And just like that, Meta caved to public pressure amid a swift backlash over its recently launched Muse Image tool, which presented a mountain of privacy concerns. Who the hell is running things over there?
We called it out on Wednesday, as Meta proudly announced the launch of its AI image-manipulation tool called Muse Image, that the company had clearly, once again, become its own worst enemy. In the rush to catch up to the AI age, Meta rolled out a tool with a feature that left every public Instagram and Facebook account open to the manipulation and use of others, presenting not only a legion of privacy problems, but also copyright issues and more when it comes to the accounts of artists who share their work on these platforms.
The feature allowed users to simply @-tag any other user in order to grab an image from their account and pull it into Muse Image for doctoring, or transformation.
Meta, naturally, showed only goofy and cute examples of how Muse Image could be used to create fun pics for friends and family, willfully ignoring the deepfake and abuse potential — and making it so that users would need to opt out of the feature or make their accounts private to avoid having their images stolen.
Just two days later, quietly on Friday, Meta updated the company blog post in which the launch was announced, saying that it had disabled the feature, following the negative feedback.
"Earlier this week, we announced that one way for people to generate images in Meta AI is by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they want to reference. 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. We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available," the post now says.
TechCrunch notes that it's baffling that no one at Meta foresaw this backlash, but they were unable to get a direct comment from anyone at the company.
Puck News founder Dylan Byers first caught the news Friday, and he reports that, "The move comes amid scrutiny from users and talent agencies, including CAA."
Talent agencies likely pushed back quickly, given the potential for problems both with influencers and celebrities who need to keep their accounts public, and who could become major targets of deepfakes.
The Muse Image tool apparently remains live, it just won't be quite as easy for users to steal images with the app's help.
Top image via Getty Images