamorous young women, and the accounts point viewers to OnlyFans pages where they’re pushed to pay for more.

Comedian George Brett Olson put the issue in front of Mosseri. Futurism says Olson posted a video this month showing how an AI account with more than 300,000 followers copied his material, and even his outfit. In a reply, Mosseri said he doesn’t “think it’s practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform,” adding that it’s “gonna be harder and harder to identify, and it’s not all bad content (though yes, there is plenty of slop).” He said Instagram is “very invested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators” and promised to raise it with his team.

“A tricky problem”

Mosseri came back to the subject after Olson flagged another case, this time an AI clip copied from a visual artist’s video. “To be clear, I am very worried about this trend. We are actively working out what to do; it’s just a tricky problem,” he wrote on Threads, as quoted by Futurism.

The catch, he explained, is copyright. Instagram already lets people file claims and remove stolen copyrighted material, but he said that’s “not enough,” since many comedians and dancers never formally copyright their work. He added that any new system has to help those creators “without letting bad actors make more fake claims,” which he said “happens all the time.”

AI won’t be throttled just for being AI

According to Social Media Today‘s Andrew Hutchinson, Mosseri also used his weekly Instagram Story Q&A to say the app does “not throttle the reach of AI content just for being AI content.” Ranking is meant to show people what they like, AI or not, though he admitted “we make some mistakes sometimes.” Hutchinson reports Instagram plans more AI labels and wants to reward creators for tagging their own AI-made posts. He also points out that Meta has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI and keeps nudging users to make AI images and video, so this is partly a problem Meta helped create.

As Net Influencer‘s Dragomir Stojkov notes, it’s the latest in a string of small fixes. Instagram added a voluntary “AI creator” label in May, then in September renamed it “AI-generated profile” and started cutting unlabeled synthetic-person accounts out of Reels and Explore recommendations. Stojkov also recalls Mosseri arguing last December that “authenticity is fast becoming a scarce resource” as AI makes content easier to copy.

The takeaway

For real creators, including the ones on OnlyFans whose space is being crowded by AI fakes, the message is plain: Instagram isn’t going to ban AI, and its current tools don’t protect work you never registered. Until it builds something better, the best defense is keeping receipts, reporting copycats and making sure your audience knows exactly where the real you lives.

Image: Instagram app icon on a smartphone screen, by Yuri Samoilov (CC BY 2.0), resized, via Wikimedia Commons.