TikTok is testing an AI-powered meme maker that’s inspired by your videos, the company confirmed to CNET this week. The experimental feature prompted TikTok to add a new setting that automatically gives other users permission to remix your content with AI, unless you explicitly opt out.
Creators who spotted the hidden setting on the social media app are complaining and worried about their data.
The new AI feature, called the meme remixer, lets anyone who sees your TikTok video create an AI-generated image from it, changing the face, voice or background. For example, if you posted a video of yourself at a new coffee shop, a commenter could hypothetically use the meme remixer to type in a custom prompt and create an AI image featuring your likeness on a beach or in another scenario. These images would get shared in the comments of the original video.
For some TikTokers, it feels like an invasion of privacy, another attempt by social media platforms to stealthily alter original content. From the company’s perspective, it’s a way to expand on the ability to post images in comments.
“It shouldn’t be that hard to allow us to opt out in one toggle setting,” creator Sean Szolek-Van Valkenburgh said in his video. While creators knowingly hand over some rights to their content when posting to platforms, there should be an option to limit how much of that is exploited by AI, he said.
TikTok has been introducing AI features to its platform for several years now. You might’ve noticed the new translucent icon above a profile picture when you’re swiping through videos — that’s Tako (pronounced “taco”), TikTok’s AI assistant.
Like other social media platforms, TikTok has faced backlash for integrating AI, with creators panicking that AI slop is drowning out their original content, along with environmental, legal and ethical concerns. But that hasn’t stopped companies like TikTok, Snapchat and Meta, which own Instagram and Facebook, from charging into AI.
I learned why TikTok introduced the AI remix setting and explored the privacy concerns it raises.
Remixable content
The meme remixer feature is still in an experimental phase, TikTok said. It’s not broadly available, and there’s no word on when it may be rolled out to more users on the platform. TikTok said the tool could change significantly before a potential general release.
The AI remix setting is on by default. There’s a toggle you can switch off to prohibit others from creating AI memes from your clips. The setting works similarly to the ones that let you control whether people can duet or stitch your videos.
Though you can turn off AI remixing on individual videos, there’s no way to opt out at an account level, so you’ll have to turn this setting off for every video. If the feature is released more broadly, that’ll likely be frustrating for influencers and others who post regularly.
TikTok said that if you allow your videos to be remixed with AI, they won’t be used to train its AI models. But there’s no way for individual creators to confirm this, given the black box nature of how tech companies develop AI. In the company’s general AI policy, it says any content edited or entirely created by AI has to adhere to its community guidelines.
TikTok’s rules around edited media specifically outlaw content that “misleads” users into believing something fake is real, particularly when it depicts “fake authoritative sources or crisis events, or falsely shows public figures in certain contexts.” This suggests that deepfakes would be prohibited. Child sexual abuse material is also explicitly banned.
AI-edited content shared on TikTok has an invisible watermark, compliant with the C2PA standard. But with newer, more powerful AI image and video models, it’s hard for folks to tell whether something is real or AI-generated.
While policies can look good on paper, it’s their enforcement that matters. One creator, Georgie, who goes by the handle soupytime, called out that it’s already easy for people to repost or steal viral videos, and that the new AI tool would make it even easier to create deepfakes of well-known creators without their consent.
This can be dangerous, as we’ve seen with Grok AI on X. Without proper precautions, it’s easy for social media users to take photos and videos that people share online and turn them into abusive, illegal content.
How to turn off TikTok’s meme remixer
If you want to turn off the feature, tap the three dots in the bottom right corner > scroll and tap privacy settings > tap to turn off “Allow AI to remix content.” You’ll have to do this for every video you want opted out.
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