AI video and image editing comes to Facebook and Instagram

Facebook and Instagram have new AI-powered creation tools that will allow users to edit their photos and produce “high-quality videos” using text descriptions. On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two new features based on Emu – the company’s core model for image generation – that will be integrated into Facebook and Instagram.

The first, called “Emu Edit,” will allow users to “precisely edit images based on text input.” The video demonstration resembles existing tools provided by Adobe, Google and Canva, giving users a way to remove or replace objects and people from photographs without any professional image editing experience.

What’s a little crazy is that it doesn’t seem to require users to manually select the section of the image they want to edit. The video suggests that you can type something like “turn dog into a panda” and Emu Edit will be able to identify the dog in the image. Meta also states that Emu Edit will focus precisely on the changes relevant to the change request. For example, asking him to add text to a baseball cap won’t change anything else about the cap’s design.

“Emu Video” is the second tool Meta is working on. According to the Meta blog post published with Zuckerberg’s teaser, it can generate a video from text prompts, reference images, or a combination of both inputs. The results look far from realistic, but they also seem like a step up from the rough animations produced by Meta’s Make-A-Video system last year.

It’s not yet clear when users can expect these new editing capabilities to come to Facebook or Instagram, or if this announcement is related to the AI-powered creation tools that Meta teased last year . We have reached out to Meta for clarification and will update this story if we receive a response.

Introducing a native AI-powered image editing feature to its social media platforms seems like a no-brainer for Meta here. There are many similar tools, such as Google Photos Magic Editor and Adobe’s Generative Fill for Photoshop, but it’s obviously more convenient for Instagram and Facebook users to not have to switch to a third-party service.