On Wednesday, Meta launched a free image generator website called “Imagine with Meta AI,” which has been developed using 1.1 billion publicly visible Facebook and Instagram user photos.
This standalone AI (artificial intelligence) image generator website is powered by the company’s image foundation model, Emu, which allows users to create high-resolution unique images based on text prompts.
“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 wrote in its Newsroom post announcing the website and other new AI features.
“While our messaging experience is designed for more playful, back-and-forth interactions, you can now create free images on the web, too.”
As mentioned above, Meta has used 1.1 billion publicly visible Facebook and Instagram images to train its AI to generate pictures, raising concerns about consumers’ privacy.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s President of Global Affairs, highlighted that the company has excluded private posts and messages not shared publicly on its services from its AI model’s training data to safeguard user privacy. It also has taken steps to filter out private information from the publicly accessible datasets used for training.
“We’ve tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information,” Clegg said, adding that the “vast majority” of the data used by Meta for training was publicly available.
Currently, the AI-generated images create four images for each message, including a visible watermark in the lower left corner to indicate they were made with Meta AI. However, Meta said it would start adding invisible watermarks very soon with a deep learning model to increase the transparency and traceability of these AI-generated images.
“While it’s imperceptible to the human eye, the invisible watermark can be detected with a corresponding model. It’s resilient to common image manipulations like cropping, resizing, color change (brightness, contrast, etc.), screen shots, image compression, noise, sticker overlays and more. We aim to bring invisible watermarking to many of our products with AI-generated images in the future,” Meta stated in the post.
The “Imagine with Meta AI” tool is available only for users in the U.S. for free (as of now) and is expected to expand to other countries in the near future. It is available at its own dedicated website at imagine.meta.com.