Instagram is now labeling real photos as “Made with AI”
Jun 6, 2024
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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After labeling photos with Generative Fill as AI, Instagram has gone even further. It’s now labeling real photos with its new tag “Made with AI,” and photographers are rightfully losing their minds over this.
I first noticed the issue brought up by Monika Rohfeld (Instagram | Facebook) in a Facebook group I follow. She took a photo of a man on Coney Island, an actual photo, with “nothing artificial about,” as she describes it. “Props are real, person is real, location is real,” Monika writes. She used an AD 300 Pro on full power to fill because her model was backlit on full power: and that’s all! “I did pull the contrast from the background and the usual D/B but that’s it,” she notes.
However, after posting the photo on Instagram, the social media labeled it “Made with AI.” How annoying is that?!
Commenting on Monika’s post, Kevin Patrick Robbins noted that “If you use ANY AI tools in your edit, such as Generative Fill or the remove brush, it gets tagged in the metadata and IG will flag it.” And the problem is – the new crop tool fills after straightening the image. “There was a tiny sliver in the corner that needed content aware fill,” Monika replied. “That is outrageous.”
This reminded me of the time when a photographer got banned from 500px for “posting non-photographic content,” because 500px apparently can’t tell between light painting and AI/composites. Speaking of light painting, I noticed another example of Instagram mislabeling images. Our buddy Eric Paré had the same situation as Monika, as one of his light-painting photos was automatically flagged as AI by Instagram. “It’s been posted in my stories and there was no option to disable this,” he writes on Instagram. “I tried with 3 images and got the same result.”
Getting around Instagram’s “Made with AI” label
Honestly, I find this super-annoying. Imagine investing your time, effort, money and whatnot to create the look and the result that you want. Then, removing a blemish or filling in a tiny corner of the photo – bam, your photo is flagged as AI, just like someone’s image created in 5 seconds by writing a prompt. It’s simply not fair, especially since all editing tools are constantly shoving AI up our noses.
I don’t see how and if Instagram can address this and tell AI images apart from real photos with slight AI-based editing. There are sometimes nuances between the two, and it can be hard to tell how much AI is too much AI – but it doesn’t make this issue less frustrating. Pratik Naik shares some tips on getting around this issue – at least until algorithms become more sophisticated if they ever do.
Have you had a similar experience with your photos on Instagram? Do you have any idea how to overcome this?
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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2 responses to “Instagram is now labeling real photos as “Made with AI””
If you train an AI on x-ray imagery to detect breast cancer, it might end up effectively detecting the “R” orientation tag which was clearly visible in the positive portion of the training material, but not on the negative ones. And not tumors. Similarly, Insta might have trained its AI on a bunch of AI-created images that were looking quite artificial vs. “natural” images with grain, noise, distortion, bad lighting etc. Monika Rohfeld’s image looks “artificial” too, hence it must have been made with AI.
The whole excercise is a ridiculous, futile, helpless, forced, unsustainable and complete waste of time.
So…
… Monika was using content aware fill and content aware fill is forbidden. It’s as simple as that. It’s essentially the same as with pregnancy: You can’t be “a bit” pregnant. Don’t use content aware fill and all the features based on it. Or, even better: Don’t use Instagram.