On Tuesday, Meta announced its new Muse Image model, the first release from "Meta Superintelligence Labs." With the new image model, Meta promises to create hyperrealistic images, posters, and even videos—once Muse Video launches, anyway. All of that is par for the course for a major AI company. But as Wired reports, there’s something weird going on with how it integrates with public Instagram profiles.
How Meta's new Instagram image generation feature works
By default, anyone using Meta AI can create an image using the likeness of a public Instagram account, which they can then share via chat, Stories, or the Instagram feed. This doesn’t have to be a celebrity or a famous person, either (in fact, some celebrity profiles are restricted from this feature). So long as it's public, your personal Instagram profile is fair game here. Google has a similar feature, but it’s limited to the user themself, and it only works after an approval process. There are no such guardrails here.
This is quite a big privacy issue. Every public profile is automatically opted into this new feature, without their consent. If you're using Meta AI features on Instagram, you're in on this as well. For Meta, the distinction is clear. If you’re posting anything publicly, they can use it on their AI platform. Of course, creating an image out of two different faces is nothing new. You can just upload two profile images and get the same effect. But Meta is making this trivially easy on a very large scale.
I tested this out in a couple of ways. First, I tried to make an image of me in a fight scene with Robert Downey Jr. The AI refused, perhaps because of image rights. Then, I asked Meta AI to create an image with me and my colleague Pranay Parab. That wasn’t possible because he has a private profile (more on that later).
Lastly, I asked it to create an image of me having coffee with my friend Dhaval, who owns a cafe, and has a public profile. That image was created in just under a minute, and was based on recent images uploaded by Dhaval and me on our respective profiles (both a couple of years old at this point). It's obviously easy to use, but can you turn it off?
How to stop people from using your Instagram profile in their AI images
If you have a private Instagram profile, this isn’t something you need to worry about—beyond a mutual taking your photos for their own AI usage. If you have a public profile, you need to disable a setting that lets Meta use your profile data for Meta AI and Reels generation.
Open the Instagram app on your iPhone, go to your Profile and tap the three-lined Menu button in the top-right corner. Go to Sharing and Reuse and navigate to the section called Allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with AI features at Meta. Here, disable the Posts and Reels feature.
The good news is that this does work. I tried it on my Instagram coffee page that I rarely use. When I was logged into my personal profile on Meta, I asked Meta AI to create an image of me brewing coffee using my coffee page handle, and it refused, saying it doesn’t have the right to do that. This, of course, should be the default.
