Meta’s new AI tool can remix your Instagram photos without asking you first

Meta shipped its first in-house image generator this week, and chief AI officer Alexandr Wang was quick to show it off. “It’s personal,” he posted on X the day of launch, explaining that users can upload their photos, @-mention friends and pull whatever’s trending to have Muse Image build a shareable picture in seconds.

What Wang skipped over is the part that has privacy watchers alarmed: that same @-mention feature works on strangers too, and if an Instagram account is public, its owner has already been signed up for it without a word. Muse Image, which launched Tuesday out of Meta Superintelligence Labs, lets anyone open the Meta AI app, tag a public Instagram handle, and generate fresh AI images built from that person’s published photos and reels — with no permission request and no heads-up.

Meta confirms in a help document that account owners won’t be notified when someone remixes their face this way. Every adult with a public account was opted in automatically, meaning the tool pulls “part or all” of an account’s photos, per Meta’s own wording, to spin up something new — putting the burden of opting out entirely on the user.

Gizmodo’s Mike Pearl tested how far this goes, generating images of a real-world acquaintance he’d never followed or interacted with on Instagram — effectively a digital stranger — without that person’s knowledge, and managed the same with an ordinary friend and even Mark Zuckerberg.