A couple of days ago, I covered Meta’s announcement of the Muse Image, an AI tool that lets users generate images based on someone’s Instagram profile without asking the account owner.
I also highlighted the risks associated with it in another piece, along with steps for opting out. Three days later, the feature is no longer available.
What exactly happened there?
As more and more people picked up on Meta’s Muse Image and how it assumed you’re okay when someone else used your Instagram pictures as a reference for generating AI pictures, the tool started to face a massive backlash.
Opt-out controls existed for users who wanted to protect their likeness, but the default was in, which meant millions of public Instagram users were enrolled in a system that could generate AI images of them without ever clicking anything to agree.
However, in a statement to Puck News’ Dylan Byers, Meta acknowledges that the feature “missed the mark” and is therefore “no longer available.”
What did Meta say about it?
“Earlier this week, we announced that one way for people to generate images in Meta AI is by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they want to reference,” says Meta in a statement to the outlet.
“Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way. We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available.”
Byers highlights that the pushback from talent agencies, most notably CAA, one of the largest in the entertainment industry, could have played a major role in rolling the feature back.
While I would have argued that turning it off by default for all Instagram accounts and allowing experimental users to opt in would have been the right approach, the feature is gone, and I beleive it’s for good.