Instagram’s Ham-Fisted Approach to Labeling Photos as AI Is Bad for Creatives

In the last week, Instagram has been automatically labeling any photo touched by artificial intelligence tools as “Made with AI.” On the surface, this sounds like a win for photographers decrying the use of AI as intellectual property theft. But in practice, the way Meta has decided to call out AI leaves little room for nuance and debate.

Buckle up, because this is probably a hot take, especially coming from a photojournalist.

Earlier this week, I used my phone and uploaded to Instagram a photo of famed New York City Photographer Louis Mendes at Photoville. I made fairly ordinary Photoshop edits that are typical in my non-journalistic work, and in the process, I lassoed a small section at the edge of the frame and told generative AI to remove the highlight. Here’s a before and after of the results:

Imagine my surprise when upon upload, prominently at the top of the post, Instagram labeled it “Made with AI.”

Well, no. I lassoed a small section of the photo and had AI make an edit. It’s the same edit that I could have made with the clone tool and a little extra time. The end result would have been almost exactly the same. But one photo would get flagged and one would not.

It’s in this distinction that the broad brush of “Made with AI,” though noble in its pursuit of the truth, fails. The label seems to imply that this image was whole-cloth made with AI when it simply wasn’t. AI was used as a retouching tool, much in the way the dodge or burn tool would be used, or the clone tool, or the healing brush. To single out the use of the generative AI tool for this label seems to misunderstand how AI was used in this case.

Sure, if DALL-E or Midjourney generated this image of Louis Mendes out of thin air, the “Made with AI” label applies. But I don’t believe it should in this case, as Mr. Mendes was standing there, as sure as I’m typing this sentence (the snake and the dinosaur were not, as I’ll get to in a moment).

This could have a chilling effect on retouching in general. Here’s another example where the “Made with AI” label would make no sense:

The only AI “crime,” so to speak, in this photo is using it to remove the front license plate of this car. It’s something I would file under the category of retouching work and not generating an image completely with AI. If an edit like this is demonized, why even have AI tools in the first place?

There are other problems here. One of the commenters on my post asked if using an AI Denoise function in Photoshop would trigger this label. It’s something that would look very bad for event shooters using this tool for clients. I tried this out, and it appears that using that tool doesn’t apply the label in Instagram. Instagram’s help page about the label was cryptic about it, saying that it looks at “industry-standard signals” to make its determination. I have seen AI noise reduction introduce some gnarly artifacts and made-up faces to photos, so it’s not immune to fabrication either.

Further, the photo at the top of this post, very clearly made with AI and labeled as such, receives no such designation when uploaded from a desktop web browser. That’s a pretty big loophole and quite the uneven application of Instagram’s AI policy.

Creatives have long adapted new tools to make better art, whether for client work or personal satisfaction. But for a huge company such as Meta to appoint itself the arbiter of how the “Made with AI” label is applied is a huge misstep. It paints a scarlet letter on folks that are responsibly using AI.

Yes, journalists and other purveyors of the truth should never use such tools to edit their work, but should a wedding photographer have to deal with a lawsuit from a bride seeing the “Made with AI” label when they upload wedding photos to social media? Should a company tweaking a photo to hide a wardrobe malfunction on social media face backlash when the photo is labeled as AI?

These are questions to which Meta doesn’t seem to have fully contemplated.

But it’s something that photographers will certainly be contemplating.

Do you have thoughts on the new “Made with AI” label on Instagram? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.