7 Surprising Ways Instagram Uses AI You Didn’t Know About

Instagram is more than just a platform for sharing photos and videos—it’s powered by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that shapes your experience every day. From curating your feed to keeping the community safe, Instagram uses AI in ways you might not even realize.

In this blog, we’ll uncover seven surprising ways Instagram uses AI to enhance the platform. Whether you’re curious about how content recommendations work or how Instagram tackles harmful behavior, you’ll learn something new.

Ready to discover Instagram’s AI secrets? Keep reading to see how technology works behind the scenes to make your experience seamless and engaging!

Exploring and Searching

In the past, Instagram used hashtags to help improve recommendations and searches. When you search for a hashtag, you’ll see related posts and photos that might interest you. Tagged content and trending topics will also appear on your search page when you look for something new.

Now, AI makes this process even better.

Instagram’s AI looks at your personal information, location, and browsing habits to guess what you’d like to see. With so much content uploaded every day, AI helps sort through it all and shows you posts that match your preferences. Meta, Instagram’s parent company, uses AI to make sure your search results feel more useful and personalized.

It’s not always clear why certain reels and photos show up in your feed, but Instagram makes it easy to find out. Here’s how you can check:

1. Tap the Action Button (three dots) in the top right corner of any post.

2. Select “Why you’re seeing this post.”

3. You’ll see a list of factors explaining why the content was shown to you.

This feature helps you understand how Instagram tailors your feed based on your activity and preferences.

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 might not seem like a big problem until they start filling your feed. Fake accounts, bots, and false information are big challenges for social media platforms, and AI is helping to manage them.

Interestingly, AI can also create new types of spam, so it’s both part of the problem and the solution. Meta uses tools like Deep Text, a smart text analysis system, to fight spam on Instagram. This AI can quickly check thousands of posts and understand text almost as well as a human. It’s used to find and block spam or fake information, so your feed stays clean and relevant.

Learning Without Labels

AI tools like Deep Text don’t need labeled data, like hashtags, to learn. Instead, they can look at unorganized content on Instagram and teach themselves using unsupervised learning. This means the AI keeps improving on its own and becomes better at spotting unwanted content over time.

Thanks to AI, Instagram can protect your feed from spam and keep it focused on the content you actually want to see.