Meta has launched its first in-house AI image generator, Muse Image, built by its Superintelligence Labs to rival OpenAI's GPT Images 2.0 and Google's Nano Banana 2. The model is tightly integrated into Instagram, and crucially, public Instagram profiles have been automatically opted in to being used in other people's AI creations. Anyone can now tag a public account in a Meta AI prompt to generate images featuring that person's likeness, drawn from their public photos—raising significant privacy and consent concerns.

To opt out without making an account private, users must go to their Instagram profile, open the menu, find the "Sharing and reuse" tab, and switch off the toggles under "Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta" for Posts and Reels. However, the rollout has notable limitations: users are not notified when someone remixes their images, any AI images already generated will not be deleted even after opting out, and the settings language had not appeared on every account at the time of writing. The piece frames this as part of a wider industry pattern of making AI data use opt-out rather than opt-in.