Your Instagram Photos Are Now Meta AI Fodder (Unless You Flip This Switch)

This week, Meta announced Muse Image. It’s the social media giant’s latest chilling use of AI tech — a move that’s made even more disturbing by the fact that the company considers every Instagram user’s public photos as fair game to use in its image generation tool.

We can only hope Meta isn’t doing anything nearly as antisocial as Elon Musk’s creepy little chatbot, which spent the better part of December and January helping deviants generate explicit deepfakes without restriction. Even so, the company is still missing the crucial privacy guardrail of actually asking Instagram users for permission before hijacking their photos.

It’s a safe bet that Meta isn’t technically doing anything wrong. I’m sure if you dig deep enough into the Instagram terms of service, you’ll find a nice lawyerly clause that says the company has the right to do pretty much anything it wants with the images users upload to the service. Sadly, this kind of language has become par for the course in most online services, but Meta seems to be playing faster and looser than usual with its implied rights.

What This Means

As The New York Times reports, every adult with a public Instagram account was automatically opted in to the new Muse Image service, meaning that any user of the standalone Meta AI app can use “part or all of your published photos” to create new AI images.

Meta’s own blog post describes the feature thusly, and while it thankfully adds that users retain control over their content, it relies on folks to be aware of this feature — and understand how to turn it off:

The words “you have control” link to a support article titled “Reuse of Instagram media.” Although that does explain how to do this if you read through it to the very bottom and expand the relevant sections, Meta isn’t making it as obvious as it should. Could it be the company doesn’t really want people to opt out?

To make matters worse, while you will be notified if a public account remixes your content normally, the support article clearly states that “You will not be notified about content created using AI features at Meta.”

How to Opt Out

Thankfully, the process isn’t nearly as hard as Meta’s thousand-word support article makes it seem. There are actually two pretty simple ways to stop Meta from using your photos in other people’s AI creations.

The first and easiest is to mark your account as private. In that case, Meta says, “No one can reuse any part of your reels, feed videos, and photos.”

In fact, if your Instagram account was already private, you have nothing to worry about. Meta only opted in public Instagram accounts. Switching from a public to a private account will not only prevent your content from being used by others, but it will also result in “all reels, posts or stories using your content” being deleted from Instagram.

However, there’s a catch on that one: you have to set your account to private for longer than 24 hours. If you switch to private and back to public any sooner than that, everything will pretty much remain the way it was before.

If you’d like your account to remain public, but you’re creeped out by the idea of Meta AI using your photos as a content mill, you can toggle off a setting under “Sharing and reuse.” Here’s where to find it:

1. Open Instagram on your iPhone.
2. Tap the Profile button at the bottom right.
3. Tap the three-line Menu button in the top right.
4. Scroll down and select Sharing and reuse.
5. Scroll down to the section titled “Allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with AI features at Meta.”
6. Toggle off Posts and Reels.
   

Note that this only applies to photos and videos. Meta says, “You can’t turn off reuse of your original audio, text, or comments,” so those continue to be fodder for the AI machine.

One silver lining here is that Meta knows better than to include younger Instagram users in this hodgepodge of AI slop generation. The company confirmed to The New York Times that underage users cannot have their account used to generate AI images — even if they want to. This differs from other content reuse, such as creating remixes and reels, but even that’s only available for people followed by users under 18 — even if their account is otherwise set to public.

While Meta isn’t the first company to try to feed other people’s images into its AI machine, it’s the first high-profile one to opt users in by default. As the Times notes, OpenAI’s Sora came with similar privacy concerns, but the key difference was that users’ likenesses couldn’t be used in Sora videos unless they explicitly opted in. Sora was also ultimately shut down earlier this year as the AI giant deemed it too expensive to keep running.

Meanwhile, Meta is already working on Muse Video, claiming it will bring the company “one step closer to personal superintelligence,” while glossing over the fact that it will undoubtedly start farming people’s Instagram photos and reels to create these. If that bothers you even a little bit, we’d recommend getting ahead of the curve and opting out now.