Meta Rolls Out AI-Powered ‘Imagine’ Feature to Facebook, Instagram and Messenger

Meta AI features were a major highlight during the company’s annual Meta Connect event on Wednesday. The company introduced the new voice chat feature and added new artificial intelligence features to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The social media giant also expanded the experimental ‘Imagine’ feature to Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. The feature was unveiled earlier this year, allowing users to recreate their profile picture in different AI-generated styles. This is now being rolled out to all users. Additionally, Meta is also testing a feature that will auto-generate images and recommend users to share them to their feed.

In a newsroom post, the social media giant shared details about how this feature would work. So far, users can use Meta AI to generate images from text prompts. Users can also share an image as an input and ask the AI to generate images based on that. However, the company did not let users use their images of their profile pictures to generate images.

This is now changing as at the Meta Connect 2024, the company announced that the ‘Imagine’ feature will be available to all Facebook and Instagram users and this feature will allow users to create posts as well as Stories.

Put simply, users can now ask Meta AI to ‘Imagine’ them as a superhero, a royal monarch, or an astronaut, and the AI will do so. Based on the images shared by the company, it appears the AI-generated images will not be very realistic and instead appear digitally created. Meta is also adding AI-generated watermarks on these images as well.

In Instagram DM and Messenger, users will be now able to use AI to generate personalised chat themes. Users could earlier change the background colour and chat bubble, but this will offer a higher level of customisation.

Additionally, Meta is also testing a recommendation feature involving the Imagine feature. The company plans to show images auto-generated AI images of the user’s profile picture in the feed of Instagram and Facebook. The generated images will be based on the user’s interests or current trends. If the user likes the image, they can share it on their feed or Stories. They can also tap on the image to make changes to the suggested image.