About Meta AI

Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) is eager to show that they are a part of the generative AI revolution too. Primarily known as a social media company, they changed their name in 2021 to focus on creating a "metaverse" (an AOL-like environment for people wearing VR goggles), but now they are offering a free on-line image generator at www.meta.ai. Just visit the link and type a prompt, and you'll be creating AI images in no time.

The site is both quick and easy to use. While the output is heavily censored and the image quality isn't the best, Meta AI lets you create short animations very quickly, and the image generation speed is so fast that there's even an option for it to generate images while you type the prompt, with images updating as you type each word.

Meta.ai seems generally good at prompt adherence. When I ask a for a beach house with a bicycle path with bicycles on it, it gives me images containing all the elements I asked for. Asking for certain items in an image to be specific colors also gives good results, without much "adjective bleed" affecting other objects. It got confused when I asked for "a big blue ball on top of a small red cube" and couldn't quite get that right. I'd call Meta.ai good at prompt adherence, even if it isn't the best in the industry.

Image quality is low compared to DALL-E 3, Midjourney, or other sites that I've just reviewed. The resolution of 1,280 x 1,280 pixels is fine, but the level of detail is sometimes very low within the image. Faces that are not in close-up can have missing or distorted facial features. Surfaces that could be richly textured are simplified, making some images look almost cartoonish. The images you can download are .jpg files with a prominent logo in the lower left corner that says, "Imagined with AI."

Prompts are heavily censored. If you type anything it deems inappropriate, it will reply with "Oops! I can't generate that image. Can I help you imagine something else?"

No filter like this is perfect, and on several occasions, I felt that it made a mistake and blocked images that wouldn't have violated any of their rules. In those situations, I tried rephrasing my prompts and entering them again, and was able to create images based on slightly different wordings.

When I prompted for "a scene from a G-rated movie," Meta unapologetically gave me images that looked like "The Little Mermaid" and "Finding Nemo." When I moved up to asking for "a scene from an R-rated movie" I got the "Oops!" error again.

Even when I didn't mention a movie's MPAA rating in the prompt, the prompt 'A scene from the movie "The Matrix."' gave me images of Neo fighting with other characters from that movie, while the prompt 'A scene from the movie "The King's Speech."' gave me the "Oops!" error, presumably because that film is rated R.

After you create an image, you can press an "Animate" button and Meta AI will quickly generate a short animation of the scene. There's no option to type a prompt describing what motion you'd like, so the resulting animations are somewhat random. Sometimes a camera move is added, changing the perspective and making the scene look more three dimensional. Other times a person will appear to be walking, or a round thing will appear to be spinning, or water will be flowing in the image. If you start with an image that has an obvious type of motion, such as ocean surf hitting a rock, or traffic driving down a highway, you're likely to get good results.

The animations are only one second long, although some of them have motion that looks good when looped. You can download them as small .mp4 files. The animation files also have a logo in the lower left corner. It is illegible at the low 512 x 512 resolution, but I believe that it says "Imagined with AI" just like the still images.

Meta AI isn't the best image generator out there, but it is fast, easy to use, and capable short animations. It's also a part of a larger AI system that can answer questions about many topics, or write things for you on demand, much like Chat GPT. With all of this available for free, I recommend that you go ahead and give it a try.