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 the images are shared, friends and followers can see them 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.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg remarked during the event that Meta AI differentiates itself not only by offering “state-of-the-art AI models but also unlimited access to those models for free, integrated easily into our different products and apps,” he said.

“So Meta AI is on track to being the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of this year. In fact, it’s probably already there. … We’re almost at 500 million monthly actives, and we haven’t even launched in some of the bigger countries yet,” Zuckerberg added.

Meta AI is starting to catch up with Google when it comes to AI-powered photo editing. On Wednesday, at the Meta Connect 2024 conference, the tech giant announced that Meta AI will now be able to help you edit photos using AI technology and answer questions about the photos you share.

The additional features are made possible because Meta AI is gaining multimodal capabilities, powered by its Llama 3.2 models. This means you can now share photos in your chats, not just text, similar to Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

When sharing a photo, Meta AI can understand what the image contains and answer questions about the image. For example, Meta suggests you could share a photo of a flower and then ask the AI what type of flower it is. Or you could share a photo of a delicious dish and ask Meta AI how to make it. Of course, how accurately Meta AI responds to these and other questions still needs to be tested and reviewed.

Another key feature with the added photo support is the ability to edit images using AI.

After sending Meta AI the photo, you can ask it to make some sort of change — like adding or removing an object in the foreground, changing your outfit, or updating the background of the photo in some way, like adding a rainbow to the sky, for instance.

Meta AI can also be used on Instagram when you reshare a photo from your feed to your Instagram Stories. Here, the AI technology can look at the photo, understand the images, then generate an accompanying background for your Story.

Beyond photo edits, Meta is also testing translation tools for Facebook and Instagram Reels that include automatic dubbing and lip-syncing. These tests will initially be run in small groups in the U.S. and Latin America in both English and Spanish.

Other Meta AI photo features include the expansion of Meta AI’s generative AI features and the rollout of tests of Meta AI images shared to your Facebook and Instagram feeds, to prompt users to try the feature.

Fine text during Meta’s demo noted the editing features were coming to the U.S. in English first.

Noted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the event, “Meta AI differentiates itself in this category by not just offering state-of-the-art AI models, but also unlimited access to those models for free, integrated easily into our different products and apps,” he said. “So Meta AI is on track to being the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of this year. In fact, it’s probably already there. … We’re almost at 500 million monthly actives, and we haven’t even launched in some of the bigger countries yet,” Zuckerberg added.