Meta AI is Fun, Accessible, and Free. Maybe It’s Finally Time to Make AI Chatbots Part of Your Life
Meta AI's integration within WhatsApp offers a user-friendly and free tool for experimenting with generative AI, potentially making AI chatbots a regular part of everyday life.
Meta AI's free accessibility within WhatsApp makes it a compelling tool for users to experiment and familiarise themselves with GenAI.
Last week, like many others, I noticed a blue ring icon appear at the top right corner above the search bar on WhatsApp. I had been anticipating the rollout of Meta’s new AI chatbot but was not particularly excited. In fact, Meta had been testing its AI chatbot for months in India, but now Meta AI is rolling out to the company’s main apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Honestly, my interest in AI chatbots peaked a long time ago. I have been occasionally using them for specific things, but they haven’t grown on me, nor have I become addicted to them. I still Google all my search queries, spend a lot of time on Reddit for Bollywood stuff, and get news from websites. That leaves less scope for a user like myself to make an effort to download an app or change my habits to log into a new service on a browser to use an AI chatbot.
Images created using AI have been a controversial topic, and there is definitely a need for standards regarding content provenance and ownership. However, in the context of sending AI-generated images to friends and family using a chat app like WhatsApp, this one seems harmless. Meta’s AI and its ability to generate images by typing a “description” make emojis so much fun. It’s safe too—the “Imagine with AI” label ensures the image is created using AI. For example, I typed, “imagine a photograph of a cat having fun in a pool in the summer.” In seconds, Meta AI created a convincing image. I felt Meta AI was faster in creating AI images than other image generators, which can take up to a minute to create an AI image. Sure, there are plenty of AI image generators, but having a feature built right into a chat app makes a lot of sense. Clearly, Meta is giving a large user base a user-friendly way to experiment with AI image generation without the risk of copying another artist’s style. The more users generate AI images and send them in messages, the more they become familiar with GenAI. To me, this may become Meta’s gateway to massify GenAI.
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