This week, ULI Toronto visited One Delisle for a behind-the-scenes look at what we believe is this city's next global landmark. The tour sold out in under 24 hours, and it was great to see so much interest from our industry peers. For those of you who made it out, thanks for taking the time! Here are some photos from the event, all courtesy of Multiplex Construction Canada.
Instagram, AI, and the crisis of authenticity
What's the future of Instagram in a world of endless AI-generated content?
Sometime last year, Instagram changed its bottom menu bar to the following:
Bookended by the home button and the user profile button are now video reels, DMs, and the explore page. The create a new post button, which was formerly here in the center, was moved up to the top of the screen in a far less conspicuous place. These changes felt weird at first, but they were, of course, based on real user data. What people do on Instagram these days is watch reels and then share them with their friends. The era of posting beautiful square photos with nice filter edits died a long time ago.
But even today's world of video reels and TikTok videos is in massive flux. AI is flooding the system, and it's impossible to know what is "real" anymore. The name of the game with social media used to be authenticity. This is how individuals gained distribution control from institutions and large brands; they were more real and authentic. But today, we are in a world where AI-generated content can be entirely indistinguishable from "real" or captured content.
I have felt this change myself. As someone who has been a hobby photographer since undergrad some 20+ years ago, I have noticed myself grabbing my Fujifilm camera a lot less over the last year. Instead, I've just been using my phone and spending more time playing around with AI. And, of course, it's not just me. I see my architect and real estate friends using AI to test concepts, create presentation renderings, and more. So, where does all of this leave a platform like Instagram that was designed around individuals creating and sharing their own content?
A few days ago, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, published these twenty slides about how the company sees the world as we head into 2026. They're an interesting read because they mark a shift in messaging. Previously, the narrative was all about connecting the world and empowering creators. Now it's about labeling, mediating, and controlling this new world. In the words of Silicon Valley journalist and entrepreneur Om Malik, "deep down, Instagram is frightened."
But there is a path forward (excerpt also from Malik):
It starts by verifying who is behind an account, embedding provenance in media, and rewarding trust signals. Over time, Meta may tighten control and aim to be an identity broker for everyone. Instagrams want [sic] you to be prepared for this new era of tighter control over identity, authenticity, and content provenance.
One of the most important slides in Mosseri's post for me is this one here:
I've been arguing for years that crypto has an important role to play in a world filled with AI. When nobody knows what is "real" anymore, there's value in being able to say with finality that, hey, this thing over here is authentic and comes from this source. Social media (web2) showed us that people would rather tie something back to an individual instead of a large faceless brand. AI is disrupting this chain of provenance, but I think crypto will bring us back to it, somehow. Whether Instagram will be a part of it, of course, remains to be seen.
Cover photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
What is real anymore? It doesn't matter.
In development, visuals are persuasion. AI makes them infinite.
In case you missed it, Google released Gemini 3 this past week. And boy is it awesome. The images it creates — see the tweet above — are completely undetectable as the work of AI, and this is just one particular use case. From an overall sentiment standpoint, it is also amazing to see how quickly things have changed for Google. This past summer, the narrative was that AI was going to kill Google's golden goose — its search business. But now all of a sudden, it feels like Google is the king of AI.
I know we all know this, but it's hard not to keep thinking about how profoundly this is all going to change the global economy. Let's take real estate development. Development is a future-oriented business. It's about imagining what the future could be, and then going out and trying to create it. Because of this, I think you could also describe it as an industry of visual persuasion. Renderings, photos, diagrams, and many other tools are used to sell a specific kind of future.
In the olden days, these tools used to cost a lot of money, especially if you were preparing for something like a condominium sales launch. When it came to renderings, we used to have to book the best companies months in advance, and then once work actually started, it would take several weeks of iteration before the final renderings were ready. In parallel to this, you'd also be working on your photography. And because no developer wants to photograph dormant winter trees and sidewalks shellacked in road salt, you also needed to carefully plan ahead for when you'd be taking these.
Then, once you had all your visuals ready, you sent them off to the printers, so that sales brochures and other marketing collateral could be physically printed. It's a long and expensive process. Of course, AI collapses this entire workflow. It dramatically reduces both time and cost (down to an almost zero marginal cost), and opens up a world of unlimited visual possibilities. Want a photograph of a couple walking in New York City in the snow during Christmas? Done.
So what does this mean for development and all of the service providers who help to visualize projects into existence? In my view, it means the low-value-add ones go away. AI easily replaces them. But for the high-value ones who bring incredible creative direction to projects, I think they get better and become even more important. AI is creative rocket fuel. But you still need someone who can direct, who has taste, and who can decide what story the project should tell.
Cover photo by Serhii Hanushchak on Unsplash