Hello!
I hope you’re coping ok in the THIRD heatwave of 2026, I can’t believe it’s heatwave number 3 and the kids haven’t even broken up for the holidays yet.
The big AI news this week has been the Meta AI story. In case you didn’t see my post on social media, there’s a new feature that makes it super simple for anyone to use your public Instagram profile to generate AI images that look just like you.
We talk a lot about privacy at Raising Generation AI, and the right to decide what you are personally happy being fed into AI, so there’s understandably been a lot of pushback about this. We try not to be all AI-doom and scaremonger-y, but this is something you should probably take note of.
The feature from Meta – the company behind Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram – allows users to @ mention (basically link to their profile) and it pulls in the pictures from their page and generates an AI image of them. So I can go to my Instagram stories, give it a picture of me and say “make it look like I’m in a punk band” and then @ Holly and say “put Holly in my band” and it will feed her own photos into the AI model and generate an image of her to add to my picture.
The technology itself isn’t new – if you have a public Instagram profile then someone could have saved all the photos and fed them into an AI image generator manually – what’s changed here is the lack of friction. It will likely be promoted heavily and its use encouraged by the platforms, so rather than having to be something someone actively decides to do, and then has to put a lot of effort into doing it, they can effectively just push a button and it’s right there in front of them.
Here’s the key things you should know:
- It’s currently only available in the USA, but they will be rolling it out to other regions soon and I suspect UK is not too far behind
- It’s not clear whether US profiles can already use non-US profiles in the feature
- It’s opt out – so you need to change your settings if you have a public profile and don’t want your images to be used for this (I explain how in this video)
- Private/closed profiles cannot be used for this feature
- You will not be notified when someone uses your images in the AI generator
- Any images generated from your photos will not be deleted if you change your settings after they’ve been made
If you’re wondering why this might be such an issue, there’s no shortage of news coverage and most of it focuses on the particularly grim potential for inappropriate image creation. This is a big concern, especially with what we saw with X’s (Twitter) Grok. And crucially these platforms have a high percentage of young people using them, often with public profiles. So it’s a good time to have that conversation with your teenagers.
I also think there’s an under-reported concern here, and that’s the use of these types of tools for bullying. The kind of thing that wouldn’t even touch the guardrails designed to prevent the worst kind of image generation, but could still easily hurt, offend or bully young people. I joked on the podcast coming on Monday that I could put producer James, who is a life-long Arsenal fan, in a Spurs football shirt. When James is in on the joke (and I didn’t actually do it by the way otherwise I think we’d no longer be together 😆) it’s fine, but being giving young people easy access to tools that can aid persistent bullying, I think, is far too likely to cause harm. And it’s not something the guardrails are designed to catch.
This Monday on the podcast
It’s the final episode of the season! Boooooo
Holly and Fiona reflect on the last few weeks, decide on what’s next and talk a bit about the summer. We discuss the Meta AI story in-depth, as well as their Kylie Jenner endorsed AI Ray-Ban sunglasses – and what all this means for the privacy of kids (and adults!).
It’s on YouTube, Spotify and Apple from Monday morning.
This weekend’s screen-free AI activity
I’m super honoured that you’ve subscribed to the newsletter, so thank you. I’ve actually got a little gift for you this week – it’s access to all the Screen-Free Summer AI activities that I shall be releasing each week. You can access them all for free HERE ahead of everyone else.
All the activities over the summer are designed to provide you with some ideas for keeping the kids occupied and away from screens. And the first one is a Comic Strip Illustrator. AI designs a little 6-part story for your child to illustrate, just fold a piece of paper into sections, add the captions and get them drawing away.
There’s a step-by-step guide over on our blog – with a handy pdf download.
Over to you
The podcast may be taking a break (back on 7th September) but I’ll be keeping the newsletter going alongside all the fun on social media. I’m going to put a heavier focus on reflecting on AI news for parents, so do come and follow.
We’re on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.
Enjoy the sunshine and stay in touch,
Fiona