Meta Pulls AI Image Feature That Used Your Instagram Photos Without Asking

Key points

• Meta launched a feature in 2025 letting users generate AI images by tagging any public Instagram account, without the account owner's consent.
• Meta removed the feature within days after widespread public criticism.
• The National Center on Sexual Exploitation warned the tool was an obvious instrument for sextortion scams.
• The Screen Actors Guild told its members to opt out before Meta shut the feature down entirely.

Meta, the company behind Instagram and Facebook, built something that sounded harmless on paper: tag a public Instagram account in a prompt, and its AI would use that account's photos as inspiration for a new image. No permission required from the person who posted those photos.

The backlash was swift.

As first reported by The Verge AI, Meta has now pulled the feature entirely. The company updated a blog post about its new Muse Image AI model, a tool that generates pictures from text descriptions, with a short admission: "We've heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it's no longer available."

The problem was not subtle. Any photo you had ever posted publicly on Instagram could be fed into someone else's AI creation. You would never know, and you would never be asked.

Meta did build in an opt-out, meaning users could bury through account settings to remove themselves. But critics argued that flipping the default to "anyone can use your face" and then hiding the exit is the wrong way round.

Haley McNamara, executive director and chief strategy officer of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a nonprofit that campaigns against image-based abuse, put it plainly on Friday: "Not only does this obviously erode our rights to our own likeness, but it is an obvious tool for sextortion and other scammers. Pursuing high-risk design and then putting the onus on individuals to jump through hoops to opt out is unacceptable."

Sextortion is a form of blackmail where someone threatens to share real or fake explicit images of a victim unless they pay money or send more images. AI tools that can generate convincing fake images of real people make that threat cheaper and easier to carry out.

The Screen Actors Guild, the union representing film and TV performers, recommended its members opt out and posted step-by-step instructions before Meta pulled the feature.

Meta says its intent was to give people "a useful creative tool" and control over their content. The feature's design told a different story: control sat with the person doing the generating, not the person whose face was being used.

For ordinary Instagram users, the feature is gone for now. If you run a public account, this episode is a useful reminder that public does not always mean freely available for any purpose. Checking your Instagram privacy settings periodically, and switching your account to private if you do not need a public audience, limits how your content can be swept up in features like this one.