Meta launches standalone AI image generator ‘Imagine’

Meta (formerly Facebook) has rolled out a new standalone AI-powered image generator “Imagine with Meta” on the web that lets users create images by describing them in natural language.

The image generator was first previewed at the company’s Connect event in November and has been available as part of Meta’s AI chatbot.

‘Imagine with Meta’ comes powered by the company’s existing Emu image generation model, which creates high-resolution images from text prompts. Presently, it is free to use for users in the US and generates four images per prompt.

“Today, we’re expanding access to imagine outside of chats, making it available in the US to start at imagine.meta.com. This standalone experience for creative hobbyists lets you create images with technology from Emu, our image foundation model,” Meta said in a blogpost on Wednesday.

“While our messaging experience is designed for more playful, back-and-forth interactions, you can now create free images on the web, too,” it added.

Creating images via AI leaves a visible watermark in the lower left corner, indicating they were created with Meta AI and also to reduce the chances of people mistaking them for human-generated content.

Meta said it will add invisible watermarking to the imagine with Meta AI experience for increased transparency and traceability in the coming weeks. The invisible watermark will be applied with a deep learning model.

“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, colour change (brightness, contrast, etc.), screenshots and more. We aim to bring invisible watermarking to many of our products with AI-generated images in the future,” Meta said.