Meta Expands AI Image Generation Across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger

Meta fully embraces AI image generation: it's time to "imagine" - Softonic

Subscribe to the Softonic newsletter and get the latest in tech, gaming, entertainment and deals right in your inbox. The images, tagged as "Imagined for you", will offer the possibility to share them or generate new ones in real time. An example presented by Meta showed an "enchanted realm, where magic fills the air," but it was also suggested that versions of oneself could appear in scenarios like video games or space explorations. Amanda Felix, spokesperson for Meta, stated to The Verge that the platform will only generate images with a user's face if they have registered for the "Imagine" feature and accepted its terms, including uploading photos. Additionally, users will have the option to remove these images from their feed if they wish. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, commented that integrating AI-generated images into feeds is the next "logical leap" for their platforms, noting that feeds originally showed only content from friends, but over time, a layer of AI-generated content that might interest users has been added. "Its growth depends on execution and how good it is," Zuckerberg explained. This movement by Meta follows the example of Snapchat, whose AI selfie feature allows the company to use users' faces in personalized ads, unless the option is disabled, as reported by 404 Media. For now, Meta says this feature is in the testing phase, and there are no details on when it will be implemented worldwide.

Meta Is Putting AI Images on Your Facebook and Instagram Feeds, With Personalized Pictures

Meta AI has about 500 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at Connect earlier this week. You may now see AI-generated images of yourself on your Facebook or Instagram feeds as Meta tests new content. Meta told Axios on Friday that users can opt out of a new "Imagined for You" test that creates AI content based on a user's interests, even incorporating their likenesses. For example, users can imagine themselves in new settings, as royalty, or as an astronaut, and share the images that Meta AI creates of them with their network. You "can be the star of your own story," Meta stated. The generated images seem to rely on photos uploaded by users, noted The Verge. Meta is also testing adding other AI images on newsfeeds that may not feature users' faces but are still personalized to them. One example image Meta shared shows an enchanted realm with moonbeams. Meta is experimenting with the changes across Facebook and Instagram. The new feature is in its testing stages and it's unclear how many accounts it affects. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about its AI efforts earlier this week at Connect, stating that Meta AI has 500 million monthly active users and is slated to become the most-used AI assistant by the end of the year.

Meta AI's genAI 'Imagine' features expand across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger

Meta AI's Imagine features, which use generative AI to turn text prompts into images, are now being expanded across Facebook and Instagram, the company announced at Meta Connect 2024 on Wednesday. With the update, users will be able to use prompts to generate AI photos directly in their feed, Stories, and for their Facebook profile pictures. The new capabilities could help users and creators call more attention to their posts and shares by allowing them to generate fanciful and eye-catching images to accompany their text. Once shared, friends and followers can see the images and react to them or even mimic them, Meta says. Facebook users already upload photos of characters, animals, or something else besides their own photo as their profile picture to better protect their privacy. Now, they won't have to seek out such a photo: They can simply generate one. The AI can also suggest captions for Stories on Facebook and Instagram, as a part of this update. The image generation capabilities will come to Messenger, too, to create personalized chat themes. This is accessed by tapping on "Themes" in the chat. Before, users could change the background of their chats as well as the color of the text bubbles, but Meta AI offers far more options in terms of the types of images that can be used. Meta says it's also testing new AI-generated content in Facebook and Instagram feeds where it will display AI images created for users based on interests and trends. This is largely designed to push people to try Meta AI by tapping on a suggested prompt to reimagine the photo or by swiping to generate content in real time using Meta Imagine AI.

You'll soon be able to use Meta's Imagine to generate images in Facebook and Instagram

Meta AI's Imagine features are coming to Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger so you can generate images right in your Facebook feed, Instagram Stories, or profile pictures. Announced alongside a whole host of Meta AI updates including a new voice mode at Meta Connect 2024, Meta AI's Imagine tools are set to take over your most beloved social media platforms. Straight from Instagram and Facebook, you'll be able to generate an image of anything you can imagine (see what I did there?) and then share it with your friends. Mark Zuckerberg also announced that Meta AI will suggest captions for your Stories on Facebook and Instagram, allowing you to completely generate posts with the power of Imagine. Image generation isn't the only new AI feature coming to Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, however. New AI theme generation for your Messenger and Instagram DMs will allow you to create a personalized look for your apps with just the tap of a button. And that's not all, Meta is also testing AI-generated content in your Facebook and Instagram feeds where you'll see images created by Meta AI just for you, which the company says is curated based on your interests and current trends. Meta is going all in on AI across its social media platforms with loads of AI-powered features coming across the next few months. With so many new quality-of-life improvements across Facebook and Instagram, such as an AI translation tool, currently in testing, that will allow you to watch Reels filmed in other languages with ease, there's lots to get excited about.

