7 Interesting Ways Instagram Is Using AI (Without You Realizing It)

Dominic Anderson October 21, 2024

Since AI exploded onto the scene in a big way a few years back, software companies and social media giants alike have been finding ways to integrate this new functionality into their products. Some examples of AI (like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Adobe’s AI Companion) are client facing, so you can see them at work. Others work more discreetly in the background to make the software run more smoothly. There’s so much content for the algorithms on large social media networks to sift through, after all.

Instagram is no exception, using AI in some interesting ways that you might not know about. This article will reveal seven of these ways.

Exploring and Searching

In the past, recommendations and searches were beefed up by the “tagging” feature. Searching by hashtag would bring up a number of related posts and pics that you’d probably be interested in too. This tagged content, combined with trending topics, would fill your search page when you searched for something new. These days, AI lends a rather big helping hand to this process.

AI is used to rank content and predict what you’d be keen on seeing, based on your personal information, location, and past browsing habits. The constant stream of content being posted to Instagram is no problem for AI to crunch through, and Meta (Instagram’s parent company) uses the technology to offer more accurate content to suit your preferences.

While it may not be obvious to you why certain reels and pics are popping up in your feed, Instagram has provided a way for you to see the reasons. On any picture or video, simply:

Tap the Action Button in the top right corner.
Select “Why you’re seeing this post.”
The factors that made the content appear in your feed will be displayed.

Research Tools

Meta states that they want their AI models to be open and transparent to all, particularly researchers. That’s why they’ve released tools like “Meta Content Library and AI,” which makes Instagram creator and business account data available to accredited researchers. AI assists in gathering this data and making it available to these researchers.

Targeted Advertising

Targeted ads are nothing new. For example, you know the restaurant on your feed was chosen based on your location. But these days, the analytics behind these choices is greatly enhanced by AI. The more advanced computing power provided by AI enables your search preferences, location, and engagement rates to be used more effectively to determine what to offer you. This tech also helps advertisers better target their campaigns.

Content Moderation

There are simply too many posts on Instagram for any human (or team of humans) to keep track of efficiently. Reporting problematic posts has always been a pain, and more often than not doesn’t pay off. For these reasons, Meta is using AI tools like Deep Text both to proactively find posts that violate its Community Guidelines, and to respond to issues reported by its users.

The types of content that users flag as offensive or problematic, along with the types of accounts that create them, are used by machine learning algorithms to flag and remove content. This has resulted in many cases of false flagging, but these tools are steadily honing their abilities and improving over time. The hope is that AI will help curb cyberbullying, and actively fight against the spread of harmful or misleading content.

Spam Filtering

Spam and junk posts are often something you don’t notice until you’re flooded with them. Fake accounts, bots, and misinformation are huge problems for social media companies, and artificial intelligence is being used to stem the tide.

Part of the problem is that AI itself is responsible for some of the newer sources of spam. But Meta has developed some ways to fight this. Deep Text – a Facebook technology – is a text analytics algorithm also used by Instagram. Its deep neural networks can process several thousand posts a second, and understand text with near-human accuracy. It’s a valuable tool for classifying spam and misinformation, and choosing the content that finally reaches your feed.

Deep Learning Through Unlabelled Data

Due to its deep understanding of human-written text, technology like Deep Text doesn’t need to rely on large sets of human labelled data like hashtags to train its algorithms. As such, AI can now use Instagram to train itself on uncategorized information, which enables unsupervised learning, and greatly enhances the capacity of the technology.

Learning About People

The human species is vast, with a huge variety of preferences and practices. AI algorithms on platforms like Instagram, which has over two billion active users, have access to truly unfathomable amounts of data. Thanks to its computing power, AI is able to process billions of images and reels to form a more complete picture of its userbase. In one case, 100 million photos were processed to examine global clothing patterns.

This kind of processing power, combined with machine learning, can produce intimate insights into humanity and its habits that were simply not possible before. These insight will become increasingly instrumental in studies, and help to shape large-scale decisions in the future.