Meta Pulls Muse AI Image Feature Less Than a Week After User Backlash Highlights Privacy Risks

Meta introduced a new Muse Image feature last week, based on the firm's first AI model from the tech firm's Superintelligence Labs. The feature lets users reuse “publicly available” content, which has been posted by Instagram users. This AI-generated content can then be shared with others on various Meta-owned platforms, including WhatsApp and Facebook. This drew criticism from Instagram users, highlighting the privacy risks the newly added functionality poses. Now, the US-based company has updated the original blog post to announce that the feature has been removed. However, it did not address the highlighted privacy concerns.

Meta Says Its Muse Image Feature ‘Missed the Mark'

The Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant recently updated the Muse Image blog post to announce that the functionality is “no longer available”. The company said that the decision was taken because of the “feedback” it received regarding the Muse Image feature on Instagram, saying that the feature “missed the mark”. Meta said, “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.”

Soon after the tech giant launched the Muse Image tool on July 7, which was powered by Meta Superintelligence Labs' first image-generation model, users took to various social media platforms, highlighting their concerns regarding the misuse of the AI-powered tool and the privacy risks it poses.

Gadgets 360 members were able to confirm that the "Sharing and reuse" settings page has been updated to remove the toggles for the Meta AI features, and has been renamed to "Sharing".

Apart from privacy-related concerns, Meta automatically enrolled all public accounts and other “publicly available” content for reuse by other users via the Muse Image feature, without notifying the content owners. To restrict access to their “publicly available” content, users had to either switch to a private Instagram account or disallow people from reusing content on Instagram with AI features at Meta from the Instagram settings menu. Alternatively, users had to toggle reuse for each post off individually.

Integrated within the Meta AI chat, users were allowed to mention other public Instagram accounts and use their content “as reference” and generate their own versions using the Muse Image feature. However, the content owner was neither informed about the automatic enrolment of their accounts nor about their content being reused.