Thirty Seconds to Decide Who Reuses Your Instagram Images

Meta released a new tool this week called Muse Image, and buried inside the announcement is a detail worth your attention: if your Instagram account is public, any Meta user can now pull your posts and Reels into an AI generator and remix them into something new. Flattering or not. With or without your knowledge. Meta frames this as a creative feature, and for your own photos it probably is. But the setting that lets strangers do it to you is on by default, and turning it off takes about thirty seconds.

Open Instagram, go to Settings, find "How others can interact with you," tap "Sharing and reuse," and switch off the toggles for Posts, Reels, and original audio. You do not have to make your account private to protect what you post there. You just have to decide, on purpose, who gets to reuse it.