Please Stop Making Me Opt Out of AI

In early July, Meta rolled out a new feature where anyone using its AI app could tag public Instagram accounts and generate images using their likenesses. Meta’s decision to turn the feature on by default, so that Instagram users had to actively opt out, was controversial.

Multiple Instagram creators posted viral videos explaining how to opt out and expressed frustration. After three days of outcry, Meta said in a statement that “this feature missed the mark” and rolled back Instagram tagging for its AI chatbot.

“They should have given you the option to opt in rather than opt out. But I am really getting tired of these companies pushing this AI stuff on us when we don’t want to use it,” said creator Sam Sooin Yang in an Instagram video with over 3 million views. As public sentiment has continued to sour on generative AI, Silicon Valley companies have leaned into enabling these features and related settings by default.

The public reaction to Instagram’s “opt-out” default for that AI feature was notable for its swiftness. “That was a clear and immediate pushback,” says Thorin Klosowski, a senior security and privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Honestly, it was great to see how quickly that happened.” Three days from lights on to lights off for a generative AI feature has to be some kind of record.

Recently, I turned off the “Ask Gemini” bar in my Google Docs. It popped up at the bottom of my documents one morning and prompted me to use Google's chatbot as part of my regular writing workflow. Immediately, I started digging in the settings to disengage this feature. It's a ritual I’ve also performed an unfortunate number of times in recent years on other platforms, like Dropbox and LinkedIn.

Even beyond this feature, Meta is deeply entrenched in the privacy toggle game. “This type of behavior is not unique for Meta,” says Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America. “They are stewards of the opt-out status quo that we find ourselves in, without adequate privacy regulation in the States.” Another Meta setting you might want to opt out of is Facebook’s “Enhanced Browsing” roundup that tracks in-app visited websites on mobile.

“We've built a wide array of settings and controls to help people make the privacy choices that are right for them and shape their experiences across our platforms,” Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts wrote in an emailed statement to WIRED. “We also conduct and fund extensive research to develop controls and data practices that are easy for people to use and understand, including through cross-industry organizations like TTC Labs."

It really matters when companies decide to opt users into a new AI tool or data training. “People tend to stick with whatever the default option is,” says Woodrow Hartzog, a professor at Boston University’s law school. “So, if the default option is that you're enrolled, you're probably going to stay enrolled.”

Hartzog points to Article 25 of the European Union’s privacy law, called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as an example of better protections for users. “The idea is that you have to build your systems to collect only what you need and nothing more,” he says. “And, if one of the options is more privacy protective than the other one, then by default, the more privacy protective option needs to be pre-selected.”

While some privacy experts have taken issue with how the GDPR works in practice, I find the idea of a more privacy-preserving approach as the default powerful. That would give me better peace of mind about my online interactions. No need to feel personally responsible for digging through esoteric menu screens, solving three limericks before I better protect my data.

While regulatory experts highlight scattered state laws in places like California and Maryland as solid steps toward better personal data protections, a more centralized set of standards would benefit consumers who are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of privacy-impacting settings they are automatically enrolled in.

“It is the perfect recipe for something that needs federal government intervention,” Winters says. “That's what legislatures and governments are there for: to protect people where they are unable to protect themselves and constrain companies from doing things that are particularly abusive and deceptive at scale.” While past attempts have failed at the national scale, Winters is optimistic that public sentiment is putting us closer to federal regulation than we were a decade ago.

When a company chooses to opt you into an AI feature, they are making decisions with real-world consequences. “People say technology is just a tool that you can do good things or bad things with. That often is said to hide the ways in which technology makes certain realities more or less likely,” Hartzog says. “So when you design tools in particular ways, there are foreseeable uses of those tools.”

If a company automatically opts millions of users into a deepfake tool, then a world filled with even more deepfakes becomes more possible. And that's a reality I’d love to opt out of.