Instagram’s ‘Made with AI’ label was changed to ‘AI info’ after complaints from photographers

On Monday, Meta announced which is “updating the ‘Made with AI’ label to ‘AI Insights’ in our apps, where people can click for more information,” after people complained that their photos had the label applied incorrectly. Former White House photographer Pete Souza pointed out the tag that appeared in the upload of a photo originally taken on film during a basketball game 40 years ago, speculating that using Adobe’s cropping tool and flattening images could have triggered the problem.

“As we have said from the beginning, we are consistently improving our AI products and working closely with our industry partners on our approach to AI labeling,” said Meta spokeswoman Kate McLaughlin. The new label is supposed to more accurately represent that the content can simply be modified, rather than making it appear as if it was entirely generated by AI.

The problem appears to be what metadata tools like Adobe Photoshop apply to images and how platforms interpret this. After Meta expanded its policies around AI content labeling, real-life photos posted on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Threads were marked as “Made with AI.”

You can see the new labeling first in mobile apps and then in the web view, as McLaughlin says On the edge it is starting to spread to all surfaces.

Once you click the tag, it will still show the same message as the old tag, which contains a more detailed explanation of why it may have been applied, and which may cover images that are entirely AI-generated or edited with tools that include AI technology, such as fill generative. Metadata tagging technology like C2PA should make it simpler and easier to differentiate between AI-generated images and real images, but that future is not yet here.