This is interesting.

Facebook is currently testing a new option that would enable users to add a note to their Story which specifies that their chosen image hasn’t been edited in the app.

As you can see in this example sequence, shared by app researcher Radu Oncescu, some users are now able to long tap on any image in their camera roll to share it without having to go through the usual editing and enhancement process.

Which would streamline the posting process for more in-the-moment updates. While it also adds this new tag to your Story frame.

Theoretically at least, that could add a level of authenticity to your content, by clarifying straight up that the image hasn’t been altered, by AI or any other means.

Though you could still edit it in another app and upload it via Stories. Meta does have some level of detection in place for external edits, but it won’t catch everything. And as such, you may still be able to make changes before uploading to Stories, and still be able to use this tag.

But conceptually, it could still facilitate a higher level of trust, especially as more and more AI content gets pumped into Meta’s networks.

Because with AI, it’s going to become increasingly difficult to know if anything you see in-stream is real or not. That’s a key negative of social platforms pushing more and more gen AI features into their apps, that the use of these tools means that an increasing amount of posts that you see won’t be representative of a users’ experience. Or really, anything at all, and as such, AI content will cause problems for true social interactivity.

Meta does already have labels for AI-generated content, and custom watermarks for images that have been created within its own apps.

But again, they won’t necessarily cover externally created images.

So while a “No Edit” tag does seem like a good idea, and may help in many cases, you can also imagine that if it does become a more widely applied tag, some will use it to try and scam users with externally altered pictures.

I don’t know, I just don’t see the value of generative AI image and post creation tools, as they can only lead to less actual human connection within social apps. That seems like a backwards step, and the fact that Meta is now resorting to tags like this only underlines that people want to see real, unedited depictions in-stream.

I do think this could be of value, but the gradual dilution of human content via AI is a broader problem, which social apps are directly contributing to.