Multiple photographers are voicing their frustrations as Meta mistakenly labels real photos as ‘Made by AI,’ according to a report by TechCrunch.
Over the past few months, several photographers have shared examples of this issue. Recently, Meta marked a photo taken by former White House photographer Pete Souza of a basketball game as AI-generated. Similarly, an Instagram photo of the Kolkata Knight Riders winning the Indian Premier League Cricket tournament was incorrectly labeled by Meta. Notably, these labels only appear when viewing the images on mobile devices, not on the web.
Souza attempted to remove the label but was unsuccessful. He speculates that using Adobe’s cropping tool and flattening images before saving them as JPEGs might be triggering Meta’s algorithm.
However, it seems Meta also incorrectly marks real photos as AI-generated when photographers use generative AI tools like Adobe’s Generative Fill to make minor edits. PetaPixel reports that even removing a speck from an image using Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool led to Meta marking it as AI-generated on Instagram. Interestingly, when PetaPixel re-uploaded the file into Photoshop, saved it after copying and pasting it into a black document, Meta did not add the ‘Made with AI’ label.
Photographers are expressing their concerns that such minor edits should not be labeled as AI-generated. Photographer Noah Kalina voiced his frustration on Threads, stating, “If ‘retouched’ photos are ‘Made with AI’ then that term effectively has no meaning. They might as well auto tag every photograph ‘Not a True Representation of Reality’ if they are serious about protecting people.”
This mislabeling issue raises questions about the accuracy of Meta’s content identification algorithms and their impact on photographers and content creators.
Meanwhile, many Facebook users have reported a troubling trend: the platform’s spam filter appears to be overly aggressive, mistakenly flagging and removing legitimate posts.
Last week, I received a notification from Facebook that one of my posts had been removed for violating their community standards. The post was simply about the differences between addon domains, parked domains, and subdomains. How could Facebook possibly consider this as spam?
We contacted Facebook about this issue, but we haven’t received a response yet.
