The Public Got So Mad at Meta’s New AI Photo Tool That It’s Scrapped Already
"We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available," Meta says.
By Mike Pearl Published July 11, 2026, 2:11 pm ET
Reading time 2 minutes
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg © Wally Skalij/Getty Images
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I don’t know what the world record is for killing bad AI features quickly, but this has to be a competitor. On Tuesday, July 7, Meta released an AI photo generation feature that pulled face data from any public Instagram account by default. It made it to Friday—a little over three days in operation by my count.
The model tied to the feature, Muse Image, is still available. Muse Image is the first Image Generator released by Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, and the blog post announcing it calls it, “the 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.”
However, the blog post now has an update, added Friday:
“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 showbiz performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, captured the popular mood pretty well with its Friday statement on this feature:
678K followers
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sagaftra Verified\
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SAG-AFTRA Statement on Meta’s New AI Image Generation Tool, Muse Image
“Anything other than a clear and conspicuous OPT-IN for these types of uses of Instagram users’ images is unacceptable, and an utter miscalculation of public sentiment regarding the obvious dangers and harms inherent in such use.”
Read more in the LA Times: https://ow.ly/ntEQ50ZmfQx.
“Anything other than a clear and conspicuous OPT-IN for these types of uses of Instagram users’ images is unacceptable, and an utter miscalculation of public sentiment regarding the obvious dangers and harms inherent in such use,” the blunt statement reads.
According to Reuters, after the feature was pulled, a SAG-AFTRA spokesperson said, “With the dangers of nonconsensual digital replicas well known to all, a feature that encouraged that behavior is unwise. We appreciate its discontinuance. It is the responsible thing to do.”
As I’ve written before, a pattern emerged in releases of AI products after ChatGPT—perhaps you could call it “ The Ghibli Meme Effect”—in which models would arrive on the scene and make a splash by offending copyright holders or privacy activists, and that backlash would sometimes be followed by a retreat after sufficient ink had been spilled denouncing the product.
But the downfall of OpenAI’s ill-fated video generator Sora, and the large number of frankly nauseating episodes tied to SpaceXAI’s Grok image generator seems to have interrupted that pattern somewhat. Over the past six months or so, these companies have transitioned from pitching video and image generation at top volume to highlighting supposed breakthroughs in work productivity.
In that sense, this release from Meta seems like it was either a throwback, or, as SAG-AFTRA suggested, a genuine miscalculation.
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- B
BCGeiger
10 hours ago
Not a miscalculation. The system got trained on the millions of faces on Instagram. It's not available to the public anymore but that does not mean that Meta won't use it for its next evil plan. They have the data.
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- G
Guest
10 hours ago
The feature being available for four days is more than enough time to allow everyone's Instagram content to be scraped. He only needed a few days to do that. The thing to do now is to make him delete and/or claw back all the scraped images from whatever database they are in now. Where are the co...
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S
6 hours ago
Sadly it’s worse than that. Meta already owns every image on instagram and almost certainly used them to train the underlying model.
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Listento
12 hours ago
Zuckerberg is a Trump billionaire who will soon get taxed out of existence by social democrats. We all be better because of that.
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M
Me
9 hours ago
LoL no he won't because the US is broken
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2 replies
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- g
guest
13 hours ago
A company with no use or real value to humanity.
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Jesse Gruber
11 minutes ago
Oh, I wish it were just a simple matter of no use or value to humanity. It is actively harmful to humanity, and the damage that Meta has already done may not even be reversible.
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- anarwen
13 hours ago
Super intelligence Labs?
I think not.
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2 replies
- B
Bloop
12 hours ago
Pulled the feature. Sure they did.
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1 reply
- d
davebe
7 hours ago
likely muse was under its own shell corporation.. It operated for just long enough to ingest the information and just happen to not get many opt-outs. That was not a miscalculation.
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l
lolz
6 hours ago
Meta already has all the info and could ingest it into any model they want without a public release.
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RG
Reason’s Ghost
8 hours ago
I’d like to see a feature that allows me to rearrange Zuck’s face. Not his instagram image- his actual face.
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- G
Guest
5 hours ago
Leave it to Meta to miss the Mark.
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- JJ
Jar Jar
8 hours ago
Public backlash does sometimes work in small ways. Don't discount it.
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