Like it or not, the world has decided to embrace artificial intelligence head-on. This means that AI is being built into everything, even your favorite messaging app. Chances are, one of those apps is Meta’s property: WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. Soon, you’ll be able to interface with any of these apps to generate images.
I had the chance to try this out at Meta Connect, where we hosted a demo of the Samsung Galaxy S22, which also showed off the image generation capabilities of Llama 3.2. These new models are Meta’s first primary vision models that understand images and text within a dialogue. So far, this is something we’ve already done with Google’s AI. That said, I ran into most of the same roadblocks I ran into with Gemini, and realized I still didn’t understand this whole thing: the query. I wasn’t unhappy with the final product (header image above), but it wasn’t what I had envisioned.
My initial idea was to have a photo of a family dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog characters flying through space. First, I asked Meta AI in the Messenger app to “imagine a family of three as various Sonic the Hedgehog characters” (preparing for Halloween). The result was a typical nuclear family: mother, father, and young child. Everyone in the photo was dressed in Sonic costumes. The “mother” in the photo was Knuckles, the father was Sonic, and the child was Tails. The child was also a boy, so I asked Meta AI to change the “gender of the middle child.” This generated a photo with another boy in it, completely changing the scope of the entire image.
At this point in the demo I was getting frustrated, so I decided to try a different approach. I asked Meta to change the background of the generated photos to something like a “space theme.” That worked as instructed, so I asked Meta to “change post to flying.” And thus I got the header image above. Somehow it evolved from a family to a man dressed as Sonic and three other kids.
In the end, I didn’t get what I envisioned. Perhaps I should have been more detailed in how I wanted that image to be generated a certain way. But can you blame me? This AI stuff is pretty new to me, as it is to most people. I’m hoping to see a lot more of these kinds of images appearing in my Instagram feed as this feature rolls out.
