What you need to know
- Meta is upping its AI efforts with some new features across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
- These include the ability to recreate AI images with prompts, the release of its AI image generator as a "standalone web experience," and support for Reels on Meta AI.
- The company is testing 20 new generative AI capabilities, with some being rolled out today.
It looks like Meta is banking on its AI efforts to convince more people to use the tech giant’s social media apps as Meta AI, the company’s generative AI experience, gains new capabilities.
The company announced on Wednesday that it’s testing a host of new AI features — more than 20 different generative AI capabilities, to be exact — from search, ads, business messaging, and more across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The upgrades are considered the biggest changes across its platforms since the company launched Reels in 2020.
“Many of these are using technology from Meta AI to do some of the heavy lifting behind the scenes to make our in-app experiences more fun and useful than ever before,” a representative from Meta said.
Notably, the company is working on the ability to recreate AI images with prompts. Dubbed Reimagine, the feature builds on Meta AI’s existing AI image generator, Imagine, which allows users to create images on the fly.
To use the feature in a group chat, a user would need to generate an image using a Meta AI text prompt. One of the respondents can then press and hold the image to add another text prompt, which would create an entirely new image with changes added to the previous result. The group can go back and forth with multiple prompts, Meta notes, “as you try to one-up each other with increasingly wild ideas.”
Alongside the launch of Reimagine in group chats, the tech giant is also expanding access to Imagine, which is now widely available as a "standalone web experience," the representative of Meta notes.
The company is also starting to roll out Reels in Meta AI chats. This is a particularly useful update to see visual examples that match your query. One example Meta gives is if you're planning a trip with friends in a group chat, you could ask Meta AI to recommend the top places to visit and share Reels to accompany the request.
Other new features include using Meta AI to create birthday greetings for friends, introductions for your profiles, or AI-generated images to post on Facebook. For example, Meta AI can even be used to transform a landscape photo into a portrait image to make it fit better when posting stories.
The company highlights that these AI features are starting to roll out today, with many others currently being tested. While the 20 new generative AI features are being worked on, you may not see all of them at once, and more is on the way, such as invisible watermarking on AI-generated images.
These capabilities are part of Meta’s efforts to use AI to keep users on its platforms, especially as the company faces competition from YouTube, Snapchat, and other brands similarly upping their AI efforts.
