How to opt out of Meta using your Instagram posts to make AI images

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There are already plenty of reasons to stay the hell away from anything that Meta has its grubby little rat hooks on: Facebook surveils and monetizes everything you do while you’re online, and their shitty Meta AI glasses pick up the surveillance slack in meatspace, capturing every moment they’re on your face while robbing others of their privacy to boot. Meta’s been working on their in-house Large Language Model, cunningly named Meta AI, for some time now. To help it grow in capability, it’s fed a blend of stolen publicly available information found online, bits and pieces of information that Zuckerberg bothered to license, and a constant flow of information gleaned from Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram users. It’s the crap price some folks are willing to pay for using Meta’s supposedly free services. However, according to Wired, the cost of using Meta to post your life online just went up. In addition to using your data to teach its AI to be more human than the company’s founder, Meta now also allows anyone to use your Instagram photographs as a base for AI-generated artwork.

Earlier this week, Meta rolled out the new iteration of their Muse Image model. So fancy! Also, so frigging intrusive. The images posted by anyone with a public Instagram account are fair game for Muse to use. This, of course, suck. The good news, however, is that while this bullshit is set up on all public accounts by default, it’s possible to opt out.

• Open Instagram on your smartphone and tap to open your profile.

• Now, tap the Hamburger icon (the three horizontal lines) in the top right corner of the Profile menu

• Give Settings a slap.

• Scroll down to Sharing and Reuse. Give that a slap as well.

• See those toggles for Posts and Reels in the section marked “Allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with AI features at Meta”? Yeah, you’re gonna want to kill both of those.

If you have an account that’s marked as Private, there’s no need to do any of this. But you know what? I’d check it anyway, as Meta is always gonna Meta. Or, you could opt for a quieter, photographer-focused experience with Flickr.