Adam Mosseri Says AI Backlash Is Only Going to Get Worse — and the Data Back Him Up

Last week, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, delivered a statement to the Colin and Samir podcast that might surprise coming from a tech executive: public hostility toward artificial intelligence isn't going to slow down. Quite the opposite. "It's not only getting worse," Mosseri said, "it's going to continue to get worse." For him, the root of the problem isn't the technology itself but "the fear of being left behind in some way."

What makes this remark particularly revealing is the moment it's delivered. Mosseri doesn't speak like a skeptic, but as an insider watching the ground shift beneath his feet. And the question worth asking is: is he seeing what nobody else wants to see, or has the industry simply chosen to ignore the signals?

What the Instagram boss really said

In the podcast, Mosseri got straight to the point answering questions about the wave of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies across the United States. The phenomenon began intensifying in May 2026, when executives including Sundar Pichai (Google), Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO), and Cathie Duncan (former CEO of Inflection AI) were booed at commencement speeches for speaking optimistically about AI.

Mosseri acknowledged that the hostility isn't limited to young people and creatives — though those are the most visible groups — and that the trend has spread to sectors that were historically more receptive to technology. He also raised an uncomfortable question about AI-generated content on Instagram itself: "There's a lot of great AI content out there, there's also a lot of AI slop. Do we rank AI content as well as we rank non-AI content? Probably not."

The confession about algorithmic ranking quality is interesting because it touches on a point that Meta, and many other companies, avoid admitting publicly: the model knows AI-generated content has lower quality, but the platform doesn't want to — or can't — penalize it, because AI is the company's real growth bet.

The public opinion data

What Mosseri says in one sentence, the numbers confirm at scale. A recent survey jointly conducted by The Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos with more than 2,500 American adults found that 57% of Americans consider AI to be "bad" for society, compared to 42% who see it as "good." Among those with strong opinions, the disparity is stark: 17% rated AI as "extremely bad," while just 2% considered it "extremely good."

The numbers vary by age group and political line. Young people (up to 30) are more critical: 65% see AI as bad, compared to 53% of those over 40. Among Democrats, 63% are negative; among independents, 58%; among Republicans, 51%. It's a pattern that dismantles the narrative that opposition to AI is an elitist or purely creative movement — it cuts across generations and the political spectrum.

A Quinnipiac University Poll survey from September 2026 showed that 73% of Americans consider AI a serious threat to human survival. The same poll found that 72% oppose the construction of data centers in their community — a jump from the 65% recorded in the March survey. In other words: the opposition not only exists but is strengthening.

CNN also reported in September that 9 out of 10 Americans are "more concerned than excited" about the possibility of AI surpassing human intelligence. And the Annenberg Public Policy Center revealed in August that 68% of Americans believe the government has done "too little" to regulate AI — a number stable since spring.

The creator paradox

What Mosseri touched on next was perhaps the most sensitive point for AI's future: the question of jobs. "They're concerned about job displacement," he said, "having AI displace whatever it is they do, if you're a content creator or an engineer or a mathematician."

This isn't a hypothetical concern. A 2025 McKinsey report estimated that up to 30% of working hours in Western countries could be automated by 2030, with particular impact on entry-level roles. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that hiring for entry-level technology positions has already fallen 18% compared to 2022.

The paradox is that creators who use AI the most (designers, writers, screenwriters, musicians) are also those most threatened by it. The same Mosseri who admits the "AI slop" also needs to keep the platform growing — and AI is Instagram's only real growth bet, having seen average daily time spent stagnate since 2023.

The industry's preference to look away

Sundar Pichai's reaction to being booed at Stanford was revealing. Instead of listening to students, Pichai said they "will have to live with the impact of the technology" — a line that sounded like condescension to many observers. Sarah Kreps, a Cornell professor who studies societal reactions to new technologies, summed it up in one sentence: "These tech executives are not reading the room."

But there's an important nuance. The rejection isn't irrational — it's contextual. As journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant put it, "I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM." It's an accurate description of what it feels like to graduate into technology in 2026.

What Mosseri captured with precision is that the emotional root of this hostility isn't anti-technologism, but the genuine fear of obsolescence. When you've spent years building a career in creativity or analysis, and you suddenly discover the tool your employer is buying could do 60% of your work for a fraction of the cost — the anger isn't a character defect; it's a rational response.

What comes next

The question that arises isn't whether hostility will improve, but what the industry will do about it. So far, the response has been the same: accelerate. More models, more capabilities, more deployment. But this strategy assumes the market will accept what the industry delivers — and opinion data suggests otherwise.

Meanwhile, Mosseri himself works for a company whose advertising revenue depends directly on platform engagement. If more people are hostile to AI, they engage less with AI-generated content. If content quality drops (as he himself admitted), engagement drops. The cycle closes.

The tension between corporate strategy and public perception isn't new in technology. The pharmaceutical industry faced a similar problem in the 2000s when public trust in new medicines began to fall — and discovered that having the best product doesn't matter if the public doesn't want to use it. The AI industry's challenge will be the same: convincing a population that has already decided it doesn't want AI, why it should change its mind.

Sources: The Verge, Futurism, POLITICO, The Guardian, Business Insider

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