Meta wrongly marks real photos as “AI-made”

Several photographers have shared examples in recent months, with Meta recently tagging a photo taken by former White House photographer Pete Souza of a basketball game as AI-generated. In another recent example, Meta mistakenly added the tag to an Instagram photo of the Kolkata Knight Riders winning the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. Interestingly, like Souza’s photo, the label only appears when viewing the images on mobile, not on the web.

Souza said he tried to uncheck the label, but couldn’t. He theorizes that using Adobe’s cropping tool and flattening images before saving them as JPEG images can trigger Meta’s algorithm.

However, Meta has also wrongly marked real photos as AI when photographers use generative AI tools like Adobe’s Generative Fill to remove even the smallest of objects, PetaPixel reports. The publication tested this for itself by using Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool to remove a blemish from an image, which Meta then marked as AI-generated on Instagram. Strangely, Meta didn’t add the “Made with AI” label when PetaPixel I downloaded the file into Photoshop, then saved it after copying and pasting it into a black document.

Many photographers have expressed frustration that such minor edits are unfairly labeled as AI-generated.

“If ‘edited’ photos are ‘made with AI,’ then the term actually has no meaning,” photographer Noah Kalina wrote on Threads. “They might as well automatically label every photograph as ‘Not a true representation of reality’ if they really want to protect people.”

In a statement to The edgeMeta spokeswoman Kate McLaughlin said the company was aware of the issue and was evaluating its approach “so that (its) labels reflect the amount of AI used in an image.”

“We rely on industry standard metrics that other companies include in the content of their tools. So we are actively working with these companies to improve the process so that our labeling approach matches our intent,” McLaughlin added.

In February, Meta announced that it would begin adding “Made with AI” labels to photos uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads ahead of this year’s election season. Specifically, the company announced that it would add the label to AI-generated photos made with tools from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock.

Meta hasn’t revealed what exactly triggers the “Made with AI” label, but all of these companies have – or are working on – adding metadata to image files to signify the use of AI tools, which is a way for Meta to identify AI-generated files. Pictures. Adobe, for example, began adding information about the origin of content into metadata with the release of its Content Credentials system last year.