Meta on Thursday released “Imagine with Meta AI”, its standalone AI (artificial intelligence) image generator website trained on a huge dataset of 1.1 billion publicly visible photos from Facebook and Instagram.
Powered by the company’s image foundation model, Emu, this website allows users to generate unique images based on text prompts. Previously, this AI technology was only limited to messaging and social networking apps such as Instagram. Now, the tool will be available at its own dedicated website at imagine.meta.com.
“We’ve enjoyed hearing from people about how they’re using imagine, Meta AI’s text-to-image generation feature, to make fun and creative content in chats. Today, we’re expanding access to imagine outside of chats,” Meta said in its Newsroom post announcing the website and other new AI features.
“While our messaging experience is designed for more playful, back-and-forth interactions, you can now create free images on the web, too.”
The company also announced that it is testing more than 20 new ways generative AI can improve your experiences across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, including those focused on search, social discovery, ads, business messaging, and more.
This Meta AI tool creates four images for each message, all of which will have a visible watermark in the lower left corner indicating they were created with Meta AI.
Further, Meta says it will soon begin testing an invisible watermarking system that’s “resilient to common image manipulations like cropping, color change (brightness, contrast, etc.), screen shots and more” for increased transparency and traceability.
Since Meta’s AI image generator tool is trained on 1.1 billion publicly available Facebook and Instagram images to create diverse and creative visuals, it has raised concerns and questions about privacy and data usage.
The company says users are the product when they use these platforms. However, Meta claims to only use publicly available photos for training purposes, maintaining that user privacy was not compromised.
If you are concerned about your privacy and want to prevent your photos from being included in Meta’s future AI model training, you can set your photos on Instagram or Facebook to private.
Currently, ”Imagine with Meta AI” is available to only users in the U.S. and is expected to be expanded to other countries in the near future.
