Instagram will label your photo as AI if you use Generative Fill

Photographers and content creators are finding their images mislabelled as “made with AI” on Instagram. The social media platform introduced the new label to create transparency around AI generated images, however the label is appearing on photos with minimal post-processing.

Photographer Peter Yan posted on Threads that his photo of Mount Fuji had been labelled as “made with AI”. Yan posted the RAW image beside it, clearly showing the minimal amount of post-processing that had been done.

“I did not use generative AI, only Photoshop to clean up some spots. This ‘Made with AI’ was auto-labeled by Instagram when I posted it, I did not select this option,” Yan posted.

Generative Fill

According to Petapixel, the label may have been added because Yan used Photoshop’s Generative Fill to remove a trash can from the image.This is an easy and common thing to do in post, and not something that you need to use AI for. The good old fashioned clone tool used to do the job, albeit with a little more skill needed.

Petapixel did an expiment where they edited a photo in a similarly minor way, using Generative Fill to remove blemishes from an image. They then uploaded the image to Instagram to see what would happen.

They then did the same thing using the more old fashioned Photoshop tools of the clone stamp, healing brush and content aware fill.

Made with AI

Lo and behold, the image that was corrected using Generative Fill got the “Made with AI” label, the image that was edited using other tools did not receive the AI label. Interesting.

According to Petapixel, Meta has not revealed the technology or methods it uses for determining what is AI generated content and what isn’t. If it’s anything like Instagram’s nipple censoring algorithms, we can expect a lot of mis-labelled content.

You’ve been warned. Use Generative Fill at your own risk if you’re merely making small edits and removing blemishes in a photograph.

[via petapixel]