Instagram will finally label influencers who don’t actually exist

September 1, 2026 at 12:52
/BY
VINCENT LAUTIER/2 MIN READ/Related categories

You may have already come across Aitana Lopez on Instagram, a pink-haired influencer followed by hundreds of thousands of people who don’t always suspect she came straight out of an image generator, invented by a Spanish agency that rakes in very real revenue thanks to her.

Accounts like hers, the platform hosts loads of them. Instagram has just decided to bring a bit of order to this whole mess.

Profiles that portray a person entirely generated by AI will now have to carry a dedicated label, plainly titled AI-generated profile, and those who skip it will see their reach limited, meaning their posts shown to fewer people. On a platform where visibility is what keeps creators alive, that penalty carries real weight.

The official justification is interesting. People don’t like following a profile that looks human only to discover the person doesn’t exist, the platform basically explains.

The rule only targets fully fabricated characters. A real creator who touches up their photos with AI or has a bot write their captions has nothing to declare for now, which still leaves a huge grey area between heavy-handed filters and a synthetic human, and you can already picture the endless debates over the edge cases.

At Meta, the parent company, things have actually gotten touchy ever since a feature launched in July generated images from other users’ portraits, before being pulled following the backlash.

The hardest part actually starts now. Spotting an undeclared AI account among hundreds of millions of profiles requires substantial rethese virtual influencers have zero incentive to snitch on themselves, since the illusion is precisely their business model

I have to admit I’m mostly curious to see the effect this new label will have on these AI profiles. Will people really unfollow en masse? And more importantly, am I following people who are actually AIs without knowing it?

• https://www.tomsguide.fr/instagram-cette-influenceuse-creee-par-lia-gagne-10-000-e-par-mois/
• https://www.ojim.fr/aitana-lopez-influenceuse-artificielle/

This article was originally written in French and automatically translated. Read the original.
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