Meta withdraws its most controversial feature to date two days after its launch

As we told you last week, Meta launched Muse Image, its first image-generating AI. One of this AI’s standout features allowed users to type in the username of anyone on Instagram and ask the artificial intelligence to generate content based on that account’s posts. A feature that was enabled by default (which we already showed you how to disable) and that sparked a major backlash from the community.

Now, that feature is no longer available.

Why Meta removed the feature

According to Mark Zuckerberg’s company, “its intention was to provide a useful tool and allow users to decide whether their public content could be referenced in this way,” but after seeing the reaction from its community, the feature was no longer available just two days later. The company made this public when it updated its launch article. And thankfully so.

On the Instagram CEO’s post alone, there were already several comments complaining about it, saying things like “Nobody wants this, literally” or “What we need is an option to stop seeing AI-generated content.”

Still, that has not exactly done much to calm users down. The mere fact that Meta thought it was a good idea to enable it by default without asking anyone is enough to raise alarm bells. Because the responsibility falls on the user, and it is the user who has to notice. But how many users on any Meta platform actually read its communications or product launch announcements? I am sure it is fewer than half of half of everyone in the world.

If this were 2013, when social media was just becoming the norm, maybe we would have let it slide. In the golden age of social media, everything looked rosy, because… how could something new that allowed us to connect with our faraway friends and family possibly be bad? But twenty years after the creation of Facebook (Meta), we can look at these platforms differently and recognize that, despite all the good they have given us, there are also mistakes that could have been addressed earlier and are now irreversible. That is why governments are now seeking to set a minimum age for access. That is why we are now “TikTok-ified” and cannot watch a video at normal speed. And that is why our attention span was gone before I even wrote the first H2 of this article.

In this context, failing to take the necessary precautions to protect users amid the growing and rapid evolution of AI would be a mistake. And although neither Meta, nor OpenAI, nor X, nor any company whose reason for existing is artificial intelligence is going to put obstacles in its own path, it is worth remembering that users are the ones who ultimately determine whether something works or not. Just as happened with the Muse Image feature.