Meta has removed a feature from its new Muse AI photo and video tools that has drawn the ire of big Hollywood players like CAA and SAG-AFTRA.
The tech giant said on Friday evening that it has pulled functionality that allows users to create artificial intelligence content by tagging another public user to effectively remix their content. The company has made it applicable to all public profiles on Instagram unless users opt out of the feature.
“Earlier this week, we announced that one of the ways people can create photos in Meta AI is to tag public Instagram accounts they want to reference,” the company said in a statement on Friday. “Our goal was to provide a useful creative tool and give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way. We heard feedback that this feature didn’t achieve the goal, so it’s no longer available.
The feature has sparked outrage from major players in Hollywood, including CAA, which said in a statement on Wednesday that “no person’s name, image, likeness, voice or creative work should be used by any third party, including artificial intelligence models, without clear, documented consent.”
SAG-AFTRA followed up with a statement of its own, saying, “Anything other than a clear and obvious opt-in option for these types of uses of Instagram users’ images is unacceptable, and a complete misjudgment of public sentiment regarding the clear risks and harms inherent in such use.”
Meta seems to have heard these concerns about dropping the functionality.
The retraction bears a striking similarity to OpenAI’s backlash to the launch of the Sora app last year, which launched with limited intellectual property protections, spawning a slew of dissenting figures, including several celebrities and well-known figures, before retracting a few days later and cracking down on it. Eventually, OpenAI discontinued Sora as it shifted its strategy toward enterprise customers.
