Earlier in February, Meta said it would start tagging photos generated with AI tools on its social networks. Since May, Meta has been regularly tagging certain photos with the “Made with AI” tag on its Facebook, Instagram and Threads apps.
However, the company’s approach to tagging photos has drawn ire from users and photographers alike after attaching the “Made with AI” tag to photos that weren’t created with AI tools.
There are many examples of Meta automatically tagging non-AI generated photos. For example, this photo of Kolkata Knight Riders winning the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. Specifically, the label is only visible on mobile apps and not on the web.
Host but photographers I have lifted up concerns about their images being incorrectly labeled “Made with AI”. Their point is that simply editing a photo with a tool should not be subject to the label.
Former White House photographer Pete Souza said in an Instagram post that one of his photos was tagged with the new tag. Souza told TechCrunch in an email that Adobe changed the way the crop tool works and it must “flatten the image” before saving it as a JPEG image. It is suspected that this action has triggered Meta’s algorithm to attach this tag.
“What’s annoying is that the post forced me to include ‘Made with AI’ even though I unchecked it,” Souza told TechCrunch.
Meta would not respond in writing to TechCrunch’s questions about Souza’s experience or to posts by other photographers who said their posts were mislabeled.
In a February blog post, Meta said it uses image metadata to locate the tag.
“We’re building industry-leading tools that can recognize invisible markers at scale — specifically, AI-generated information in the C2PA and IPTC technical standards — so we can tag images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock as they implement their plans to add metadata to images generated by their tools,” the company he said at the time.
As PetaPixels reported last week, Meta appears to apply the “Made with AI” tag when photographers use tools like Adobe’s Generative AI Fill to remove objects.
While Meta hasn’t specified when it automatically applies the tag, some photographers have sided with Meta’s approach, arguing that any use of AI tools should be disclosed.
Currently, Meta does not provide separate tags to indicate whether a photographer used a tool to clean up their photo or used artificial intelligence to create it. For users, it can be difficult to understand how much artificial intelligence is involved in a photo. The Meta tag specifies that “Generative AI may have been used to create or edit content in this post” — but only if you click on the tag.
Despite this approach, there are many photos on Meta’s platforms that are clearly created by artificial intelligence and have not been flagged by Meta’s algorithm. With the US election just months away, social media companies are under more pressure than ever to get AI-generated content right.
