Meta’s new 'Muse Image' tool has sparked intense controversy by allowing users to generate AI images using other people's profile pictures without their knowledge.
For visual creators using a public Instagram or Facebook account to showcase their portfolio, a sobering reality has arrived: your imagery is no longer just a display of your photography – it is free training data for Big Tech. What is being controversially rolled out in the US is Meta's ‘Muse Image’.
This feature allows any user to type a public handle into Meta AI to generate entirely new, synthetic images utilising that specific person's likeness, severely lowering the barrier for deepfakes and intellectual property infringement.
While Meta explicitly states it does not scrape private messages, anything set to ‘public’ is fair game. For professional photographers, this means portfolios, personal work and client work are now feeding a corporate data engine.
Unsurprisingly, the move has sparked fierce global pushback. While the European Union’s strict GDPR rules have allowed regulatory bodies to challenge this automatic opt-in, Australian creators face a much steeper uphill battle.
Because Australia’s current privacy laws lack strict, AI-specific mandates, Meta has not provided local users with a straightforward, comprehensive ‘opt-out’ switch for general AI data harvesting. Furthermore, the granular toggle to stop others from generating AI images using your likeness is currently being trialled in the US, meaning Australian accounts cannot access the setting just yet.
Who knows what is in store for Australian users is anyone’s guess – but we can guarantee all of these settings and usage rights may be changed in the blink of an app update.
For now, local photographers looking to protect their intellectual property and digital footprint under the current Australian framework, immediate action is required:
• Switch to a Private Account: This remains the most definitive shield. Meta's scraping policy applies strictly to public content, so changing your profile visibility immediately locks future imagery out of their AI training pool.
• Limit Past Content: To protect years of historical work on Facebook, utilise the ‘Limit Past Posts’ feature in your settings to instantly change the visibility of all past timeline photos to ‘Friends Only’.
As generative AI models demand more data, the line between public sharing and copyright protection is completely blurring, leaving it squarely up to Australian photographers to proactively lock down their own visual assets.
You can read Meta's AI Studio Policy here.
Or read about Muse Image on the Facebook / Meta website here.