Creative Artists Agency Demands Meta Overhaul Muse Image Privacy Defaults

Creative Artists Agency, one of the most influential agencies representing Hollywood stars and creators, issued a sharp rebuke of Meta on July 8. At issue is how the company rolled out its Muse Image generation tool: by default, every public Instagram profile became available to the AI system, and users have to actively opt out rather than being asked for consent beforehand.

On by Default, Not Off

The core of CAA's complaint concerns how consent is structured. Meta Superintelligence Labs launched Muse Image and an accompanying video tool this week, giving the system default access to every public Instagram account. That means a creator, actor, or musician has to find the setting themselves and turn it off if they don't want their likeness used to generate new images through an AI system also used by other people.

No one's name, image, likeness, voice, or creative work should be used by any third party, including AI models, without clear, documented consent - Creative Artists Agency

The agency is directly calling on Meta to "make protection the default in Muse Image rather than the exception, and let people knowingly opt in if they want to allow their image or likeness to be used to create AI content." That distinction, opt-in versus opt-out, has become the central battleground in most disputes over creators' rights in the generative AI era in recent years.

A Repeat of the Sora Playbook

CAA explicitly draws a parallel to the earlier dispute over Sora, OpenAI's video generator, which also initially operated on an opt-out basis and drew a wave of criticism from the creative community. OpenAI eventually switched to an opt-in model, and the product in that form was ultimately pulled from the market as financially unviable. For Meta, the comparison is an uncomfortable one, since it suggests a repeat of a mistake the entertainment industry has already watched play out once.

Muse Image is the second major product released by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the lab led by former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang, following the Muse Spark language model unveiled in April. The company touts the tool as acting like an agent, independently reaching for search and coding tools, refining its own generations, and using inference-time compute scaling to better execute complex prompts.

What It Means for Creators and Businesses

For Polish creators, influencers, and businesses using Instagram, the issue has a very concrete practical dimension: if an account is public, its photos may already be used by the Muse system unless the owner manually opts out in the settings. That applies both to private individuals and to brands running company profiles, for whom the likeness of employees or products can be a key asset. Pressure from an agency as large as CAA, which represents some of the biggest names in global entertainment, increases the chance that Meta will adjust its default settings in response to the criticism, much as OpenAI did before it.

The dispute is unfolding alongside a broader debate over image rights in the generative AI era, one increasingly compared to the earlier period when social platforms defaulted to sharing user data before regulators and public opinion forced a shift toward explicit consent. So far, Meta has not announced any policy change in response to CAA's statement.

What Comes Next

The key question is whether pressure from the creative community will force a quick change to the settings before Muse Image expands to the additional markets and platforms Meta has announced, including a broader rollout on Facebook, Messenger, and additional WhatsApp features. Sora's history shows that disputes like this can genuinely affect a product's fate.

Sources: CAA Warns Meta Muse AI Image Needs Privacy Revamp ASAP (Deadline, deadline.com), CAA Calls Out Meta For Making Its Muse AI Video and Photo Tool Opt-Out (The Hollywood Reporter, hollywoodreporter.com), Meta debuts Muse Image (CNBC, cnbc.com), Meta launches Muse Image (Neowin, neowin.net)