After Meta began tagging photos with a “Made with AI” label in May, photographers complained that the social networking company had been applying labels to real photos where they’d used some basic editing tools.
Due to the user feedback and general confusion around what level of AI is utilized in a photograph, the corporate is changing the tag to “AI info” across all of Meta’s apps.
Meta said that the sooner version of the tag wasn’t clear enough for users to point that the image with the tag shouldn’t be necessarily created with AI, but may need used AI-powered tools within the editing process.
“Like others across the industry, we’ve found that our labels based on these indicators weren’t all the time aligned with people’s expectations and didn’t all the time provide enough context. For instance, some content that included minor modifications using AI, reminiscent of retouching tools, included industry standard indicators that were then labeled ‘Made with AI’,” the corporate said in an updated blog post.
The corporate shouldn’t be changing the underlying technology for detecting use of AI in photos and labeling them. Meta still uses information from technical metadata standards reminiscent of C2PA and IPTC that include details about use of AI tools.
Which means, if photographers use tools like Adobe’s Generative AI Fill to remove objects, their photos might still be tagged with the brand new label. Nevertheless, Meta hopes that the brand new label will help people understand that the image with the tag shouldn’t be all the time created entirely by AI.
“‘AI Info’ can encompass content that was made and/or modified with AI so the hope is that that is more according to people’s expectations, while we work with corporations across the industry to enhance the method,” Meta spokesperson Kate McLaughlin told TechCrunch over email.
The brand new tag will still not solve the issue of completely AI-generated photos going undetected. And it won’t tell users about how much AI-powered editing has been done on a picture.
Meta and other social network might want to work to set guidelines without being unfair to photographers who haven’t made alterations to their editing workflows, however the tools they used to the touch up photos have some generative AI element. Alternatively, corporations like Adobe should warn photographers that once they use a certain tool, their image is perhaps tagged with a label on other services.