In early February, Meta said it would begin tagging photos created with artificial intelligence tools on its social networks. Since May, Meta has regularly tagged some photos with the label “Made with AI” on its Facebook, Instagram and Threads apps.
But the company’s approach to labeling photos has drawn the ire of users and photographers after attaching the “Made with AI” label to photos that have not been created with AI tools.
There are many examples where Meta automatically attaches the tag to photos that were not created using AI. For example, this photo of Kolkata Knight Riders winning the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. In particular, the label is only visible in mobile applications and not on the web.
A lot other photographers have increase There are concerns that their images have been wrongly labeled “Made with AI.” His point is that simply editing a photo with a tool should not be subject to the label.
Former White House photographer Pete Souza said in an Instagram post that one of his photos was tagged with the new hashtag. Souza told TechCrunch in an email that Adobe changed how its cropping tool works and that you have to “flatten the image” before saving it as a JPEG image. He suspects that this action has caused Meta’s algorithm to place this label.
“What’s annoying is that the post forced me to include ‘Made with AI’ even though I unchecked it,” Souza told TechCrunch.
Meta did not officially respond to TechCrunch’s questions about Souza’s experience or the posts of other photographers who said their posts were incorrectly tagged.
In a February blog post, Meta said it uses image metadata to detect the tag.
“We are building industry-leading tools that can identify invisible markers at scale—specifically, “AI-generated” data in the C2PA and IPTC technical standards—so we can tag images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock. as they implement their plans to add metadata to images created by their tools,” the company he said at that time.
As PetaPixel As reported last week, Meta appears to be applying the “Made with AI” label when photographers use tools like Adobe’s Generative AI Fill to remove objects.
While Meta hasn’t clarified when it automatically applies the tag, some photographers have sided with Meta’s approach, arguing that any use of artificial intelligence tools must be disclosed.
For now, Meta does not provide separate tags to indicate whether a photographer used a tool to clean up their photo or used AI to create it. For users, it can be difficult to understand how much AI is involved in a photo. The Meta tag specifies that “Generative AI may have been used to create or edit content in this post,” but only if you tap the tag.
Despite this approach, there are many photos on Meta platforms that are clearly AI-generated and have not been tagged by Meta’s algorithm. With the US elections coming up in just a few months, social media companies are under more pressure than ever to properly handle AI-generated content.
