Meta is turning off an Instagram feature that allows users to deepfake public accounts with artificial intelligence

After significant backlash, Meta is turning off a feature it announced this week that lets users create AI photos based on content from public Instagram accounts just by tagging them. As originally set up, this feature means that content from any public Instagram account can be used in AI creations without the account owner’s permission.

“Earlier this week, we announced that one of the ways people can create photos in Meta AI is to @mention public Instagram accounts they want to reference,” Meta says in an update to Blog post About the new Muse Image AI model. “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.”

Meta has allowed you to unsubscribe through Drilling through the settings Before the feature was completely turned off, but the feature still attracted significant criticism.

“Not only does this erode our rights to look like us… but it is an obvious tool for sextortion and other fraudsters!” Haley McNamara, executive director and chief strategy officer at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, he said earlier on Friday. “Pursuing a high-risk design and then putting the burden on individuals to jump through hoops to opt out is unacceptable.”