Facebook and Instagram can now use AI to answer questions about your photos and edit them too

Asking questions about photos in Meta AI.
(Image credit: Meta)

Mark Zuckerberg has announced a ton of cool AI features at Meta Connect 2024 which apply to Meta AI, the chatbot found inside its popular social media apps like Facebook, Instagram DM, WhatsApp, and Messenger. One of the coolest new features he revealed is the ability to ask questions about photos and edit them in Meta AI.

Meta AI is now multimodal, which means it can ‘see’ photos in your chats and answer questions about them. So, you can simply post an image of a bird in your chat with Meta AI and ask it what kind of bird you’re looking at and you’ll get the right answer. But it goes beyond simply identifying animals and plants. Show it a photo of a meal and ask it how you’d make it and you’ll get a list of instructions as well as ingredients.

Intelligent backgrounds

One of the most fun things you can do with AI is to manipulate your photos. This doesn’t just involve adding an Instagram filter or changing brightness levels. With AI you can do things with your photos that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, like add or remove elements or change the background.

Even more impressively, Meta AI can now edit your photos, too. That means that if you want to remove somebody from a photo you can get Meta AI to do it for you. Or maybe you just want to change the background to something else? No problem, Meta AI can do that too. It can even add things to your photos, so if you want to be standing next to a lion, you can make it happen without risking your life. If you want to see what you’d look like in a different outfit then Meta AI is your new fashion consultant.

Plus, if you want to reshare a photo from your Instagram feed to your Instagram Story, Meta AI’s new backgrounds feature is on hand to intelligently pick a background that will go with the image for your story.

We expect the ability to see and edit photos to roll out to Meta AI users in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand over the next month.

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Graham Barlow
Senior Editor, AI

Graham is the Senior Editor for AI at TechRadar. With over 25 years of experience in both online and print journalism, Graham has worked for various market-leading tech brands including Computeractive, PC Pro, iMore, MacFormat, Mac|Life, Maximum PC, and more. He specializes in reporting on everything to do with AI and has appeared on BBC TV shows like BBC One Breakfast and on Radio 4 commenting on the latest trends in tech. Graham has an honors degree in Computer Science and spends his spare time podcasting and blogging.

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