AI Versions of Yourself Might Start Appearing in Your Instagram Feed

At the Meta Connect event yesterday (Wednesday), Mark Zuckerberg's company announced that AI images might start appearing in people's Facebook and Instagram feeds. While some may react in horror to that news, what's even creepier is the AI images may be representations of the users themselves. The feature is an expansion of Meta's "Imagine Me" features which allow users to create AI selfies based on their photos. Users might get an "Imagined for You" image in their feed which they can either quickly share or generate a new picture. The Verge notes that some of the AI pictures could be of something innocuous like "an enchanted realm, where magic fills the air." But others might be a picture of the user as royalty or some other whimsical setting. On its blog, Meta gave examples of the user as a video game character or an astronaut in space. Meta spokesperson Amanda Felix stresses to The Verge that AI images of the user's face will only appear if they have "onboarded to Meta's Imagine yourself feature, which includes adding photos to that feature" and accepted its terms. There will also be an option to remove AI images from the user's feed as well. Meta's Imagine Me feature launched back in July across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and the web. The company is continuing to roll out AI features including personalized themes for private chats which can be changed by tapping "Themes" in the chat details. The expansion of Imagine Me was announced at Meta Connect where Zuckerberg also showed off a technology that is capable of fully recreating influencers as AI figures that can be spoken to as if they were the real person. That technology has no release date yet just like Meta's first pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses "Orion". Zuckerberg presented Orion, a prototype he calls "the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen" and while there is no release date for Orion, Zuckerberg says the product will eventually become Meta's "first consumer full holographic AR glasses."

Meta is going to push AI-made posts into your feeds

Why it matters: Generative AI has largely been used to create content at the behest of individual users, but now Facebook's parent company says it will proactively surface AI-generated posts based on users' interests. Driving the news: As part of its slew of announcements on Wednesday at its annual developers conference, Meta says it's "starting to test content imagined for you by Meta AI that will appear in your Facebook and Instagram Feeds." Zoom in: In sample images, Meta showed its AI serving up the kinds of things users can choose to make today, such as stylized images and fantastical scenes. Between the lines: The move is a logical next step for Meta, which has increasingly been using the Facebook feed to surface content its algorithm thinks you will like, often instead of posts shared by friends. Yes, but: So far, a lot of the public reaction to AI-generated content in the realm of media and entertainment has not been enthusiastic, particularly outside gaming. Our thought bubble: Expect strong reaction -- both positive and negative -- to the notion of social media platforms proactively serving up personalized AI content. The bottom line: A future where our feeds will be filled with stuff written by a computer rather than a person is not a foregone conclusion. But it's not far off, either.

Custom AI Posts in Our Instagram Feeds? No Thanks, Meta

Katelyn is a writer with CNET covering social media, AI and online services. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in media and journalism. You can often find her with a novel and an iced coffee during her time off. I had to read the news about six times before it fully sunk in: Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, is experimenting with integrating custom AI content into our Instagram and Facebook feeds. To put it another way, Meta is exploring the idea of putting more recommended content (from accounts we don't follow) into our feeds, and it would be entirely generated by Meta's AI. As the person who reviews AI image generators for CNET, including Meta AI, let me tell you: This is a terrible idea. These photos, made with its AI assistant Meta AI, will be "based on your interests" and could potentially "feature you, so you can be the star of your own story and share your favorites with friends." So an AI version of your face could randomly pop up in your Instagram feed. Meta, respectfully... what? Why? Meta dropped a lot of news about its virtual assistant Meta AI this week at its annual AR/VR event Meta Connect, including a new voice featuring a variety of celebrity voices, better video dubbing translations and new visual upgrades that let it "see" your photos and edit them. But this news, buried near the end of its press release and omitted entirely from the keynote address, is important, and we need to talk about it. Mainly, we need to beg Meta not to let this experiment result in a real update. As AI content generation services get better, it's getting harder to escape the deluge of AI content (aka slop). It's also getting harder to tell real photos apart from AI ones. I admit, I was pretty impressed with Meta AI's Imagine feature, which acts as an AI image generator embedded in the chatbot. But that doesn't mean I want it to clog up my feed with weird images of me as an astronaut or whatever. Earlier this year, Meta started labeling content that was AI-generated, which was a great idea. But it wasn't a perfect tool, and photographers started getting slapped with AI labels for images that were edited, not AI-generated. The new recommended posts would have a similar label that says "Imagined for you." But labels are too easy to overlook, which is why I'm still concerned that rolling out this update would further blur the line between what's real and what's AI. And that's really the last thing we need, when mis- and disinformation is easier to create convincingly than ever before, thanks to AI. On the privacy front, CNET reached out to Meta to confirm whether you can remove AI-generated posts from your feed and if we can expect to see AI posts start to pop up while it's in the testing phase, but we didn't receive a response by the time of publication. We do know that US users cannot opt out of having publicly shared posts used for training its AI models. Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge that adding AI content to social feeds is the next "logical jump" for the social platforms. But I really can't imagine an AI image that's going to be so funny, so relevant or otherwise worth my time that it's going to make up for all the potential problems it could produce. Meta has spent so much time convincing us that if we want to use Meta AI, we can find it everywhere -- even if we didn't want it there, like in Search. Why do we need it in our feeds, too? My Instagram feed is already a mess, mostly clogged up by random accounts I don't follow, recommending content I might enjoy. I have to click through at least three ads to get to one Story from someone I follow. And I've put up with it, mostly because it's still my main online social hub. But the overall user experience of scrolling Instagram and Facebook has gone downhill in the past 10 years. We've long since moved past its original purpose to connect with friends and family, much to some users' disappointment, including me. Adding AI-generated recommended content to the mix feels like it will be the final nail in the coffin of my Instagram feed.

