Meta has sparked blowback from privacy advocates for allowing its new AI image maker to generate photos of users with public profiles by default.
Users of Meta’s Muse Image AI tool, released Tuesday, can tag public Instagram profiles and generate pictures that pull from faces of people featured in these social media posts. Instagram users aren’t notified when their posts are integrated into what the company describes as its “most advanced image generation model yet”.
The easiest and most comprehensive solution for those worried about their photos being sucked into Muse Image is to switch public Instagram accounts to private.
“It’s a blunt solution, but it prevents strangers from using your public profile as source material,” notes cybersecurity company Malwarebytes in a 9 July blogpost. But for those who want to keep their account public, there’s a more measured approach, too.
A Meta spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian that Muse Image has been built “with strong controls and safety guardrails from day one”.
“Private accounts and those belonging to users under 18 are automatically excluded and adult users with public accounts can opt out with easy-to-use controls,” the company said, adding that it would “take action against any content that violates [their] community standards”.
Meta directs Instagram users who want to opt out of having their photos fed into their AI image generator to go to the “sharing and reuse” section of settings, and toggle a button that allows people to reuse your content.
Privacy advocates argue that expecting users to proactively turn off this feature is unfair – and that “finding the setting is its own adventure”, as Malwarebytes writer Danny Bradbury describes.
A blogpost from the privacy-focused company Proton says that “data sharing is turned on by default, the opt-out is buried deep in settings, and public backlash becomes the main way users find out what happened to their content”. They urge users to “watch the toggles closely” because “the on and off states look nearly identical and a glance, and it’s easy to leave one active by mistake”.
While Meta notes that Muse Image users can’t tag accounts belonging to users under the age of 18, and that teens can’t use the feature to tag or reference other accounts, the company has not yet clarified whether children depicted in photos of public accounts belonging to adults could be plugged into prompts. Proton said children depicted in public photos risk having their faces appropriated.
Thorin Klosowski, a senior security and privacy activist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, says: “This is the sort of setting that should absolutely be opt-in for Instagram users.”
“It’s a new use of the photos they’ve been posting publicly for years, and certainly wasn’t on anyone’s mind when they signed up for Instagram years ago,” Klosowski said.
Meta’s press release for Muse Image depicts innocuous uses of the…
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