AI

TechCrunch Minute: Meta’s new ‘Imagine me’ feature lets you generate AI selfies

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Meta’s AI integrations into apps like Instagram and Facebook have felt pretty useless so far. If I’m just trying to find my friend’s Instagram, why do I have to navigate around a Meta AI interface that is desperately trying to tell me the top five vegetarian protein sources? But with the release of Meta’s new Llama 3.1 405B model, we’re getting a feature soon that could actually be quite popular. 

In your messages with Meta AI, you’ll soon be able to ask the AI to create avatars of you as an astronaut, or a superhero, or whatever else you might want to be. This feature is called “imagine me,” since that’s the text you’ll use to prompt the AI to create these images.

This feature might sound similar to those apps like the Stable Diffusion-powered Lensa AI that went viral a few years ago — that’s because it is. Lensa AI nabbed almost 13 million downloads in 11 days at the height of its popularity, and several other generative AI apps also climbed the iOS App Store charts. 

Unlike those viral avatar apps, Meta isn’t charging money for the feature, which is why we’re predicting we’re going to see a lot of AI-generated selfies soon. But remember — if something’s free, you might be the product.

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