Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
Meta detailed a bunch of updates to its Meta AI tools today in a blog post, including some new features for its AI image generators.
One that caught my eye was a tool that will let you remix AI-generated images your friends share in a Messenger or Instagram chat. The images are made with a tool Meta calls “imagine,” and the company says you’ll now be able to “reimagine” images other people make in the group chat by pressing and holding on the picture and adding a text prompt.
Image: Meta
Meta’s new “reimagine” tool for AI-generated images.
Meta is also bringing the imagine tool out of chats and letting users in the US access it on the web at imagine.meta.com. The company says that the tool is designed for “creative hobbyists” and is powered by its Emu image foundation model. And, in the “coming weeks,” Meta says that “invisible watermarking” will be added to images made with its imagine tool. The company wants to add watermarks to images made with its other AI tools at some point, but it didn’t give a very detailed commitment: “We aim to bring invisible watermarking to many of our products with AI-generated images in the future,” Meta says in the post.
Meta is also improving its Meta AI assistant, saying that it will offer “more detailed responses on mobile” and “more accurate summaries of search results.” Reels will start to show up in your chats with Meta AI. And, according to TechCrunch, Meta’s AI characters (which are based on celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady) are now fully available in WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram in the US.
There are a handful of other updates in Meta’s blog post, including that Meta is “exploring” how to use generative AI to offer suggestions for things like writing birthday greetings. But the company’s wave of announcements is almost certainly its attempt to take some of the air out of Google’s big Gemini news that was also announced today. I’d argue that Google has the more impressive news of the day, but Meta’s new AI tools do seem pretty handy.
