Meta Offers Chatbot and Image Editing Features for Social Media Platforms
Meta Platforms Inc. plans to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities into its applications, aiming to provide its vast user base of 3 billion individuals with a similar experience to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Custom stickers, photo editing and a host of celebrity-faced chatbot characters — all infused with creative artificial intelligence — are coming to Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, the company said Wednesday at its annual Connect developer conference. Meta also introduced a product developer studio where brands can build their own AI tools for the company’s messaging services, which can be used to chat with customers.
It’s a critical announcement for Metal, showing that it too can build AI-based technology that produces text and images based on simple prompts from users. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Snap Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have already deployed various tools to capitalize on public and investor interest in the nascent technology. Meta has been investing at record levels to build AI infrastructure behind the scenes, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg has teased many of these consumer-facing ideas in an attempt to make the case that the company is also a contender in the AI race.
In recent earnings calls, the CEO has emphasized that the social media company has been working on AI technology for years, although this is the first time that generative AI-focused consumer services have been the focus of Meta’s annual event. In the past, Connect has focused on the metaverse, the name for the virtual online world from which Zuckerberg got his company’s new name.
Last year, viewers with Oculus headsets could watch keynotes in the company’s virtual reality space, Horizon Worlds, a potentially harrowing experience for first-timers. Most of the event was spent pitching Oculus for use in business environments, hosting virtual meetings, or as a gaming platform. Artificial intelligence was only mentioned in the context of using the technology to create new avatars for users of the headset, and in Zuckerberg’s announcement that these characters will get legs — limbs that were only recently added to users.
The AI tools unveiled Wednesday will look more familiar to those who have quickly experimented with generative AI features such as Snap’s My AI chatbot or selfie maker and Adobe Inc’s Firefly photo-editing product.
Meta AI is the tech giant’s new text-based chatbot that runs on its large language model, Llama 2, and uses search data in collaboration with Microsoft’s Bing. The company frames it as a digital assistant that can answer questions about real-time information or use it to create images.
The company is also releasing 28 fantasy character-based bots with video reactions from the faces of well-known celebrities, such as retired Super Bowl winner Tom Brady, whose bot debates sports, and musician Snoop Dogg as the Dungeon Master’s adventure leader. These bots, which are not yet operational, will be limited to the topics they are supposed to talk about and will reflect information from before 2023, the company said.
Meta’s AI image editor, which is also not yet live, allows users to type text prompts to modify existing images, such as adding visual style or checking the background. When changes have been made, the use of AI will be announced.
Also on Wednesday, the company officially unveiled the Quest 3 headset, the latest version of the device that lets users switch between VR and mixed reality.
