Meta has drawn criticism from privacy advocates over its new AI image generator, Muse Image, which by default can create pictures drawing on the faces of Instagram users with public profiles. Released on Tuesday, the tool lets people tag public Instagram accounts and generate images pulling from the faces featured in those posts, without notifying the users whose content is used. Campaigners argue this represents a novel and unexpected use of photos that people have posted publicly for years, and that such a feature should be opt-in rather than opt-out.

Meta says Muse Image was built "with strong controls and safety guardrails", automatically excluding private accounts and those belonging to under-18s, while allowing adults with public accounts to opt out via a toggle in the "sharing and reuse" section of settings. Critics, including Malwarebytes, Proton and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Thorin Klosowski, counter that the opt-out is buried, hard to find and easy to misread, with the simplest safeguard being to switch a public account to private. Concerns also remain over whether children pictured in adults' public posts could be fed into prompts, which Meta has not clarified. The tool is currently available in the Meta AI app, Instagram Stories in the US and WhatsApp in limited countries, with planned expansion to Facebook and video.