Determining what’s real and what’s not on the internet was hard enough before the rise of AI, which can create images that look like photographs-without the help of an actual camera. Early efforts to help people understand what they’re seeing have ben halting, and now, after a bit of furious backlash, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta has had to change how it labels AI-generated content.

Remember when Photoshopped image scandals were big news? When we fussed over which photos of a Hollywood star had been "retouched" with digital tools? Those worries are part of a simpler time online. In the emerging AI-dominated era, the crucial issues affecting digital images is whether one is, entirely or in part, ever real in the first place . It’s exactly this issue that has triped up Meta, after it mistakenly labeled real photographs as " made with AI ."

Without ever quite saying "sorry," Meta admitted in a blog post that it had made errors with its push to label AI-generated imagery shared via its social media outlets. Guided by its corporate oversight board and public opinion surveys, Meta says it’s "making changes to the way we handle manipulated media." Instead of labeling photos and videos it thinks are AI-manipulated with a "Made with AI" label, instead it’s going to flag such content in the future with an "AI info" tag, to indicate that AI was involved somewhere in the process of generating the content.

That’s where things get a bit murky. Meta is responding this way because of what tech site Engaget calls "widespread complaints" from photographers who discovered that their genuine digital photos were being flagged as AI-generated by Meta’s systems.

The reason, though Meta’s blog post never directly addresses the product in question, is that tools in Adobe’s Photoshop that incorporated AI technology were used to retouch the images. In fact if Photoshop’s generative fill system (which uses AI to look around, say, a flaw in a photo and guess what should actually be shown in place of the flaw) was used for even a tiny speck of retouching in an image, then […]

Meta Changes Policy After Labeling Real Content AI-Generated