Meta Launches Muse Image, and Users Are Already Pushing Back Over How It Uses Their Photos

Meta introduced Muse Image on Tuesday, calling it the first image generation model built by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI research division formed earlier this year under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.

According to Meta, the tool, code-named Mango during development, is free inside the Meta AI app and already live in Instagram Stories and WhatsApp, with Facebook, Messenger, and Meta Advantage+ coming soon.

Muse Image reportedly works alongside Muse Spark, the reasoning model Meta released in April, which plans requests and pulls in web context before Muse Image renders the final image.

This enables users to restore old photos, redesign rooms with Facebook Marketplace furniture, or generate images with legible text built in.

A Feature That Lets Strangers Use Your Photos

The capability drawing the most attention isn’t one of Meta’s showcase use cases. 

Users can tag any public Instagram account in a Muse Image prompt, and the tool will pull that account’s public photos into a newly generated image, even if the tagged person has no connection to the creator. 

Meta’s policy states that “people may be able to create content with your Instagram content using AI features at Meta” and that account holders “will not be notified about content created using AI features at Meta.” 

The setting is opt-out, meaning public accounts are included by default unless users disable it. 

One X user, reacting to early reporting, called it “a privacy landmine waiting to detonate,” a sentiment that spread quickly after launch. 

Meta says users retain control through account settings, but critics argue the opt-out approach undermines meaningful consent and echoes long-standing concerns over control of public content on social media platforms.

A Familiar Pattern for a Company With a Complicated Privacy Record

The backlash lands against a backdrop that makes Meta an easy target for this kind of criticism. 

The company paid a then-record $5 billion FTC fine in 2019 after regulators found Cambridge Analytica had improperly harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge to build political targeting profiles ahead of the 2016 election. 

Meta had reportedly known about the scandal internally for years before it became public.

Separately, Meta shut down Facebook’s automatic facial-recognition system in 2021 amid lawsuits and regulatory pressure tied to biometric data collection and is facing a similar privacy backlash from the ACLU over smartglasses features. 

Privacy researchers are already watching how the feature holds up under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, as Meta announced no GDPR-specific changes alongside the launch.

Investors Aren’t Deterred, at Least for Now

Despite the criticism, Wall Street reacted favorably to the release. 

According to Stocktwits, Meta shares climbed roughly 3% on launch day, reaching a 30-day high as investors viewed Muse Image as the clearest sign yet that Meta’s AI infrastructure spending was translating into a consumer-facing product rather than just a cost line. 

Meta says Muse Image already outperforms Google’s Nano Banana 2 on several internal benchmarks, trailing only OpenAI’s image generator built into ChatGPT, and the company has previewed a follow-up video generation model, Muse Video, which is already in development. 

Whether the privacy criticism escalates into regulatory scrutiny or fades like past Meta controversies remains to be seen. But for now, the company appears to be betting that the product’s momentum will outweigh the backlash over its handling of other people’s photos.

Source: Introducing Muse Image: Image Generation Built for Your World