META RELEASED AN AI THAT USED YOUR PHOTOS WITHOUT ASKING. FOUR DAYS LATER, IT WAS DEAD. Meta’s new AI image generator lasted exactly four days before the company was forced to kill it. Muse Image, the first product shipped by Mark Zuckerberg’s Superintelligence Labs, launched July 7 with what looked like a powerful creative tool. The catch was buried in the setup. Meta had automatically opted in every Instagram user with a public profile, making their faces, personal photos, and likenesses available to anyone who wanted to feed them into the AI and remix them without permission or notice. SAG-AFTRA, the Hollywood actors’ union representing roughly 160,000 performers, was among the first to go public with its objections. Major talent agencies at Creative Artists Agency and others followed within hours. Then came the broader wave of user backlash, which spread faster than Meta had clearly anticipated. By July 11, Meta had pulled the feature entirely and issued a statement that read, in full, that it had “missed the mark.” No detailed explanation. No timeline for a compliant relaunch. No acknowledgment of the scale of the problem. Four days of deployment and a quiet shutdown. This is not a small misstep. Meta has spent years trying to move past Cambridge Analytica and rebuild trust around its data practices. Muse Image was the latest test of whether any of that was real. The verdict arrived in four days flat. Keywords: Meta Muse Image, AI image generator, SAG-AFTRA, Meta privacy, AI consent