Privacy fears over Meta’s new AI image generation tool

Meta’s Muse will allow you to manipulate the images on anyone’s public Instagram account. Photo: Meta

Australia’s privacy watchdog has been urged to investigate Meta’s new AI image generator, which will allow users to pull photos from other public accounts without the owner giving consent or even knowing about it.

Meta announced Muse, the first image generator developed by its Superintelligence Labs division, on Thursday.

It works with the Muse Spark large language model, which replaced the existing Llama model, to reason through prompts, search the internet and generate an image based on the request.

The tool will be available across the Meta AI app, Instagram and WhatsApp, and eventually Facebook and Messenger.

“It uses advanced reasoning to understand complex prompts seamlessly blending multiple photos into high-quality creations you can download and share anywhere – including directly to your chat, story or feed,” a Meta blog post read.

“[It is a] creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals that you can download and share anywhere, including directly to your feed, story or chat.”

Opting out

Most controversially, Meta Muse will allow users to “@ mention” other Instagram accounts and use their public photos as part of an image it generates.

To avoid this, users will have to either make their profiles private or change their settings around how people can reuse their content for AI.

Public accounts will have a new setting to “allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with AI features at Meta”, that must be turned off if users don’t want their content to be manipulated.

The new function has been criticised by privacy-focused organisations around the world.

Electronic Frontiers Australia has issued an “urgent warning” to Australian social media users and called on the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to investigate whether the new tool…

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