Not everything needs AI - especially Facebook & Instagram feeds

Enough people already have trouble separating fact from fiction on social media. But Meta has decided it's going to make things even worse. How? AI. Specifically how? By dreaming up Meta AI slop that it will inject directly into your Instagram and Facebook feeds. Sometimes with your actual face attached. When reading this news, I wondered if I was in the grip of a fever dream. I had my first bout of covid in August. Perhaps I remained in its thrall, in that barely coherent state that occurs when a virus is kicking seven shades out of your immune system. But no. Meta's plans are real. Unlike all the garbage the company plans to splatter all over your feeds, like projectiles from a manure gun. Meta explains this is all part of its plan to use AI to "help you get things done, learn, create and connect with the things and people that matter to you". Which apparently means being able to "imagine yourself as a visually stunning video game character" or creating images of a place where "moonbeams dance across a forest of lace, where trees and flowers are woven with intricate beauty, and tiny glittering diamonds sparkle like stardust within every delicate fold". To clarify at this point, you are also not in the grip of a fever dream. The words above are quoted verbatim from Facebook's news article. It explains a system is being tested which will create Meta AI images "just for you", based on your interests or current trends. I can only assume, based on the article, that Meta thinks user interests centre on being away with the fairies, in every sense. On the plus side, Meta has at least confirmed you have to approve your face being stapled to its AI slop, and can remove AI images from your feed. Up until the day you can't, of course. Meta has form when it comes to making weird and flat-out bad decisions regarding social media. In fact, it's making more here, because 'enchanted realm' images aren't even all of the new AI stuff. The same post outlines how Meta AI will have its own voice that you can set to be an uncanny valley Dame Judi Dench. And that Meta will attempt to auto-translate and auto-dub Reels into your language, even syncing people's lips to match. Which I'm sure won't be terrifying to watch and horrifying to experience when inevitable translation disasters occur. This all feels a long way from what social networks used to be. Facebook was once about keeping up with friends. Instagram was where you went for great photos, even if too many were of people's lunch. Today, both networks feel far beyond any golden age, ruined by Meta's insistence that you see what it wants you to rather than what you want to. But at least authenticity remained in your feeds. Now even that is threatened. Still, it's not all bad news on the AI front. HP's busy mashing AI into printers, with a surprisingly good (really!) use case. Having recognised browser and spreadsheet printouts are a disaster, HP claims it will use AI to reformat them for old-school paper, leaving you just the "desired text and images". There's a chatbot you can ask to adjust things in a conversational manner. (And confuse with rants when your printer fails to connect for the 500th time.) That said, who knows whether it'll remove the right bits, or where this will all end? Maybe AIs will start talking to each other and leave humans out of the loop entirely. Cue: HP's AI 'reworks' your documents in increasingly deranged ways and flings them at Meta's AI, which immediately shares them with your friends. You protest you didn't write them, but your face is there as proof. Even though you are, for some reason, sitting in a forest of lace with Dame Judi Dench, who has an unusual number of extra fingers.

Meta's going to put AI-generated images in your Facebook and Instagram feeds

It's not clear whether you need to agree to new permissions to enable this feature -- or if you can even turn it off. Last week, 404 Media found that using Snapchat's AI selfie feature gives the company permission to use your face in ads seen only by you (unless you disable the option). It looks like Facebook and Instagram will similarly only show the AI-generated content to you, while sharing remains optional. The Verge asked Meta if privacy options were available but didn't hear back by press time.