Meta's AI Generated Tag Controversy Photographers' Complaint
TapTechNews June 25th news, according to TechCrunch report, many photographers expressed dissatisfaction with the practice of social media giant Meta's platform adding AI Generated tags on their uploaded real photos.
Over the past few months, several such cases have been shared by photographers. For example, a basketball game photo taken by former White House photographer Pete Souza, as well as a picture documenting the Kolkata Knight Riders winning the Indian Premier League cricket championship, have both been marked by the Meta platform as AI Generated. Notably, these tags only appear on the mobile phone side and do not occur on the computer web version.
Souza said he tried to remove the tag but failed. He speculated that the use of Adobe's cropping tool and the flattening operation when converting an image to JPG format might have triggered Meta's algorithm.
However, according to the PetaPixel's report, even if photographers use generative AI tools (such as Adobe's Generative Fill function) to remove small objects in a photo, the Meta platform may also mislabel it as AI Generated. PetaPixel used Photoshop's Generative Fill function to remove a spot on a photo and then uploaded it to Instagram, and the result was marked as AI Generated by the platform. But strangely, when PetaPixel reimported the file into Photoshop, copied and pasted it to a black document, saved it, and uploaded it to Instagram, the platform did not add the AI Generated tag.
TapTechNews noted that many photographers expressed dissatisfaction with the practice of classifying minor editing operations as AI Generated. Photographer Noah Kalina wrote on social platform Threads: If photos after retouching are all marked as 'AI Generated', then this tag is meaningless. If they really want to protect users, they might as well put a tag of 'not a true reproduction' on all photos.
Meta company spokeswoman Kate McLaughlin stated in an interview with TheVerge that the company is aware of the issue and is evaluating its practices to ensure the label accurately reflects the amount of AI used in the image.
McLaughlin added: We rely on industry-standard identifiers that other companies include in the materials they generate with their tools. Therefore, we are actively collaborating with these companies to improve the process to make our marking method match our original intention.
Meta announced before the beginning of the election season earlier this year that it would add AI Generated tags on Facebook, Instagram and Threads platforms. The company stated that it will specifically add this tag for AI photos generated using tools from companies such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock.
Meta did not specifically explain the details that trigger the AI Generated tag, but all of the above companies have or are developing the function of adding metadata to the image file to indicate the use of an AI tool, which is also a way for Meta to identify AI-generated photos.