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As we and others have recently covered, Instagram’s algorithms have gone a bit crazy in tagging photos as “Made with AI”.
While the site’s algorithmic process for detecting and tagging AI-rendered or manipulated photos often detects them correctly, it has also enraged numerous photographers and content posters for flagging their perfectly authentic shots.
Because Instagram (and its parent company Meta) are very hermetic about how their internal detection systems for unwanted content work, it’s hard to say why these false positives happen, but they’ve been common.
Instagram itself has stated that it uses only industry-accepted indicators for detecting AI manipulation of images and hasn’t elaborated much further.
With that said the website Petapixel recently attempted to conduct its own experiments on the matter to see what regularly used AI tools from Photoshop could trigger Instagram’s Made With AI flag.
The underlying logic of this attempt was that AI editing tools to apply very minor, legitimate adjustments in photos might be creating metadata that triggers the IG filter automatically.
This has been the assumption of many photographers and an understandable source of frustration. After all, removing a small imperfection with Photoshop’s Generative Fill in an otherwise entirely natural photo would be absurd by the standards of modern photo editing.
According to Petapixel’s findings, Such tiny details seem to be exactly what is causing the problems with Instagram’s filter.
As the site’s recent post on the issue demonstrated, it was Photoshop’s tools for the addition of visual elements that really sparked the IG AI filter.
Generative Fill and Generative Expand, even if used very minimally, were shown to be extremely likely to cause an image posted on IG to be slapped with a “Made With AI” tag.
The PetaPixel post describes how it author, editing a digitized photo taken with an analog camera, used Generative Fill to clean up one extremely tiny defect in one corner of the sky in the image. This alone was enough for “Made With AI” to be applied to that image.
Using Generative Expand also provoked the same result even with minor expansion being applied to otherwise normal photos.
On the other hand, Photoshop’s Generative Remove tool doesn’t seem to trigger Instagram. This new and highly precise tool from Adobe’s Firefly AI toolbox works much like Photoshop’s Spot Healing tools, though more reliably and smoothly.
The main reason why Adobe’s Generative Fill and Generative Expand tools do trigger IG’s AI detection while Generative Remove doesn’t can be found in the metadata for images edited with these tools in PS.
The two former AI tools create more code in the metadata and most importantly, include C2PA flags and in particular, the word “Adobe Firefly”. C2PA is Adobe’s Content Authenticity initiative for labeling images edited through AI.
The Generative Remove tool also mentions “firefly” but it doesn’t add in nearly as much C2PA code. Apparently, for IG’s AI filter, this makes a difference.
Since Instagram has to filter and flag (or not flag) photos posted to it on an enormous scale, it can’t dol anything but use highly specific and selective criteria for what it decides is an AI-generated image and what isn’t.
This algorithmic method for filtering content has caused IG and Meta’s other social media platforms to piss off users in the past with apparently arbitrary flagging. It’s also sort of inevitable at the scale on which the system operates.
The perverse other side to that coin is that “Made With AI” isn’t likely to work well in so many other contexts even at its basic job of preventing AI saturation.
While the algorithmic filter categorically slaps legitimate photos with a “Made With AI” tag because they fit specific criteria like having C2PA code in their metadata, it fails on other fronts.
Notably, Instagram can easily miss thousands or even millions of blatantly AI-generated images in all sorts of posts because they were made without there being identifying metadata or code within them.
This haphazard failure of detection is evident to anyone who uses Instagram for even a short while: The site is absolutely (and increasingly) saturated with all kinds of paid or organic spam content that’s obviously AI-rendered but lacks any “Made With AI” tag identifying it as such.
At the same time, you get cases like the one highlighted in PetaPixel’s article, in which some photographer, making tiny AI edits to a digitized analog photo, does get slapped by the AI filter.
Meta is likely working on improvements to this AI filtering technology, though it has an iffy history of improving its algorithms over time. For now, at least, the whole thing is rather absurdly arbitrary.
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