Not to be outdone by Google’s Gemini launch, Meta’s rolling out a new, standalone generative AI experience on the web, Imagine with Meta, that allows users to create images by describing them in natural language.
Similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, Imagine with Meta, which is powered by Meta’s existing Emu image generation model, creates high-resolution images from text prompts. It’s free to use (at least for now) for users in the U.S. and generates four images per prompt.
“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 writes in a blog post published this morning. “While our messaging experience is designed for more playful, back-and-forth interactions, you can now create free images on the web, too.”
Now, Meta’s image generation tools have landed the company in hot water in the recent past (see: Meta’s racially biased AI sticker generator), which makes this writer wonder whether there’s safeguards in Imagine with Meta to prevent history from repeating itself. We weren’t given the chance to test the tool prior to its launch, but rest assured we’ll be keeping a close eye as Imagine with Meta reaches more users.
They won’t be live at the start, but Meta pledged to begin adding watermarks to content generated by Imagine with Meta in the coming weeks for “increased transparency and traceability.” (There’s already a visible watermark.) The watermarks, which are invisible, will be generated with an AI model and detectable with a corresponding model, Meta says. No word on whether the detection model will be made public at some point.