Understanding Meta's 'Muse Image' feature

Important to remember that Meta is a digital advertising platform. Any platform features need to be viewed through this lens to understand their motivations and the implications for privacy and data protection.

Briefly, the new Muse Image feature is likely to provide Meta with additional streams of data, including inputs and outputs from AI chats, that can be used to drive:

• User profiling
• Creation and evaluation of advertising imagery
• Development and refinement of AI models

Enabling use of public profile images as inputs to the Muse Image feature (unless users explicitly opt-out) is likely to be motivated by a desire to increase user engagement - users will create, share and react to images on the platform. This drives data collection, which drives the factors above.

Individuals and organisations that use the platform, and wider society, need to consider whether the data processing that is undertaken to support this digital advertising platform is consistent with their expectations and values.

Read about Instagram’s privacy policies at: https://privacycenter.instagram.com

Read the Meta Blog post on Muse Image at: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/07/introducing-muse-image-meta-ai/

Read the BBC article on Muse Image at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp9lee19y1yo

UPDATE: BBC published an article on the 11th July 2026 which noted that Meta had taken down the feature that allowed people to use the Muse Image tool to generate images from user content on Instagram.

Read the follow-up BBC article on Muse Image at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dy6e8klw0o