MANILA, Philippines – Meta Platforms announced on Tuesday, July 7, that it was rolling out Muse Image, its first image generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs which is available as part of Meta AI.

Muse Image is also currently available on Instagram and WhatsApp, and is coming soon to Facebook, Messenger, and for advertisers through Meta Advantage+ creative, the company said.

Muse image, as a text-to-image tool, allows users to use text prompts to start the process of creating an AI image, but users can also add public photos from Instagram into the process to “remix” the photos into an AI output. This can be done apparently without requiring permission from users at the onset, as you have to opt out of it in the settings.

How to opt out on Instagram

To opt out on Instagram’s app, users should go to their Instagram profile, click the burger menu — the option with three lines on the top right corner — then look for “Sharing and Reuse.” From there, look for “Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta” and toggle off the settings there.

You may also want to toggle off the settings that lets users reuse your original audio on Meta AI, just to lessen the chances of deepfakes being made using your voice and physical likeness.

‘Obvious recipe for disaster’

A report from the BBC cited Donald Campbell, the advocacy director at tech justice nonprofit organization Foxglove, as calling the new tool’s opt-out requirement “an obvious recipe for disaster.”

“We’ve already seen a catalogue of harms from non-consensual AI-altered images on social platforms just in the past year,” Campbell explained.

He added, “It is hard to see why Mark Zuckerberg thinks facilitating yet more of this creepy image manipulation is a good idea.”

Meanwhile, J.B. Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at the consumer nonprofit organization Public Citizen, said in a statement that Meta has chosen “the creepiest possible path.”

Branch added: “People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy. Instead of asking for meaningful consent, Meta quietly defaults users into the system and buries the opt-out in account settings. It’s a playbook we’ve come to expect from a company with a long history of putting its business interests ahead of the public.” – Rappler.com