Find out which toggles to turn off so other Instagram users and Meta’s Muse AI tool cannot use your personal photos for image generation, stickers, remixes, etc.
Meta’s new Muse image generation feature is integrated into Instagram and allows other people to use your posted account photos, including your profile picture, as the basis for generating images based on prompts (like Apple’s Image Playground does). As a result, if you have a public Instagram account, someone can just tag your account using ‘@’ and then give a text prompt to generate an image.
While it can be used to create cute stuff like happy birthday cards (as shown in Meta’s newsroom post), someone can also just as easily misuse your face and posted family or other personal photos to generate dangerous images. There is practically no limit on how it can be misused!
Meta’s newsroom post says:
You can also @-mention Instagram accounts in the Meta AI app to bring specific Instagram profiles right into your images. Whether you want to design a custom event invitation, mock up a collaborative creative concept, or generate a personalized graphic, tagging a username lets Meta AI use public photos to build a visual that’s ready to post. You have control over how your content can be tagged for AI creation with an easy setting to turn this feature off at any time.
If you don’t want others to be able to use or misuse your profile photo and personal photos, Instagram offers you the option to opt out of this feature.
Of course, this only applies if you have a public Instagram account. If your account is set to Private, you don’t have to worry about it (yet).
Stop AI from using your photos on Instagram
1) Open the Instagram app on your iPhone or Android phone, go to your profile screen, and tap the hamburger menu icon at the top.
2) Find “Sharing and reuse” and tap it.
3) Scroll to the “Allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with Al features at Meta” section and turn off the switches for Posts and Reels.
Other people will no longer be able to use your photos to generate images using Meta’s Muse AI. However, content already generated from your photos remains unaffected.
4) Explore the remaining settings on this pane and turn them off as well to secure your privacy even further:
- Allow people to share your posts and reels
- Allow people to create with and reuse your content
- Allow people to create with and reuse your original audio on Meta AI
You should see the 2nd and 3rd options if you don’t yet have the one mentioned in Step 3 above.
In addition to that, you can also consider setting your account from public to private by going to Instagram Settings > Account privacy.
What do you think of this new Instagram AI feature? Do you think it will be helpful or creepy, scary, and very easily misused?
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