In less than a week, Meta went from pushing its new AI photo tool to taking it down altogether.
Announced on July 7, the feature was called “the creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals that you can download and share anywhere, including directly to your feed, story, or chat.”
However, people turned on the feature after they learned it pulled face data from any public account by default. You could just make your account private to nullify the feature, but that’s not really a solution if you’re a big-enough public figure or your business hinges on keeping your account public.
SAG-AFTRA, a labor union that represents over 150,000 performers and media professionals, didn’t mince words on its thoughts on the feature.
“Anything other than a clear and conspicuous OPT-IN for these types of uses of Instagram users’ images is unacceptable, and an utter miscalculation of public sentiment regarding the obvious dangers and harms inherent in such use,” reads the statement.
With near-universal panning of the feature, Meta announced it has discontinued use of the photo generator.
“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,” reads the blog post.
“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.”
In a statement sent to Reuters, SAG-AFTRA applauded the decision.
“With the dangers of nonconsensual digital replicas well known to all, a feature that encouraged that behavior is unwise. We appreciate its discontinuance. It is the responsible thing to do,” reads the statement.
Muse Image, the AI model used to power the feature, remains available. However, seeing how other AI efforts have pivoted to work productivity, it remains to be seen if Meta will re-release the image generator feature at some point.
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