Meta has removed a controversial feature that allowed users to modify photos from public Instagram accounts using AI. The feature, which launched earlier this week along with a batch of other AI tools, “failed” and is no longer available, according to the company.
Earlier this week, Meta announced Muse Image, a new AI imager built by Meta Superintelligence Labs, its dedicated AI unit. Meta promoted a feature that allowed people to generate @images mentioning public Instagram accounts they wanted to reference. The feature, which was not designed to alert a user if their photos were being used in this way, sparked an immediate reaction.
TechCrunch wrote his own guide on how to disable the feature.
Now Meta has changed course. The company issued a blog post On Friday it announced it would remove the feature. Puck News founding partner Dylan Byers was the first to share the company decision.
“Our intention was to provide a useful creative tool and give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way,” the company posted on its blog. “We’ve heard feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for more information and will update this article if they respond.
Since its integration with social media platforms, AI has been misused and abandoned, often to generate nude images of female celebrities. Platforms have attempted to mitigate this trend, although the guardrails introduced have often not been sufficient.
In the case of Meta’s recently removed feature, it seems somewhat obvious that it would have been abused in this way. In fact, Byers notes that the decision to remove the feature came “amid scrutiny from users and talent agencies, including CAA.”
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